WE’VE lived in this house in Ben Rhydding for nearly eighteen years now and, for the first time, we have a singing chiffchaff in the garden. Not just singing but observed carrying nesting material into an overgrown corner near the fence. Unlike many summer migrants, chiffchaffs are doing well, needing to find new nest sites; we are the gainers. Sometimes we lose. Newcomers pose new questions: absences sometimes ask even harder ones.

About a year ago I noticed that collared doves, those elegant buff members of the pigeon family with the monotonous three note call, had not been seen in the garden for several months. Previously they were one of the most reliable records on my weekly chart. I included a note about this when sending my record sheet to the British Trust for Ornithology. One of the pleasures of doing the BTO Garden Birdwatch is that, in return, you get information from the whole UK in a quarterly report and, sometimes, a personal response. I got a phone call from HQ. Apparently the decline had been noted nationwide and the evidence suggested that collared doves were being edged out of gardens by those bigger – I’d say greedier – newcomers, the once exclusively rural wood pigeon.

Two other species that have always been considered common garden visitors are also in serious decline. I love starlings: so energetic, resourceful and, with the sun on their backs, so beautifully decorative. We still see them, but infrequently and in much smaller numbers - when winter conditions are really harsh, or in Spring, when a pair faithfully return to nest in a neighbour’s eaves and to bring their young family to feed on our lawn before taking them off to join the foraging flocks in the fields.

In our eighteen years here, I’ve only once recorded a house sparrow – a rather bedraggled female who stayed for a week. She wasn’t, as I’d hoped, the thin end of the wedge: she was only a flash in the pan. Yet go a couple of hundred yards down into the valley and the hedges are alive with these cheerful, friendly birds. The jury’s still out on the rapid decline of this once common species.

Meanwhile, the chiffchaff sings lustily from our oak tree, the young starlings raid the fat balls and range over the lawn with their characteristic swagger, and the blue tit family in the nestbox seems to be thriving.

Jenny Dixon

Wharfedale Naturalists Society

(wharfedale-nats.org)