Tick

"I think you should go birding," said R. Usually this would suggest that he's finding me more than usually irritating and is trying to get me to leave the premises and be somewhere else, but today I think he was just being nice: Don't stay here doing sensible domestic chores - go out and have fun instead. So I did.

The first day of a new year means a new wildlife sightings list, and this was a mega tick to start my 2023 bird list. I make no claims for the photo, which is very heavily cropped - I certainly won't be bothering the BPOTY judges with it - but I'd never seen a bearded reedling before, and today I not only saw one, but got the record shot to prove it

A few weeks ago there were a handful of bearded reedlings in Worcestershire, but this female seems to be the only one remaining. She's been at Upton Warren since mid-November, so I'm probably the last person in the Shire with the remotest interest in birds to go looking for her, but I'm not the most committed of birders and I've genuinely been too busy up till now. Luckily, having decided to try for her today, I met someone I know in the car park, and he pointed me towards Jacobs Hide, where she'd been seen a little while earlier mining bulrushes for their seeds.

Someone else told me that she tends to work along the eastern edge of the Moors Pool, going from one end to the other before reversing direction and working back again. This being so, on a "just in case" basis, I stepped into the Water Rail Hide first, this being on the same path but closer to the car park than Jacobs. There were three people already in the hide when I entered, and I didn't even have time to finish saying, "Is the b-" when two of them pointed to the reed bed about thirty metres front and left of the window and said "There!" Two dozen frames later she exited stage left, and though I saw her again a few times over the next couple of hours she was always in motion, and I didn't manage to get her on camera again.

Commonly known as bearded tits, or sometimes as bearded parrotbills, it's now known that bearded reedlings are neither tits nor parrotbills, and in fact aren't closely related to either family. Their closest relatives are thought to be larks, but recently they've been placed by taxonomists within their own family, the Panuridae. They're about 12cm long, with a 17cm wingspan, and weigh around 15g. The heavily moustached males are very distinctive, but even if they're less spectacular, I'm going to assert (possessively) that the females are no less attractive.

By the time I left Upton Warren I'd logged 23 species (missing number 24 - a kittiwake - which had moved on by the time I walked round to the far side of the pool to look for it), but the bearded reedling was the star of the day by some distance. I'm featuring this photo because it shows her with some bulrush seeds, but the extra gives a slightly clearer view of her markings. Both images would benefit from being viewed full-screen.