Browncap

Expect the unexpected is what I said yesterday, then this morning I looked out the window and quite unexpectedly there was this little bird foraging in the flower bed, a female blackcap - distinguished from the male by her brown cap.  What a beautiful little bird.  My usual view of one of these is at eye level or above, I don't often get a view looking down on one.  I hadn't noticed before that faint patch of brown behind the eye, nor the soft almost fur like plumage.

There have been other records in gardens in the village this winter, but she's the first one I've seen in ours this year.  The blackcap was once mainly a summer visitor, arriving in early Spring from its wintering grounds in North Africa.  But there's a growing population of wintering birds, particularly in the milder western parts of the country.  And the wintering birds are a different population to the breeding ones, they come from central Europe.  One of the supposed advantages of these birds wintering here is that they have a shorter route back to their breeding grounds, and thus make an earlier start to their breeding season.  It's been shown that they lay more eggs and raise more chicks than our summer visitors.  To which the obvious question arising, is why do our summer birds still migrate south?

That was a bit of joyful compensation for a wasted trip to Kendal this morning for a dental appointment at 0900 that didn't happen.  A message had been left on my mobile phone yesterday, but reception in the house is close to non-existent while the phone has a battery life of a few minutes.  So it wasn't until late evening, that I charged the phone and took it to one of the few spots where we get a signal.  The surgery had rung, but hadn't told me they were cancelling the appointment.  So I had to commit to going on the assumption they were only trying to do a Covid check before the appointment.  Oh well, time to upgrade the phone and perhaps find a network with better reception here.