With a national influx of Common Crossbills taking place this summer, any conscientious local patch birder should be out searching for Crossbills, their flight calls fresh in the mind from revision sessions on Xeno-Canto or the Macaulay Library. Whilst this influx had caused me to remind myself of the flight calls, I was far from being on full alert on Monday morning. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, my camera broke last week, frustratingly as I left the house to see and hear Oxfordshire’s second Savi’s Warbler, and is currently being repaired.
Secondly, the birding year has entered the Dead Zone. In birding terms, mid-May to late July are deathly quiet in the Lye Valley, Oxford. Resident breeding species are feeding fledged young, there are Swifts overhead, but very little else. The last seven years have demonstrated that adding new species to the Lye Valley year list is near impossible in these ten weeks of early and mid-summer.
This combination of factors meant that on Monday morning I visited my local patch without a camera or a microphone. Of nearly 800 patch visits, this was one of a tiny handful when I left the house with just binoculars. With hindsight, I should have known that this would guarantee that a good bird would fly over.
As anticipated, the visit was completely uneventful until I left Churchill Meadow, adjacent to the Churchill Hospital. Suddenly, the sky was filled with loud “chip-chip-chip” flight calls from directly above me, and immediately the thought “Crossbills?” flashed through my mind. I picked up the source of the calls, a flock of four large finches, flying quite low, on a line from the Lye Valley towards Warneford Meadow, over the southern edge of the hospital. The binocular views were really good, and I could see the huge bill on the closest bird: they were Common Crossbills! The birds appeared to be pretty uniform against the sky, with no white or colour visible in the wings or tail. The flock continued west and out of sight, those distinctive flight calls ringing out constantly.
I stood staring after the flock in a mild state of shock. As someone who has been meticulous in evidencing bird records with photos or recordings, it was slightly frustrating to have a locally rare bird flyover and not be able to capture the flight calls in a recording. But strangely, not having to grab a camera or point a microphone at disappearing birds in flight made this one of the more relaxed flyover experiences: I just watched and listened to the flock going over and enjoyed every second.
The flight calls sounded like this, especially the calls in the second half of this recording…
… calls that I’ll be listening out for in the next couple of months, though hopefully next time I’ll have working recording gear with me.
This is the second patch record of Common Crossbill, after two flyover birds in September 2020. This record takes the 2025 Lye Valley year list to 69 species, two species of which have been seen by others (Reed Bunting and Little Egret). The complete Lye Valley illustrated bird list can be found here.