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| A Family of Cetti's Warblers - © Ingeborg Van Leeuwen |
Nottinghamshire may seem like a million miles away from the
sunny climes of the Mediterranean, but that’s
not to stop one little warbler from calling Attenborough Nature Reserve its home.
Even after one of the coldest winters on local records, we have been delighted
to find out that the cetti’s warbler (pronounced chetty) has gone on to have its
most successful year ever - with six pairs breeding on the Reserve this summer.
If you’ve walked around the Reserve in recent weeks you may well
have heard a cetti’s warbler singing. You can’t miss their explosive bursts of
song as it is delivered from deep within the undergrowth. They are almost
around every corner. Presumed to be mostly juveniles from this year’s bumper
breeding season, you can even see one singing in the reedbed in front of the
Nature Centre! Double figures (of birds) can now be counted on a single visit
to the Reserve and they are becoming so frequent that local birders have named
them ‘Reed Robins’.
However it has not always been so easy for the cetti’s
warbler. They first bred in the UK
in Kent in 1972 and went on
to colonise many parts of Southern England.
Unlike most of the warblers in the UK
the cetti’s is a resident species and does not migrate south to Africa for the winter. This species is therefore very
susceptible to our cold winters. The severe winter of 1986/87 caused the
British population to crash and for many years they were largely confined to warmer
regions of the south, south-east England
and southern parts of Wales.
The mild winters of recent years have since enabled the
cetti’s warbler to expand its range and in 2007 the first breeding record for
Nottinghamshire was confirmed – at Attenborough Nature Reserve. This pair
successfully went on to raise four chicks (pictured).
The cetti’s is a small rich brown warbler with short wings,
pale eye stripe and a broad rounded tail. The shy skulking behaviour of the
cetti’s deep within the vegetation of its wetland habitat often makes them
difficult to see. Despite this, the extremely loud song of the cetti’s warbler
is guaranteed to give its presence away. Like the sweet song of the robin the
sound of a cetti’s warbler always brightens up a cold winter walk around the
Reserve.
