Those magnificent birds we never notice

That scrap of brown flying by may be a house sparrow, a dunnock or a skylark, birds so nondescript that they are lumped together in a single category. However, there's more to 'little brown jobs' than meets the eye 

- Tim Dee

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 unnecessary material, in a kind of dismal taxonomic dustbin.

It’s not fair. Many other passerines could merit the title. A wren is a little brown job, yet it is so small and so brown—and has such a charismatic presence—that it has avoided the slur. Warblers of the Acrocephalus and Locustella families are also little brown jobs, skulking in reeds and sedge and looking like where they live, but, by being actively known for being tricky to see and a pain to identify, they’ve escaped any casual trashing. For a bird to be tarred and feathered as an LBJ, first it must be commonplace and noted often enough, even if not named, and, second, it must be (in appearance and lifestyle) workaday and plain.