Trees and birds

I associate some birds with particular trees or plants.

In some cases the connection's obvious: reed warblers, bearded tits and bitterns are birds of the reedbed, for instance.

Willow tits, Sale Water Park
(In a hawthorn bush)

In other cases the connection's subtler, a coincidence of environmental preferences perhaps, or just a geographical coincidence: the places where I've seen the birds most often happen to have a particular vegetation. These include:

• Blackcap — Sycamore
• Cetti's warbler — Brambles with reeds
• Lesser redpoll — Alder
• Lesser whitetroat — Field bindweed
• Marsh tit — Willow
• Pied flycatcher — Oak
• Redstart — Oak
• Whitethroat — Bramble
• Willow tit — Alder and birch
• Wood warbler — Oak
• Yellowhammer — Hawthorn

It would be a mistake to treat these relationships as hard and fast rules — birds fly where they please without our say so and it would be a mistake to think that any marsh tit that alighted on a branch of alder automatically became a willow tit — but I think it's something I should bear in mind more often, if only to test the idea to destruction.