Our dining room faces onto a small patio facing the front garden. Water and food is placed on the patio for the birds to eat, drink, bathe and generally frolic for our amusement summer and winter.
We get large numbers of sparrows and tits with the flock mentality of one for all. This means that when one is startled they all take off en mass. Sometimes the startled birds lose their sense of direction and we occasionally hear a tell tale knock on the window. Usually, they fly off but sometimes they are stunned.
The other day we heard the fateful rap on the window and ran to check that all was well. A stunned bird was lying on the patio, so I picked it up and even I with my limited birding knowledge realised that it was not a sparrow.
It was completely stunned so Kourosh quickly took a few photographs and then dashed off for a cardboard box. He found a conveniently small one and I placed the bird in the box and closed the lid and left it in a quiet place. A couple of hours later we heard a scrabbling from inside the box. We opened the box outside at the back of the house and the bird flew directly into the trees.
The dark box treatment is the best course to take to prevent a stunned bird from freezing in the winter or dehydrating in the sun of the summer.
Next we had to find out what it was! I thought it might be a Goldcrest (the smallest British bird – I’m not sure why that stuck in my mind.) I was on the right track though – it is in fact a Firecrest. I think I have heard it in the back garden, it has a very distinctive call, you can listen to it here http://www.oiseaux.net/oiseaux/roitelet.triple-bandeau.html
My book on the birds of the Charente-Maritime calls it the Roitelet triple-bandeau and says that it nests in this region but can also migrate in winter. It also identifies her as a female, the male having a bright orange stripe instead of the females more yellow stripe on the head. I hope her disagreement with our window does not put her off nesting in the garden or visiting the patio.
a french garden 