Country diary: a little chat goes a long way

A thoughtful friend, knowing I’d been under the weather, sent me the location of a bird we had both been anxious to watch. Such a gift, and one I gratefully accepted. Soon I was drowsing in afternoon sunshine on a grassy bank above a hillside of tussock grass and scraggy heather, opposite a scrubby rowan and its offspring, with nibbled saplings raising their heads from a surrounding patch of bracken.

Ramsley is a fine place to watch moorland birds. I could hear willow warblers singing from a patch of alders. I watched meadow pipits drifting back to earth, and admired a kestrel working the slope. A pair of swallows swept past, and several stonechats, round and bold, with their black heads and white collars, barked a sort of whip-chak-chak from fence posts, like orders from a sergeant major. Another chat, the wheatear, was even more commanding, being bigger and more elegant, with its flashy white rump and black mask on its head: a strutting caballero.

Yet I’d come to see a different sort of chat, smaller than the wheatear, sleeker than the stonechat, and minutes later it shyly obliged, hanging off one of the emerging rowans just a few feet away from me.

The whinchat is a pretty bird, and remarkable too, migrating up the west coast of Africa each spring to breed. Most live only a couple of years, although one male in Cumbria did this migration six times, fathering some 30 offspring. It might carry less bluster than a stonechat, but the distinctive stripe above the whinchat’s eye and its trim bearing lend it more dignity. Its song is prettier, too.

This one was a female, with a paler, honey-coloured chest in contrast to the redder tones of the male.

The name “whin” means gorse, of which there are scraps on Ramsley, the perfect launch pad for dropping on insects. But while we may think of them as upland birds, they’re not.

It’s more that they’ve become so scarce elsewhere in Britain. It’s only in places like this that this brave little bird can still find the insects it needs.