A few days later, I hadn’t had chance to look the bird up in my bird book, and we were watching the new series of Springwatch<\/a> and to my surprise, they did a feature on the Stonechat. \u00a0At which point, I recognised the bird and the noise it was making! \u00a0No wonder I hadn’t recognised it, as I hadn’t even heard of that bird before but it was a lovely looking bird. \u00a0Thanks Springwatch<\/a>!! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n It turned out to be the male Stonechat that I saw, perched on the top of a fence, which is apparently a common place for them to be perched and calling from, along with tops of low bushes. Stonechats are Robin sized birds with the male and female having a striking difference in colouring. \u00a0The males have black heads and white around the sides of their neck, with orange breasts and a browny back, whereas females do not have the black head and are often much browner with a slight orange tinge to their chests.<\/p>\n The strange noise that I heard coming from it was the sharp loud call that they have. \u00a0It sounded like two stones being clicked together and this is actually correct and what they are called after as it is very distinctive!<\/p>\n These birds aren’t often seen in Winter but breed in the Spring in western and southern parts of the country. \u00a0Their Latin name is Saxicola Torquata and they come from the Chat and Thrush family. \u00a0They mainly eat insects, seeds and fruit such as blackberries and can be seen and heard mostly in heaths or coastal sites (hence why we saw it at the beach!).<\/p>\n This is a lovely little bird and I would really like to see and hear it again. \u00a0We are going down to the same beach this weekend so I am hoping to catch a glimpse of it again then. \u00a0I will report on my findings next week! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n Here is an image of a male Stonechat from the RSPB website.<\/p>\n Here is an image of a female Stonechat from the RSPB website.<\/p>\n A month or so ago, my family and I were walking to the beach at Holywell Bay in Cornwall and to get to the beach you have to walk through a naturally occuring wildlife area with tall reeds, sand dunes and other areas that birds love. We had made it quite close to the beach …Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[116,115,114,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"http:\/\/www.birdingblog.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/male-stonechat.jpg\")
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