As I was recently reminded by reading another blogger’s post, those of us who love birds each have our own ways of remembering their songs and calls. Every year, whenever I hear my first Common whitethroat, I immediately think ‘itchy and scratchy’. This is nothing to do with the animated television series, at least not in the sense of any comparison of sounds; rather it’s that the whitethroat’s song sounds very scratchy to me and my mind jumps to the word association of itchy with scratchy. The Common whitethroat pictured below was belting out his scratchy song with gusto and enthusiasm in his efforts to attract a mate.