Getting Your Eye In

The best garden birdwatchers are not the ones with the most expensive equipment — they are the ones who sit still. Before you try to name anything, give yourself a fortnight of simple watching. Notice which birds arrive first after you refill the feeders, where they land, and how they move. A robin perches upright and bold on a spade handle. A blue tit dangles upside down from a peanut holder. A blackbird hops across the lawn in short bursts, pausing to cock its head at the ground. These habits narrow the identification before you have even lifted your binoculars.

A pair of 8x42 binoculars is the sensible starting point for a beginner. The first figure is magnification, the second is the diameter of the front lens in millimetres; 8x42 gives a bright, forgiving image and a wide field of view. If your garden is small, look for a model that focuses down to two metres or less, so you can watch a bird on a nearby fence post. Keep the binoculars by the window rather than in a cupboard, and practise on a stationary bird on a feeder until the motion of raising them to your eyes becomes automatic.

The Robin

Nothing in a British garden is quite so recognisable as the robin's orange-red breast and face, which runs from the bill down to the belly. Unusually among our songbirds, both males and females wear the same colouring, so you cannot sex a robin by its breast. The back and wings are a soft olive-brown, the belly is white, and the tail is short and often held slightly raised. Juveniles in summer are a mottled brown all over, with no red at all, and are frequently mistaken for something rarer.

Robins are territorial and curious. They will follow a gardener turning soil, dropping onto freshly dug ground within seconds, and they will see off rivals with a startling ferocity. The song is a thin, silvery, wistful warble — high, clear and slightly melancholy, with pauses that seem deliberate. You may hear it at almost any time of year, and in towns robins often sing at night beneath street lamps. The common call is a sharp, ticking "tic-tic-tic", often delivered as a scolding from a hidden perch.

The Blue Tit

Small, restless and endlessly acrobatic, the blue tit is the bird most likely to be hanging sideways off a fat ball. Look for a blue crown and wings, a white face crossed by a dark line through the eye, and a soft yellow belly with a faint dark stripe down the middle. The back is a greenish blue, and the wings show a narrow white bar. At roughly 11 centimetres, it is noticeably smaller than a robin, and its movements are quicker and more nervous.

Blue tits are sociable in winter, often moving through gardens in loose mixed flocks with great tits and long-tailed tits. Their song is a high, hurried, ringing "see-see-see" or "tsee-tsee-tsee", sometimes written down as "teacher-teacher-teacher". The everyday call is a thin, scolding "churrr" and a soft, high "tsee" that is easy to miss against traffic noise. Put sunflower hearts or peanuts out and they will come close enough that you barely need optics.

The Blackbird

The male blackbird is all black with a bright orange-yellow bill and a matching ring around the eye. That bill is the giveaway: a young male in its first year may still have a dark bill and browner wings, which is where beginners often come unstuck. The female is entirely different — plain brown, with a paler throat and a breast lightly marked with darker streaks, and a brownish bill. Many a novice has dismissed her as "just a thrush" and moved on.

Watch the ground. Blackbirds feed by hopping forward a pace or two, then standing motionless and turning an ear towards the soil, listening for worms. They favour fallen apples, berries and ground-level food, so scatter a little under a shrub for them. The song is deservedly famous: fluty, mellow, unhurried phrases, each one repeated two to four times before a pause, usually delivered from a rooftop or chimney pot at dawn. The alarm is unmistakable — a loud, metallic "pink-pink-pink" followed by a rattling "tuk-tuk-tuk" that sends every other bird in the garden into cover.

Reading the Soundtrack

Learning calls saves you a great deal of squinting into foliage. Try to separate them by character rather than by trying to transcribe them precisely:

• Robin: thin, silvery, wistful, with clear pauses — a small bird singing quietly to itself.
• Blue tit: high, rapid and ringing, often three or four identical notes in a row.
• Blackbird: rich, low and fluty, phrases repeated with unhurried confidence.
• Alarm calls: the blackbird's chattering rattle and the blue tit's scolding "churrr" usually mean a cat or sparrowhawk is about.

Dawn is the best time to listen, from about an hour before sunrise in spring, but robins and blackbirds sing through much of the year, and a mild January morning can be surprisingly musical.

Putting It All Together

Start with the three birds you are most likely to see, and give yourself time to be wrong. A brown bird on the lawn is probably a female blackbird; a tiny blue-and-yellow bird upside down on the feeder is a blue tit; a round, upright bird with a red face watching you dig is a robin. Note the size, the posture, the bill colour and the sound, and the identification will follow almost on its own. Once these three are second nature, the next arrivals — great tits, goldfinches, dunnocks and the rest — will begin to sort themselves out far more quickly than you would expect.