Dartford but a distant memory for these stay-at-home warblers

LAST week I visited the East Devon Pebblebed Heaths for an event marking their new designation as a National Nature Reserve, and arrived well ahead of time at Woodbury Common in order to engage in a quick bit of wildlife watching.

The habitat on free-draining soils is known as dry heath – though was anything but in the rain – and I went in search of the iconic resident rarity found here, the Dartford warbler.

Paths cut through thick carof heather and I wandered the tracks for an hour, not rating my chances as everything was keeping its head down, sheltering from downpours in the foliage.

Birds living in this kind of scrub often make sounds as harsh and scratchy as the gorse in which they forage, and I spotted common whitethroats and plenty of stonechats. Then, during a break in the rain, I heard a sharp churring call from deep in the sea of heather and as I approached a Dartford warbler bobbed to the surface, perching in full view revealing its grey back, plum-red front and long tail. They are obviously used to passersby here given how close it came.

Our insect-eating warblers generally fly south for the colder months. However, the Dartford warbler toughs it out on home soil, suffering terrible losses during particularly harsh winters. Numbers on the Pebblebed Heaths plummeted to fewer than a couple of dozen territories during the hard winter of 2010/11, rallying only to be knocked back by the ‘Beast From the East’ in 2017/18. Today, ranger Ed Lagdon told me, there are some 200 pairs. And while it is thought they seldom roam far, one ringed bird with a spirit of wanderlust turned up at Portland in Dorset.

You no longer find them in the Kent area from where they were first named, but it would be nice to think this little traveller was planning to pay a visit...