My new office/broom-cupboard-full-of-books at our wonderful new home in Great Chalfield looks straight out at what I fully intend to be the most important bird feeding-station for - well, miles around (though the fact that the entire countryside surrounded our little garden appears to be one of the better-stocked feeding-stations I’ve seen for a long while may defeat that little aim…). However, said station has only been up a week and we already have regular Coal, Blue, Marsh, and Great Tits visiting, as well as (Black-billed) Magpies Pica pica and (Eurasian) Jackdaws Corvus monedula - and it hopefully won’t be long before the local Nuthatches Sitta europea and finches discover my generosity and dive in too.

Nothing out of the ordinary really, but I have had one regular visitor that just for a second (when I first caught it out of the corner of my eye) did - I admit - have me thinking of things potentially far more exotic (I’m not going to tell you what, no). Small, long-legged, black-eyed, and an olive-brown ground colour liberally dotted with buff spots it didn’t look immediately familiar - but somehow didn’t really look unfamiliar either. Once I got a better look at it I realised what it was, but it was an object identification lesson that - judging by some of the email questions I’ve been getting asked recently - I think bears sharing.

Have a look at the images below and you’ll see what I mean: and the big clue to the bird’s identity is - JULY…

 

 

The big clue is July? Indeed it is - because this is the time of year when fully-fledged juvenile birds of all sorts leave the cover of their nests and spread confusion in gardens all over Europe and North America: and this little beauty - if you hadn’t worked it out yet - is a juvenile of a common and typically ‘British’ species that I’ve posted about before right here…

Yes, it’s a European Robin, sans the adult’s red-breast but still packing attitude a-plenty!

 

European Robin Erithacus rubecula

 

The heavy covering of spots is typical of the plumage of juveniles of the huge and closely-related group of thrushes, chats, and flycatchers that robins belong to. It helps the young bird when it’s at its most vulnerable by breaking up the bird’s shape in the mixed light and shade of ground/canopy cover they stay in when very young, making them far less easily seen by predators than the often contrasting colours of the adult plumage.

It’s only when the young birds are able to fly properly and emerge into the open that many people even realise that they’ve been sharing their gardens with juvenile birds - which is when the identification questions start of course. There’s no hard and fast rule to identifying young birds, but - and this sounds obvious but it’s the best starting-point - they will often be accompanying adults to begin with (which definitely helps!). Many juveniles will show a coloured gape-line too, which is intended to stimulate the adult into shoving food into the enormous gape that goes with it and is usually more plainly coloured in the adult. Essentially, though, even when they’re coloured differently most young passerines are the same shape, structure, and size as the adults we’re more used to seeing in our gardens. The spotty bird in my photos may look different to the adult at first glance, but it is fundamentally very similar - and is very much ‘all Robin’.

 

Incidentally, talking of ‘fundamentally similar’ I wrote a fundamentally similar post almost exactly a year ago which looked at young American Robins: if you’d like to have a look it’s at Scruffy Youths and Spotty Adolescents.

 

All photographs copyright Charlie Moores