The stealthy, secretive dunnock has a most colourful love life
The dunnock is an overwhelmingly inconspicuous bird, so it might come as some surprise that it’s one of Britain’s most common. This garden regular flies under the radar and is a skulking bird of the understory. Outside the breeding season it tends to draw little attention to itself, creeping and hopping, nervously mouselike and somewhat apologetically amongst the shrub-layer. Despite such secretive habits it has obtained a surprisingly large number of vernacular names, the most common of which is hedge sparrow. The poor dunnock has long suffered the indignity of this misidentification, and it wasn’t until the 19th century that the ornithologically correct ‘hedge accentor’ was proposed – though it never really caught on. The dunnock does indeed belong to a continental family of montane birds (the accentors) and not to the finchlike sparrows. Though ‘dunnock’ had been proposed centuries beforehand, it wasn’t universally accepted until the 1950s – and even this name is not entirely complimentary as it translates to ‘dingybrown diminutive.’ The naming of the dunnock is just one way in which we’ve forever misunderstood this little brown bird of ‘few striking attributes.’ Its bland reputation was flipped on its head by a closer look at its breeding habits, and it turns out the drab dunnock has an extraordinarily colourful private life. In one of the most elaborate mating systems amongst our birds, the dunnock subscribes to each and every system of polygamy: one male may have two or more females (polygyny), one female may have two or more males (polyandry) and two or more males may share two or more females (polygynandry) – and this only scratches the surface of the true complexity. Their lusty choices provide strategic benefits, with broods fed by multiple birds more likely to survive and fledge. The dunnock is one of the first birds to sing early in spring, quickly recognising the welcome light of lengthening days. It may not be the very first to join the daily dawn chorus, perhaps delayed by its proclivity for ‘nocturnal activities.’ However, the breeding season is the one time of the year when the dunnock breaks free of its stealthy nature, pouring forth a squeaky little ditty from a prominent song-post. For wildlife information and advice, contact the Sussex Wildlife Trust’s WildCall service: 01273 494777 (weekday mornings) or wildcall@sussexwt.org.uk
I’ve stopped counting down the days until when fans are allowed to go back into football stadiums en-masse because even if that does happen anytime soon, I’ve got a horrible feeling that going to the match will be a sanitised affair and that displays of raw emotion such as screaming at the top of your voice and jumping into the arms of nearstrangers in the event of a goal will result in immediate ejection from the ground.
Not going to the pub has been a big miss for many, but I’m not entirely sure that being allowed to neck a proper pint or two is as big a deal for the entire nation as it is currently being depicted. Our Dear Leader, who I very much doubt has stepped inside a proper local, when there wasn’t a photo opportunity, since the days when you could buy two pints and a packet of nuts and still get change out of a fiver, appears to think that everybody will be happy once the Queen’s Head opens its doors again. The reality is that, even before the pandemic struck, pubs were shutting at an alarming rate, with millions opting to drink at home instead, so it seems a bit odd that reopening licensed premises is seen as a bellwether for a return to normality. And I speak as someone who would take a pint of Best while being perched on a bar stool, over slurping from a can on my sofa any day of the week.
I actually tend to agree with the chief executive of Swim England who has argued that the country’s 5,000 swimming pools should be at the front of the queue for reopening when we eventually begin the inevitably slow descent out of lockdown.
For most young families, a trip to the swimming baths is as much part of the weekly routine as a tortuous hour or so in the play park. Going swimming has been a fixture of my weekends since the arrival of my eldest 11 years ago and I genuinely miss not being able to do it right now.
While I don’t get my trunks wet every weekend, I do take the children to their lessons. While far from stress-free – even if I live to 150 I doubt I will ever master putting the mandatory rubber hat onto a wailing child’s head – watching your kids learn to swim is strangely life-affirming, especially when somebody else is doing the hard work.
I’ve attempted to teach my two the rudimentaries of staying afloat but they’d much rather dunk dad and have me re-enact the key scenes from Jaws.
The joy that children of all ages get from going swimming, especially when it is for fun, outweighs what they take from most other activities. On top of this, they are keeping fit and, crucially, not staring at a small screen.
The day when I’m able to lark about with the kids at our local pool will be the day that we can start talking about a return to ‘normality’.