Chiffchaff Before the Clocks
March 15, 2026 · 3 min read
The first chiffchaff is my real new year. I heard it on the morning of 13 March from the footbridge, that flat two-note see-saw from the willows on the far bank, and stood there grinning like an idiot until a dog walker asked if I was all right. Last year the first one was 17 March, the year before 11 March, so this is well inside the normal range. It sang for perhaps a minute and then went quiet, and I did not see it at all.
Two days later, this morning, a blackcap was singing in the garden hawthorn: that scratchy warm-up and then the clear fluting burst, unmistakable once you know it. 15 March is early for one here. Some blackcaps now stay through the winter, so this may be a bird that never left rather than a true arrival, but I had not heard or seen one since November, so I am counting it.
Other signs. The ditch beside the footbridge has three clumps of frogspawn, laid I think around 10 March, when we had two mild wet nights. The mallards on the river are paired up and chasing each other, with one drake harrying a duck the whole length of the pool below the weir. The grey heron that stands on the weir sill most mornings has gone, which I take to mean it is at a heronry somewhere.
The garden feeders are at their busiest. A one-hour count on Saturday morning, 8 to 9, 7 °C, light rain:
- House sparrow 14, goldfinch 9, greenfinch 3, chaffinch 2
- Blue tit 6, great tit 4, coal tit 1, long-tailed tit 7 in one pass
- Blackbird 4, robin 2, dunnock 2, wren 1 heard
- Starling 11, wood pigeon 3, collared dove 2, magpie 1, jackdaw 5 on the roof
That is seventeen species in an hour, which is about as good as the garden gets. The goldfinch numbers are the highest I have had; they empty the sunflower hearts in two days. I washed both feeders yesterday in hot water, which I do every fortnight after losing greenfinches to disease a few years ago. Three greenfinches is three more than I had in 2022. Clocks go forward in a fortnight. The chiffchaff beat them again.