Winter’s wizened fingers crept along the ditches and fencelines, marked by the occasional ground frost, mist droplets sparkling on cobwebs, the first skylarks flying over as they fled southwards in search of milder conditions, and up to ten tufted ducks taking up residence on nearby Tonford Lake. Fresh from Scandinavia, a
couple of redwings flew over on 10th, alerting me with their thin “seee” calls, and two weeks later six of them were gorging on hawthorn berries on the embankment, along with a single fieldfare, another northern thrush that we don’t usually see much of on the Marshes.
A Cetti’s warbler seems to have taken up residence on the
embankment, startling visitors with its explosive song. You could be
forgiven for thinking that its name is a weak representation of the call,
which can be rendered “Sweep: chetty-chetty-chet”), and its Latin
name, Cettia cetti, is even more onomatopoeic, but in fact it is
honouring Francesco Cetti (pronounced Chetty), an 18th century
Jesuit priest who devoted all his free time to studying Sardinia’s wildlife – hence the use of a capital C when writing the name. However, it wasn’t Cetti who named the bird, but a visiting Italian called Alberto
della Marmora (who in turn lent his name to the Marmora’s warbler) forty years after Cetti’s death.