The marsh tit, I was once told, looks as though it has come straight from the office, while the willow tit has just stumbled home from a three-day music festival. It is a memorable means of distinguishing these close cousins – the marsh just that little bit more sleek, the willow more raffish – but when the bird is nothing more than a wink of white cheek and black cap behind a scraggle of bramble, you’re in no position to judge how smartly it’s turned out. It’s the call that’s the real giveaway: the willow tit produces a high-pitched piping, hitched to a startling little rasp, almost a tit-sized caw.
We were pleased to see this one here at a grey and frozen Fairburn. The willow tit has been in nationwide decline for decades. No one is entirely sure why, but it may have something to do with a shortage of young, wet woodland. There’s plenty of that here – and the reserve’s Poecile montanus population is defying the downturn.
Fairburn Ings, on a bend of the Aire not far from Castleford, was a mineworks, once. These days, with the pits long flooded and the spoilheaps grown over, it’s a likably ragged patchwork of water and copse, reedbed, heath and riverside.
The crisply laundered whites of drake goldeneye and goosander break up the dark rippled gunmetal of the river surface. There’s more stark monochrome on the frozen ponds: great black-backed gulls loiter on a dirt spit, while on the ice black-headed gulls – dainty beside the bull-necked black-backs – stand and socialise and perform slapstick red-legged cakewalks.
High up in a leafless birch a great spotted woodpecker – more black and white – forages beneath the bark. It is left to another woodpecker, the green, or “yaffle”, to bring a splurt of colour to the scene: first we see it in up-and-downing flight across the water; then, later, it explodes from the undergrowth – where it was probably hunting ants – and perches at an obtuse angle on a limb of another bare tree. Garish and glaring, it looks, in this stripped-back landscape, about the size of a goose; in reality it’s no bigger than a jackdaw, beak-to-tail, but the stats don’t take personality into account.
