To you this might be a rather unimpressive, small streaky brown bird. To me it’s a Rock Pipit, which is a bird I’d never seen before today, and therefore worth noting. It also provided belated justification for the trip I took to Farmoor this morning, in the vain hope that the pair of Little Stints that managed to hold their ground there through a busy weekend might have hung on into Monday. I’ll be honest: I’d rather have had the Little Stints – but sometimes you have to take what you can get, which in this case was a small streaky tick on the life list. Plus a decent walk on a beautiful day, and a very acceptable sausage bap for lunch.
I don’t have a lot to say about Rock Pipits. They’re pretty similar to all the other European pipits, though slightly larger and darker than Meadow and Tree Pipits, and more assertive than the Water Pipit, which in any case is rarely seen in the UK. They breed around rocky coastlines, where they build cup-shaped nests under vegetation or in cliff crevices, and the UK population is thought to be largely sedentary throughout the year. Away from the coast, most Rock Pipits seen in this country are passage migrants from Scandinavia, which migrate south and west during the autumn and return home again in the early spring. Although they will sometimes catch airborne insects, they mainly feed on invertebrates, seeds, and small fish and shellfish which they find on the shore.
