‘Little trotty wagtail, he went in the rain,
And tittering, tottering sideways he ne’er got straight again,
He stooped to get a worm, and looked up to catch a fly’
And then he flew away ere his feathers they were dry.’
These words, penned for children, are by Northamptonshire’s own John Clare, nineteenth century poet who is now recognised as one of our nation’s greatest. Although he spent his last 27 years in, as he put it, ‘a madhouse’, he became and remains one of our finest obervers of nature and the countryside around him. Using words as his brush strokes he needed so few of them to bring one of our wild creatures sharply in to focus, as the four lines above bear witness.
To me this slender bundle of feathers combining black, white and grey, presents something of an enigma. Slender and graceful, swift of movement, and seeming ever on the move, darting back and forth in its quest for food. Its diet consists mainly of insects and other small invertebrates, but when times are hard it will eat seeds and even bread scraps as I noted during this past severe winter.
We may refer to it as wagtail, but the truth is that it constantly vibrates its tail in an up-and-down motion while imperceptibly rocking the whole body fore and aft, not from side-to-side, all of which add to the impression of restlessness. Sometimes as many as half a dozen of them turn up on the streets and lawns of our open-plan front gardens at this time of year, and I never tire of watching them, as they run rapidly in pursuit of a fleeing insect, or erupt briefly into flight to intercept passing prey.
The impression that they are somehow delicate and harmless couldn’t be further from the truth. They are tough as old boots, and among the most aggressive of small birds. Especially is this true when it comes to setting up and defending a breeding territory. Many years ago I watched two males fight furiously for two days, grappling one another with their claws, alternately in the air and on the ground, pecking viciously as they sought to establish supremacy. The outcome was tragic; one actually killed the other. When I examined the corpse of the fallen bird I found that half of the feathers and skin of the skull had been torn away, its eye had been destroyed and a hole was pecked in the skull. So much for delicacy and inoffensiveness!
While I was working as a warden at the nearby Pitsford Water many years ago another aggressive pied wagtail took a violent exception to its own reflection in the wing mirrors and the chrome hub-caps of the angler’s cars parked in the car park. Time and again it would rush forward pecking viciously at its perceived enemy. Invariably it would end up perched atop of the mirror or of the tyre, by which time its ‘enemy’ would have vanished. A short burst of self-congratulation at having seen off its adversary would be repeated a while later as it once again caught a glimpse of itself. It is tempting to think of this bird as being a bit dim, but we have to ask ourselves how often highly reflective surfaces like mirrors and chrome hubcaps occur in nature. The bird was simply reacting to what it saw as an immediate threat.
In winter large flocks of these birds traditionally form overnight roosts amid the sparse shelter afforded by the rattling dry canes of reedbeds. But townee pied wagtails have learned that, like the starlings, it is better and warmer to seek shelter in street trees. Even more adventurously they have turned up in the rafters above the loading dock of a local brewery, the canopy over a local railway station. In Hampshire hundreds of them flocked to the overnight shelter and warmth of a commercial glasshouse.