It may look like a pale imitation of a kingfisher but this little bird with its faded feathers and shrill cry stole the show
Nuthatch doesn’t enjoy grandeur of the eagle or stag, but this
I had been writing a little book about kingfishers at the time which might excuse the confusion.
It was early afternoon in July. Every flower, leaf and blade of grass glittered with the fruits of sunlight and half a dozen hefty showers in the past two hours. The land steamed.
In that quiet backwater where the Highland and Lowland parts of up-country Stirling merge seamlessly in the lee of Ben Ledi, the hidden depths of the river’s well-treed banks looked briefly and improbably tropical.
Small birds thickened the foliage of alders, warblers mostly. I had settled against the trunk of a skinny little bank-side willow.
An unseen kingfisher quietly screeched “cheek-ee” somewhere nearby. We saw each other at the last moment. My first thought was that its direction of travel suggested an intention to perch in this very willow. That might well have been the kingfisher’s thought, too, but it deviated and instead passed a foot above the tree and four feet above my head.
It was the closest view of a kingfisher I had ever had, revealing the neatly-stowed undercarriage of bright scarlet feet tucked snugly into pale orange under-tail plumage. With kingfishers, no detail is anything less than extraordinary.
A few minutes later, a small bluish-and-pale-orange something-or-other whizzed busily between the tree right next to mine and a small mid-stream island. It was one of those happenings enveloped in confusion by an intervening screen of foliage and my assumption that this bird was one more fragmentary phenomenon of kingfisher sightings in such a landscape.
With my head still full of the kingfisher, it took a moment to realise what was going on.
The newcomer was suddenly clinging to the trunk of a small tree on the island, and there it inched up out of deep shadow into sunlight, performed a vertical U-turn and descended the trunk head-first like an upside-down treecreeper. It was a nuthatch.
Only then did it occur to me that nuthatches wear hand-me-down, faded kingfisher clothes and when they fly low over a kingfisher water there is a hint of the kingfisheresque about their flight.
As soon as the confusion cleared, I chuckled. The head-down-onthenuthatch raised its beak and stared through its Lone Ranger face mask at the source of the sound, then flickered away in search of tranquillity further downstream. It arced low over the water, flying like a very pale kingfisher.
It was Laurie
Campbell who introduced me to nuthatches. Laurie is a friend as well as the photographer whose art dignifies these pages month after month.
A dozen years ago, I had gone to visit him at his Berwickshire home and he had taken me to see a wild bird feeding station. The feeders were dripping with nuthatches. I went from having seen no nuthatches at all to seeing a dozen at once. To say I was charmed is to undersell my response.
Nuthatches are newcomers to Scotland. After a few false starts and false claims – including an unlikely pair at Waternish on the Isle of Skye in 1885! – they first tiptoed over the border from England to breed in 1989.
A determined northwards march had prospered in Northumbria and Cumbria and they crossed the Tweed and found the Borders and Dumfries and Galloway to their liking.
Then, with winters becoming milder as climate change redrew the landscape, nuthatches moved up through central Scotland and kept on going. Wherever they can find mature, mixed deciduous and conifer woods where insects, nuts, berries and seeds abound, they home in, then move in.
It has been a painstaking exploration. Having established a territory, a pair of nuthatches is reluctant to leave it, even in winter, so it is the young birds that sustain the momentum of the north-making crusade.
They have made it as far as Perthshire. The woodland gardens at Cluny House near Aberfeldy were clobbered by Storm Arwen last November. A small part of the colossal clean-up was to put up new nest boxes, two of which were tenanted by nuthatches.
Nuthatches have idiosyncrasies. They nest in holes in trees – either natural, abandoned by woodpeckers, or manufactured by nest-box manufacturers. But they are never content with what they find. If a hole is too small they enlarge it. Having enlarged it they then make it smaller again, with mud. If it’s too large, they make it smaller with lots of mud. If it’s just the right size, they enlarge it anyway, then apply mud.
The theory seems to be to deter would-be predators, although it’s hard to imagine a ring of dried mud keeping, say, a magpie at bay, but they do it anyway, and there is always the positive outcome that, some of the time, it will prove more trouble than it’s worth and the predator goes in search of easier pickings.
Nuthatches also have a particular way of dealing with nuts. They jam them into tree bark, then hammer them open. Or, if they are well off for food, they force other nuts and seeds into bark and leave them there until they need them.
All of that, the natty plumage, and the fact they are the only Scottish birds you will ever see descend a tree head-first, are traits we find endearing. But the voice is not what you might expect.
In my defence, I had never encountered nuthatches at nesting time before. That initial feedingstation encounter with Laurie and the midsummer episode with the kingfisher apart, my experience of nuthatches was limited to occasional glimpses in a Trossachs oakwood in winter – they did not have much to say for themselves on such occasions.
But one day in late March this year, walking from my house on the edge of Stirling to a café, I heard a bird voice high in a big fir in the grounds of Stirling Council’s HQ, about 200 yards away from the town centre. The noise was highpitched, piercing and loud.
I don’t habitually pack binoculars when I walk from house to café.
I stopped and stared into the high trees, and the only thing I could see in the general direction of the source of the sound was a tiny, pale bird 60 yards away, vaguely blue tit-sized. I know what they sound like and this was no blue tit.
For a couple of weeks, every time I passed the council grounds I heard the same bird, without being able to pinpoint the source. Then, one day, I remembered that the previous winter I had seen a nuthatch in a garden tree across the road, a silent nuthatch. So I read up on nuthatches.
My book said they were sedentary and don’t stray far from the territory, even in winter. Then I turned on my laptop and found a sample of its call. And there it was, a perfect representation of the voice in the grounds of Stirling Council HQ, with a footnote explaining the call got louder if the bird was disturbed.
My council has nuthatch squatters.
Sometimes it’s not the showstoppers, the eagles and whales and rutting stags that stop you in your tracks and make you wonder. Sometimes it’s a four-inch fragment of a relentlessly north-making expeditionary force, dressed in the faded hand-medown clothes of a kingfisher.
And all this time, it had a voice like an air-raid siren and you never knew.
‘ It had a voice like an air-raid siren and you never knew