Sometime in June I noticed a little bird – about the size of a robin – that we don’t normally see in the garden.  Mostly it sat on the fence, sometimes the trellis.  Pale tummy, grey head and back, darker stripe around the eye.  I thought it was probably a garden warbler and told Ross so.  

After a while, it seemed that it was shooting at great speed out of our honeysuckle every time we opened the patio doors.  Closer inspection found an inconspicuous little nest, tucked in between the downpipe and the entwined branches of the honeysuckle.  Not much to see really, just some brownish grass and the occasional glimpse of a shining dark eye looking out.  I love nests, they are perfect to me, like the night sky is perfect or like a baby’s tiny foot is perfect. 

Around this time, I decided that the garden warbler was actually probably a chiffchaff.  I told Ross this.  I checked for our chiffchaff every morning, watched the nest progress, warned the children to be calm when playing on the patio so we didn’t scare the chiffchaff.

And then I read that chiffchaffs like to nest low down to the ground.  This little nest was high up.  And it seemed that warblers nest down low, too.  Nothing left for it, I had to ask the good people of Instagram to identify my little mystery bird from a video.  The answer came back: spotted flycatcher.  Of course! It now seemed so obvious – the little leaps from the fence into the air to catch flies, over and over again; the nest in a creeper; the tzee tzee noise it barked at me every time I was audacious enough to go into the garden.  I told Ross: it’s a spotted flycatcher!

The flycatcher got gradually bolder and sassier as time went on.  No more nervous little dashes, it now looked me in the eye and shooed me back inside. A spirited wee guy.  I loved the constant movement in the garden, especially once the eggs hatched and both parents were hunting for flies.  They had their little routes and perches round the garden, dawn till dusk. Pale flashes, silvery swishes, leaping and dashing, in and out of the nest.  

Where my bed is in the house is directly through the wall from the nest.  Early in the morning, I could hear the cheep cheep cheep demands for breakfast begin, long before my own kids woke up to demand theirs.  Flycatchers are hard-working parents, for sure.

Then one day I went into the garden and the movement had stopped.  The nest was still and silent. No silvery bossy boots tzee tzeeing at me from the fence.  I was gutted to have missed the day that the little ones fledged, but in the following days, there were funny fluffy scruffy little grey things in the garden.  The fledglings.  They were so beautiful.  I can’t believe that those little feathery fluffbags will fly back to Africa by early September.  Some Spotted Flycatchers come from as far as Namibia to breed in the UK.  From Namibia to my honeysuckle, all that distance to perch on my fence and catch the flies in my garden.  What an incredible thing.  I find migration so bizarre and deeply touching – maybe one of the reasons I like swallows so much.  I’ve been struggling a bit with homesickness recently, any time I’m away from Drygrange. Birds that migrate such huge distances fascinate me – do they yearn for their other home?  Does the yearning become too much and that’s when they know to take flight?

So, that’s the story of the Spotted Flycatchers who nested in the honeysuckle, and brought me four weeks of wonder and glee.