Nature Features

3,000 miles off course and more at home in the Himalayas this Siberian Chiffchaff has chosen Hackney to spend the winter.

The bird, usually found in eastern Russia and Siberia, was spotted by members of the Hackney Wildlife Group near to the Woodberry Down Estate.

Siberian Chiffchaff. Photo: Mark Pearson

It was sighted at London Wildlife Trust’s East Reservoir Community Garden where another rare bird was recently seen - an Iceland gull (actually from Greenland).

The Siberian species is one of several varieties of chiffchaff and has a higher pitched call than the common chiffchaff.

Mark Pearson, avid Hackney bird watcher and a Community Officer for London Wildlife Trust says:
“The identification of eastern races of chiffchaff is a dark art, and a whole suite of features are required.  The best way to tell them apart (in tandem with a full description of appearance, and ideally good quality photos) is by their contact call. Chiffchaff subspecies all call in very different ways - and the clincher with our bird here is that it calls perfectly as a Siberian chiffchaff. It even responds instantly to an MP3 of Siberian chiffchaff played via my mobile phone!  So we have a full 'body of evidence' to ascertain its ID.”

The chiffchaff should have migrated from Siberia to India and it's likely to have been blown off course by cold easterly winds. The recent cold weather in the UK may have pushed the bird further south in search for food, until it ended up at Hackney's East Reservoir!

The East Reservoir, surrounded by reed beds, is in the middle of urban Hackney and offers a community garden and eco-classroom for local residents and wildlife.

Mark continues: “East Reservoir is important for birds for a variety of reasons - it's an oasis of precious, mixed habitats in a very built-up, inner city environment. Breeding birds include reed bunting, common pochard and sedge warbler, and, for migrant species, it's an amazing 'magnet' in an otherwise unforgiving urban sprawl. The quality and quantity of migrants that occur here is unrivalled by any other similar sized site.”