Bird of the Month: Chiffchaff

John Mcewen

No British bird declares the arrival of spring more recognisably and insistently than the chiffchaff ( Phylloscopus collybita). Pyllon is Greek for ‘leaf’ and accurately describes its appearance as a ‘leaf’-coloured warbler, along with the willow and wood warbler.

Even if you are lucky enough to see one in bare February, when the advance birds of its March army arrive, it is the call – song is too grand a word – which alerts one as decidedly as an alarm clock.

The doyen of 21st-century English bird writers, Derwent May, dared to render this as ‘tink, tank, tink, tank’ and was roundly rebuked by one of his Times readers for offering such an unromantic alternative.

How hard it is to convey the actual sound is illustrated by the onomatopoeic attempts made in other languages: Dutch tjiftjaf; German zilpzalp; Welsh siff-saff.

The chiffchaff, often arriving in wintry conditions, is considered the hardiest of the warblers, although its almost identical cousin, the willow warbler, whose poignant cadence is considered among the most beautiful bird songs, is more associated today with western and upland Britain.

The hardiness of the chiffchaff, which principally winters round the Mediterranean, not in sub-saharan tropical Africa like the willow warbler, means that, since the 1980s, there has been a steady increase to more than a thousand that remain in Britain, even as far north as Shetland, throughout the year.

These wintering birds favour habitats where insects are more abundant – wetlands or close to waste-water treatment works. The willow warbler remains more numerous at more than two million summer migrants. The chiffchaff matches the blackcap at more than a million. Residents now number about a thousand.

Chiffchaffs nest low down in scrub and sometimes on virtually bare ground, as John Clare found to his astonishment and registered in his poem The Pettichaps Nest; ‘pettichap’ then a common name for the bird in rural England.

Its nest close by the rut gulled wagon

road And on the almost bare foot-trodden

ground With scarce a clump of grass to keep

it warm Had he not startled the bird he would never have noticed the nest.

Built like a oven with a little hole Hard to discover – that snug entrance

wins Scarcely admitting e’en two fingers in And lined with feathers warm as

silken stole… Ive often found their nests in chances

way When I in pathless woods did idly

roam But never did I dream until today A spot like this would be her chosen

home.