Sometimes one goes out expecting to see certain birds and comes home having seen some different, unexpected ones. It happened like that last weekend. I was visiting Sawbridgeworth marsh, a nature reserve on the Essex-Hertfordshire border. As I had hoped, there was a fine display of purple marsh orchids just inside the gate beside a soggy path, and among them some yellow rattle flowers, many with the round seedpods that rattle when you shake them.
I rattled one. But otherwise the marsh was strangely silent. I had thought there would be some sedge warblers singing in the reeds, managing a few beautiful notes with the right hand, as it were, then falling back, as always, on their clanking, grunting bass line. But not a sound was to be heard. However, one sedge warbler did suddenly appear at the top of the reeds, giving me a good view of its distinctive yellow eyebrow — and the insects in its beak showed why that one, at any rate, was preoccupied.
There was not even a reed bunting singing, though the cock birds often sit on a bulrush endlessly repeating their dry song — something like “chizz, chizz, chizzy-wiz”. The marsh was proving unproductive. So I went on into the other part of the reserve, which is a rather open wood of old crack willow trees.
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Suddenly, I was surrounded by birds that have nothing to do with marshes. There was a flash of silver and a tree creeper landed at the base of the gnarled trunk of one of the willows. What I had seen were its silvery underparts. But I did not see much more of it, since it quickly circled round to the far side of the trunk, and by the time I had got round myself, it had gone.
Then I heard in the willows a soft version of the long-tailed tit’s lip-smacking note. It was a parent warning its brood that I had come on the scene. A moment later a whole troupe of young ones flitted across the path, their tails bouncing up and down.
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A dark-brown shape rose from the ground, swept out of the wood and landed in a sallow bush beside the marsh. All I could see of it as it crouched there was a brown back and a long, barred tail. But there was no mistaking that tail — it belonged to a sparrowhawk. Perhaps the bird had caught one of the tits, and was settling down half-hidden to rest and digest.
Finally, I did hear a reed bunting, and I picked it out sitting perkily on a reed, its black head-feathers tousled. In the end, I felt, I had had the best of two habitats — or of two worlds.