Birds are sometimes named for what they do or what they look like. Turnstones for instance turn stones. Red flanked Blue tails have red flanks and a blue tail.
We watched a Treecreeper the other week doing exactly what it shouldn’t have been doing. It was scratting around on the forest floor. A little removed from what it says on the tin … although it was scraping a living.
When I was a boy my mother used to leave plastic cups on the doorstep. They were for the milkman to place over the milkbottles he delivered each morning. If they weren’t used the Blue Tits used to peck away at the foil and help themselves to the cream at the top of the bottle. Now I guess most of us get milk from the supermarket and don’t get it delivered. The Blue Tits have had to move on. In the last ten years or so Long tailed Tits have started to feed from bird feeders. I watched a small band of Long-tails in the garden last week, They visited the peanut feeder; not for long and then moved on. Someone once described them to me as flying lollipops. Quite apt.
Letter From Norfolk 