A blaze of firecrests

I invented the collective noun ‘blaze’ as I have no idea what a group of firecrests is called, but it seemed appropriate.

I set off on a local walk on Sunday 21 March not expecting to see a ‘lifer’. Rather I was hoping to fill some obvious blanks in this year’s bird list: green woodpecker, greenfinch, yellowhammer: some heard, none yet seen.

I walked over the fields to Kiln Cottage at Southend near Turville in the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Footpath at Kiln Cottage

As I walked along the track beside a scrubby bit of Southend Common I heard a high-pitched tweeting in the holly bushes. If I had been in a hurry I would have thought ‘goldcrests’ and continued, but fortunately I stopped to watch the antics of about six birds, conveniently at eye level. They moved fast but I got a fleeting glance of an eyestripe and a raised crest which was bright orange-red, they were slightly larger than goldcrests and the song was different. My first-ever firecrests.

Where the firecrests were

After a while they left the bushes and were gone. I guess they were just passing through, and it was lucky that I was there at that moment.

Firecrest by TonyCastro, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Many times I have wandered in vain around Wendover woods near Aylesbury in search of them, as they are known to breed there. Yet here they were at Southend, just a mile and a half from home.

I have recorded them on the British Trust for Ornithology’s birdtrack.