Dartford warbler

We had a trip out to Lymington this afternoon, and while Wifie indulged in some retail therapy, I went for a walk along the sea wall past the Pennington Marshes. This is a wonderful place for birds, the saline lagoons and ditches are choc-a-bloc with waders, wildfowl and gulls. The inner side of the sea wall is gorsey, and this is where the Dartford warblers are found.

In the unseasonally balmy temperatures, the male Dartford's were drawing attention to themselves with their scratchy warble. These little birds with their thin cocky tails, greyish blue heads with a red eye, and reddy brown chests are quite unlike any other British warbler - much more like some of their Mediterranean cousins. They are usually more difficult to get a good view of, little dark birds flitting between the cover of gorse bushes.

In Britain, these are birds of southern England at the edge of their European range. Most of our warblers are summer visitors, insect eaters that arrive in time for the seasonal bounty of insect life to feed their chicks. The Dartford's stick out the winters and their range has been expanding, and there are now birds present on the south coast of Gower in South Wales. They are expected to spread further north as the climate warms. A few ferocious winters could change all that, though: their numbers in Britain were reduced to an estimated 10-12 pairs in the prolonged hard winter of 1962/63. Today the population is over 3000 pairs.

My year list moved on significantly today. As well as the Dartford's, new species for the year were chiffchaff (two singing birds), brent goose, ringed plover, greenshank, bar-tailed and black-tailed godwits, and Mediterranean gull (in numbers I've never seen before). With a flock of siskins seen on one of the blipless days during the week, that takes me on to 101 species for 2012.

While I was watching the Dartford warbler out of sight below the sea wall, I overheard a couple of people talking as they walked along past one of southern England's premier spots for seeing huge numbers and variety of birds. One man was making rather patronising and insulting remarks about "birdwatchers", saying he really couldn't understand what the attraction of birds was. How sad.