Getting ready for Big Garden Birdwatch: Telling your Hedge Sparrows from your House Sparrows

So you sit down for Big Garden Birdwatch, nice and comfy, pen and notepad in hand ready to jot down the maximum number of each species you see, when you see something fossicking about in the border. What is it?

Unlike the lovely illustrations in the field guide sat next to you, the bird is rather distant so you can't see all the detail. In fact, it's not even facing you. How frustrating!

You then see another bird in a bush where it is rather obscured and against the light.

I've chosen these photos especially because they are rather distant and fuzzy. Let's face it, these are the kind of glimpses we normally get, not your super duper I-can-see-every-feather type view.

Some of you will have identified it quickly, but that's the benefit of experience. If you haven't, hopefully your mind if working on the fact that it is streaky and brown and sparrow-sized, and so is either a House Sparrow or 'the bird formerly known as Hedge Sparrow', the Dunnock. But which one?

Here is your simple guide to the two species:

Male House Sparrows are easy to tell because they may be brown and streaky but they are black around the eye and on their chin, with a chestnut patch behind the eye and a white stripe in the wing.

But let's put a female House Sparrow (left) and a Dunnock side by side:

Four things really stand out:

1) The difference in the beaks: chunky and pale in the House Sparrow, fine and dark in the Dunnock

2) In the head, the bold, broad pale stripe behind the eye stands out in the House Sparrow, whereas it is the almost-steel-grey collar and chin that is obvious in the Dunnock

3) The dark beady eye in the House Sparrow, versus the brown iris of the Dunnock

4) And the uniform, unsteaked underparts of the House Sparrow, compared with the rather rusty side stripes of the Dunnock.

But behaviour is critical, too. Both species will retreat into the cover of bushes, and both will come down onto the ground to feed, but when Dunnock does, it flicks about, all fidgety, flicking its wings, which this shot just captures:

And of course House Sparrows are often very sociable - you can often see two or three Dunnocks fairly near each other, but they don't go around in tight posses, and certainly never in troupes like this:

And you've got sound as a clue, too. House Sparrows go 'chilp  chowp  sheelp...' etc; Dunnock's call is a weak 'tzee', and it has a shuttling little ditty of a song which House Sparrow doesn't.

So here you go, House Sparrow or Dunnock? Three photos to try; answers next week!