my week as a cet…

I’m a cetti’s warbler and my business is with other cettis. But I can’t help but come across those humans in the course of the daily round of song and love. Do I think they’re stupid? Certainly not. I know they’re stupid. I shout an inconvenient truth at the very top of my voice, and it’s a voice that carries a fair old distance. And you know what? They don’t listen. I doubt if they even hear.

Monday

Say chetty. We’re named after Padre Francesco Cetti, an Italian parson-naturalist. We used to be mad exoticisms in Britain: now you can find us almost anywhere good and damp. I’m currently singing – and singing loud – in a patch of reed and sallow in Norfolk, safeguarding the place for not one but two hens. It feels like a good year already.

Tuesday

We cettis never went anywhere near England until the 1960s. The winters were too damn cold. But year by year that began to change. By 1972 we were breeding here. Those were the pioneer days, respect to our ancestors and all that. By 2016 there were 3,450 singing males in England, so hooray for us.

Wednesday

The first egg was laid by hen number one. It’s not just paternal pride and species-vanity that makes me think they are the most beautiful eggs ever laid. The deep, bright chestnut red, the subtle curves: it really is the most perfect thing ever made.

Thursday

Sing! Sing out! That’s my job as a cetti male. It’s not a pretty song, like a willow warbler, nor madly inventive, like a sedge warbler. But it’s bloody loud. And sudden. It makes people jump. It was good enough to bring me my hens and it still keeps off any roving cocks. I’ve been in particularly good voice today. It goes like this: Me? Cetti? Ifyoudon’tlikeitfuckoff! And they don’t. So they do.

Friday

Most of those other  warblers, they’re flighty. No sticking power. They spend spring and summer here, and off to Africa or somewhere for the winter. We cettis hang on through all 12 months. And if the winter gets too cold, we die. I stuck it out here through a winter that was a full of challenges – but not enough to kill me. That’s why I’m here now and if you don’t like it – well, you know what to do,

Saturday

Full clutch of lovely red eggs in one nest, first egg in the second. I told you it was going to be a good week. The thing is, the British climate used not to suit us, now it does. We started to breed north of the Humber in 2006. Two years ago we were breeding in Scotland.

And why? Because England’s hotter, obviously. Because the world’s hotter. We cettis – we birds – we’re not climate-change sceptics. We look, we listen, we understand: and we respond. And, having wings we move. If humans were as smart as us cettis the world would be a very different place.

Lifespan: a couple of years

Eating habits: tiny insects

Hobbies: shouting

Sexual preferences: a fine Cetti hen is bellissima

Photograph by Sander Meertins/Getty