Photograph: Nature Photographers Ltd/Alamy
The bird I’m listening to has flown all the way from Africa, yet seems reluctant to show itself. Instead, it nestles deep inside a hawthorn hedge, uttering a quiet warble followed by a rhythmic coda, vaguely reminiscent of a chaffinch or yellowhammer.
It’s a lesser whitethroat (Sylvia curruca): a compact little warbler, and one of our most skulking and elusive summer visitors. When I do catch a glimpse, I see a slender bird with an immaculate plumage: grey above, pale below, with a whitish throat and dark mask across each eye.
Before I moved to Somerset, I hardly ever came across lesser whitethroats; yet having learned their subtle but distinctive song, I now hear them everywhere. This bird has taken up territory in a patch of hawthorn along my circular daily bike ride, and is singing quietly to attract a mate and repel rival males. Just when I think I have pinned down where he is, he flits across the lane to sing in a catkin-laden willow, just 50 yards or so away.
Once he has finished breeding, he will head not south, to north-west or west Africa, as most other warblers do, but east, entering Africa via the eastern Mediterranean, to winter in Ethiopia or Sudan. Just one way in which this modest little bird surprises us.
