A BROWNISH streaky flutter catches the corner of your eye. It could be a scrap of dusty litter or a hank of dead grass, but you register it as a living creature because, wherever you are, these drab and drifting things, materialising in motion at the edge of your vision, have almost always turned out to be a small bird of one uncertain kind or another.
These are the ‘little brown jobs’ (LBJ) of the British avifauna—meadow pipits, house sparrows, dunnocks, skylarks, corn buntings. The term is widely used, but I’d like to ask what it is about these birds that has kept them always, as it were, to the edge of our birdwatching and that, worse still, has determined they merit only to be dumped together, as
