View From The Shed by Shaun Finnie - WHAT COLOUR IS YOUR WAGGING TAIL?

WHAT COLOUR IS YOUR WAGGING TAIL?

If you discount the people most close to me, my two passions in life are birds and language. That comes in handy when I'm the writer of a weekly bird blog like this one.

I love the names that we've given to birds. Many of them are ridiculously descriptive and blindingly obvious. Blackbird. Black Cap. Reed Warbler. Whitethroat. All of them are perfectly named. The words more than adequately describe the animal in question.

Sometimes though, the bird's name can be confusing, as we found out the other week when I said that if you see a gull with a properly black head then it isn't a Black-Headed Gull at all, it's a Mediterranean Gull. The Black-Headed Gull is actually a brown-headed gull. Unless you happen to be in Central Asia when you see it, then it might actually be a Brown-Headed Gull – which looks almost exactly the same as our British Black-Headed Gull. Confusing much? Absolutely. That's one of the reasons I'm so enamoured by language and birds. But not so much by gulls.

And then there's another group of birds. Imagine that it's a lovely sunny day here in Britain and suddenly a smallish bird flies past with a looping flight. Flap a bit, soar a bit. Flap a bit, soar a bit. It lands and you notice that it never stands stills, it perpetually wags its tail. Thankfully its name is one of those descriptive ones. It's a Wagtail, but which kind? It could be one of three species, depending on its colour.

If it strikes you as being mainly yellow, with a grey head and wings, then its probably a GREY WAGTAIL. Yes, I know the first thing you notice about it is that its predominantly yellow, but honestly, it's a grey wag. There's another species that's similar but much more endowed in the yellow department.

A YELLOW WAGTAIL isn't just yellow, it's YELLOW!!!! Blindingly so. Every inch of it screams its yellowness more than the yellowiest Yellowhammer on International Yellow Day. Even the bits that look like they might have some grey in them are yellowy-grey. They're a little smaller and a lot rarer than their Grey-named cousins, and a heck of a lot yellower all over. Unless they're the really unusual visitor that's been reported from Wombwell Ings this week. This is Motacilla Flava Flava, the BLUE-HEADED WAGTAIL. I don't think that many of us will have this Western-European relative of our normal Yellow variety on our British list. Yet again its name matches its image, having a grey-blue head in striking contrast to that canary yellow body. I'm not a twitcher at all but if I was then I'd be out there right now twitching this pretty little chap. I suspect some of you may have been doing just that this week.

And then there are the ones with little or no yellow at all, maybe the slightest touch of lemon in a certain light. The other two must have stolen all the yellow. This fellow is monochrome in comparison.

Grey Wagtails are usually seen beside flowing water. Yellow Wagtails are (sadly) hardly ever seen at all these days. If you do happen to spot one it'll most likely be in a field or meadow. And the third one? The PIED WAGTAIL? They can be found anywhere, but most commonly in my local Morrison's car park. In the interest of impartiality I have to point out that other big shops are also available. They probably have their own resident Pied Wag anyhow.

Many of us first encounter the word “Pied” when, as children, we hear the story of 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin', the German flautist who magically convinced an entire townful of rats to depart for pastures much wetter and deadlier.

My dictionary defines 'Pied' as “having two or more different colours”. As in, “Volunteer Shaun's hair used to be all black but now it's pied”. So yes, the black and white wagtail that you see fluttering around the roofs of old buildings is indeed pied by that definition, but then again wouldn't the grey and yellow one be as well? Or even the yellow and even more yellow variety?

Remember I said that there were three species of Wagtail? Well that's what the RSPB's bird identification website says, but it's not quite that simple. There's also the White Wagtail. And to confuse things even further you might see the word 'Yarrellii', which sounds like it's made up with all the double letters left at the bottom of the Scrabble bag.

Basically you've got our bog standard British Pied Wagtail, also known as the Water Wagtail. Black and white, you see him a lot. His latin name is Motacilla Alba Yarrellii but don't hold that against him. He's named after William Yarrell, the chap who first decided that our native bird was a clear subspecies in around 1800. Then you have the much rarer (around these parts) subspecies Motacilla Alba Alba, the one that we call White Wagtail. That one is very similar to our native Pied in every respect, but generally much paler. It's more grey and white than black and white, which means it looks very much like a young Pied Waggy. I have to admit that positive identification of a White Wagtail is incredibly difficult for me, even moreso than separating the various different kind of gulls we get here in the Dearne Valley. Are the White and the Pied simply (as some people claim) the same species that just happen to live in different places? But there are about a dozen different variations of the “white” wagtail around the world. It's almost enough to make me glad that I don't travel much.

Sometimes I think children have it right. They sit in the Old Moor bird garden looking at the little brightly coloured birds and say “Look at the pretty birdy”. So to finish with (you knew this was coming) here's a list of all the pretty birdies that can currently be seen at our reserve.