Tag Archives: Phylloscopus collybita

Spring migration: chiffchaff

18 Sunday Mar 2018

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You know it’s really springtime when the migrating birds start to appear and this week has seen those birds arriving, albeit in fairly small numbers yet here in south Wales. Friends have been reporting sightings of Sand martins and Wheatear – I’ve yet to see either, but I am one of the many who have now either heard and/or seen their first Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita) of 2018.

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Though a few Chiffchaffs overwinter in Britain, the vast majority migrate south during autumn and overwinter in the sunshine and warmer temperatures of the Mediterranean and west Africa.

I heard my first of these lovely little birds last Monday, 12 March, at Forest Farm Nature Reserve, and I saw my first, shown here in my photographs, in trees alongside the River Taff in Cardiff on Thursday, the 15th. Welcome back, little Chiffchaffs!

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Autumn migration: Chiffchaff

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

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Although this little warbler can be seen all year round, most of its kind migrate in August and September, which is why, during the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing an awful lot of these pretty birds in my local parks and nature reserves. They’ve been fattening up on flies and other insects before they head south to the Mediterranean and west Africa.

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This is the Chiffchaff, Phylloscopus collybita. As it has a tendency to nest low down amongst brambles and evergreen shrubs, it has earned itself such vernacular names as bank-bottle and bank jug, but I have no idea where most of its other common names originate from: feather bed, feather pokel, huck muck, lesser pettychaps, Peggy, sally picker, thummie, and wood oven.

One thing I have learnt about the Chiffchaff, however, is to try to get a good look at the colour of its legs because if it’s not singing its distinctive ‘chiff chaff’ song, then its dark-coloured legs are one way to tell it apart from its look-alike, the Willow warbler.

Chifflets

07 Monday Aug 2017

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Luckily, I was walking quietly, stalking butterflies, when I realised there was a family of young Chiffchaffs flitting through the shrubs and umbellifers near me, intent on discovering and devouring as many insects as they could find.

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I wasn’t entirely sure they were Chiffchaffs (Phylloscopus collybita), as many young warblers look very similar and there wasn’t an adult around singing the distinctive Chiffchaff song. But they were in an area where I had heard that song many times before, and a couple of helpful folks on the Facebook birding page I belong to have confirmed my identification.

Apparently, one of the tell-tale signs is their dark legs, and they also have ‘relatively short primary projection compared with Willow warblers’. I had to google that one, and discovered: ‘Primary projection is the distance between the tip of the tertial feathers and the tip of the primary feathers, usually given as a ratio of the projection to the tertial length, vis. 1/2 tertials double the primary projection which is typical of Chiffchaff, whilst 3/4 (projection three quarters of tertial length) is more typical of Willow Warbler.’ If you’re still baffled, there’s an excellent visual comparison here, and I found a great BTO video, comparing the two species, on Youtube.

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