What bird is this?

My wife says it might be a black cap

Although its more common to be found in the summer

A Coal Tit maybe.

what noise was it making?

Agree it sounds like a male blackcap, although a migrant I think it's not that unusual for them to stay, I think.

Well, I immediately thought it could be a blackcap. Looked it up on a website and thought not but having just looked on the RSPB site, I think it was indeed a male blackcap.

According to the RSPB site, it's resident (ie all year) in England

My wife is actually a bird watcher so she is almost certain its a black cap.

Black Cap. Was it holding a cricket ball or bat by any chance? Could be a Daniel Vettori.

Actually, the RSPB says:

Although primarily a summer visitor birds from Germany and north-east Europe are increasingly spending the winter in the UK.

Can't recall seeing one before

Just seen that 3000 overwinter, which is quite a small number spread over the country, so it's a good spot.

Thanks. Satisfied it was a blackcap.

It initially drew my attention because I thought it might be a house sparrow which you rarely see these days.

Are you serious about house sparrows? I know they've declined in numbers alongside the disappearance of the horses, on whose feed and droppings they'd come to rely, but I didn't think they were a rarity.

There are dozens of them in the garden here in Somerset, making a nuisance of themselves trying to enter attics. There are grain silos over the lane, which probably attract them, and there's 100 ft or so of ancient hedge on one side which keeps them occupied (hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, elm, brambles and ivy - a proper hedge).

I f***king hate foreign birds

Maybe it's a stretch to say they're a rarity but they're well down the list of birds I see the most.

I would put all the following above the house sparrow:

Magpie, crow, blackbird, collar dove, finches, tits, gull, red kite, wagtails, wood pigeon, robin, thrush and probably others.

I forgot the starling, although you don't see them in the winter.

House sparrows
Blackbirds
Great tits
Blue tits
Robins
Dunnocks
Pheasants
Goldcrests
Wood pigeons
Wrens
Spotted woodpeckers
Green woodpeckers
Coal tits and long-tailed tits

...in roughly that order here.

Jackdaws, magpies and other crows stick to the fields, where they hunt among the slurry and plough spoil alongside gulls. By the river you see egrets and your standard heron and the occasional grey wagtail or kingfisher. During the summer there are quite a few swallows and house martins around the buildings and a lot of swifts in the the air over the river.

Starlings are oddly absent. That's the one bird whose decline has really surprised me, since they appeared to be displacing sparrows and blackbirds from the urban garden in which I grew up in Slough in the 1960s and 1970s. I wonder whether they suffered disproportionately in the great storm of October 1987. I was living in Brighton then, and remember walking among the huge fallen trees in Grand Parade the morning after and seeing countless corpses of starlings among the debris.

House sparrow would have been top of my list 30 years ago.

Thousands of starlings here during spring and summer.

I say a jay a couple of months back. Hadn't seen one for many years.

In what part of the country/type of landscape do you live?

Jays seem to behave very differently from all the other crows. Unless you're among some fairly dense woodland at the right moment they're virtually invisible. A starting splash of colour when you do disturb one though.

Could it have been a pied wagtail?... http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/White_Wagtail



btw...Did i tell you bout the Great Tits around my fat balls the other week?



i know... bore alert..

Fairly built up area just on the Berks/Bucks border

Black Cap. Was it holding a cricket ball or bat by any chance? Could be a Daniel Vettori.

Very good Joel!

Still haven't seen a sparrow.

Saw the blackcap again this morning.

i live at the back of open fields in cheshire and have a lot of bird feeders out. i regularly see a wide variety of birds but by far the most common are magpies, jackdaws,  rooks, sparrows wood pigeons and blue tits

we regularly get spotted woodpeckers, green finches, gold finches, blackbirds,coal tits, chaffinches, bullfinches, jays(but not seen for a while)treecreepers, dunnocks, robins,starlings,wagtails,nuthatch,longtailed tits, great tits , coal tits

we have a distinct lack of thrushes and once had a kestrel in garden eating a mouse.

we also see buzzards overhead

http://www.rspb.org.uk/discoverandenjoynature/discoverandlearn/birdidentifier/index.aspx

great web page for identifying birds,

the only info you have provided is

Size and colour, which doesnt narrow it down much, put in the other data such as , Location, Legs colour, beak colour, beak size, behaviour  etc etc

as you put more and more info in, the list narrows down and you get pictures of all the likely suspects...

enjoy

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Plenty of starling here in Dublin.  They hang out at the local shopping centre.  I leave food out morning and evening and they have copped on.  Now they arrive in flocks of 30 or 40 .

*starlings

Watch it non-stop for 4 hours. If it vanishes into thin air, it was an Oozlum bird.

The worst thing peep do is put out bread on a regular basis.
Lazy way to feed but the birds eventually suffer through lack of proper foods like berries and seeds.

I put seed and dried worms out most mornings, have a very tame pair of blackbirds here, they eat at my feet!
A flock of sparrows, probably hedge sparrows here too.
When I disappear, the starlings (lots of 'em) move in and clear what's left.

Never mind identifying the bird in op's question, can anyone identify the plane in this pic?[   This image is no longer available.   ]

One year when I was digging up my side garden a blackbird came and sat within a few feet of me.
Guessing it wanted the worms I picked them out and tossed them over.
He would take a few then depart to his nest of fledglings (I guessed - I'm saying he could have been she) returning quite quickly.
Once when I stopped to chat to a passer bye it started chirping like mad and didn't stop until I started digging again.

The male blackbird is black with a yellow beak. The female is a brownish colour.

I was right then it was the male.

Just seen three blackcaps in the same place.

Same time of year as my OP. Seems odd because I haven't noticed any during the spring or summer and as Flowemyth said, there are only 3000 in the UK during the winter.