Grateful for identification help - West Yorkshire, England (1 Viewer)

[dwj]

Hi
I should be grateful for help identifying this bird that has been visiting our garden in West Yorkshire, England since early February. It is slightly larger than a robin. I just managed to obtain this rather poor photograph through our window, this morning, and feel very fortunate because we had not seen it for a few days. The image is heavily cropped.
It's not a bird I've seen before.


Many thanks

 

[Richard Prior]

Hi DWJ, your visitor is a Dunnock.

 

[dwj]

Hi DWJ, your visitor is a Dunnock.

Hi
Thank you. Can dunnock colours vary so much? We are visited by many of those and they are consistently much darker. This bird is a real gingery brown, so much so that it appears prominently bright against foliage. It also has flashes of white in its tail feathers, which I think can just be made out in the image.

 

[mummymonkey]

Hi
Thank you. Can dunnock colours vary so much? We are visited by many of those and they are consistently much darker. This bird is a real gingery brown, so much so that it appears prominently bright against foliage. It also has flashes of white in its tail feathers, which I think can just be made out in the image.

Assuming the colours in the photo are true to life then it is a gingery coloured dunnock. I think this colour aberration might the one called "brown" but I'm not sure. It seems to lack black/grey pigment.

 

[PYRTLE]

Some bird species can show colour variations, pigment abnormalities etc such as white flashes in their plumage...... additionally leucistic and melanistic examples do occur from time to time.

 

[dwj]

Thank you all. Illuminating. Yes, the colours are pretty accurate. If anything, caught in the sun, they're brighter and more striking than is evident in the image, so that the bird really stands out.