A little mite with a mighty heart

Shy yet bold, furtive yet fearless and fond of nesting in your trousers, the tiny Jenny wren' has a lusty voice that matches its sense of adventure, observes Mark Cocker

- Mark Cocker

I'm guessing, in the wettest of years, that many of you have had moments such as this. I was coming off the Derbyshire moors after a rather joyless slog over sodden ground. I had seen next to nothing all day and spirits were low. As I came into a deep gritstone cleft, with boulders climbing the slopes on both sides, I discovered the usually tiny brook was engorged with rain and turned to a torrent, filling the clough with violent sound. Through it all, there arose a loud, sweet song with the penetrative, high trilling timbre of a martial fife. Again and again, the owner launched those phrases upon the waterlogged scene. It was like a tiny cannon blasting hope onto the gloom. Eventually, I located a brown bird no bigger than my inner palm, his stub tail raised above his back like a flag. The head was uplifted. The needle-thin beak quivered in time with his music as the phrases ricocheted off the rocks around and, as the rain fell, I could see puffs of condensed breath as he sang. Suddenly, the world felt fine.

What is so affecting about wrens is not that diminutive stature, but that the scale of the birds' impact is out of all proportion to their size. At about 4in tall and 12g in weight (less than half an ounce, in old money), the species is outdone only by the goldcrest and the firecrest as Europe's smallest bird. Yet the song is so loud it can be heard from more than half a mile away. Even the most scientific of authors are sometimes moved by its sheer gusto: 'Warbling phrase delivered as if it were trying to burst lungs,' suggested one usually dry tome. Wrens, you realise, are titchy birds with big hearts.

Their behaviour entails a similar sort of paradox. They are by no means shy, although they are often to be found at or just above ground level, invariably among dense vegetation, where their loud ticking or churr-ing notes are the only indications of the bird's furtive progress. The scientific name