Some birds are very well named: such as the cuckoo, treecreeper and song thrush. Others, including Kentish plover, grey wagtail and garden warbler, are almost wilfully misleading.
Garden warblers are, unlike their cousin the blackcap, hardly ever found in gardens. They prefer thick scrub, a transitory habitat that is becoming harder and harder to find in our increasingly tidy countryside.
One of the few places I still come across them is along the disused railway track running through the heart of the Avalon Marshes in Somerset. From the beginning of May, they sing their scratchy, warbling song, whose rapid tempo always reminds me of a skylark.
The good news is that, unlike the more skulking blackcap, garden warblers are often very obliging, sitting right out on a willow branch, in full view.
Some people regard the garden warbler as a rather underwhelming bird, and it doesn’t have any obvious features – no contrasting eye stripes or flashes of colour. Yet that open face, with its black, beady eye, combined with that charming song, are for me a true spring delight.
• Stephen Moss’s latest book, Mrs Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names (Guardian Faber) is out now.
