Country diary: Two chaffinches exchange wheezy warnings | Mary Montague

Lagan Valley Regional Park, Belfast: To a bird, subtle variations in song can say a lot, and these two seem to be sizing each other upA single fink. I stop for the call's repeat. Instead, the confirmation that a chaffinch has joined the dawn chorus comes with a brief trill culminating in a wheezy flourish. The song is a little like the bird itself: a common thing that's riven with significance. For the chaffinch is first among finches. With its chinking call, it named itself into Old English as finc - or finch - a name that extended to other species. Centuries later, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was surely thinking only of chaffinches when he praised "finches' wings" in his paean to ordinary contrasts, Pied Beauty.And here they are, those diagnostic bars of white flashing against the coverts' black, as the chaffinch lands on a twig in front of me. Sunrise intensifies all his colours: the slate-blue head, the rust breast, the olive rump. His gleaming blue-black bill opens and a wisp of breath pulses from his gape as he sings. Continue reading...