Britain's smallest (and hardest to film) bird

Haven't had the opportunity to get out and about the last two days, so here is one from the archive.

What is Britain's smallest bird? It isn't the Wren as most think, it is the tiny Goldcrest (Regulus Regulus). I saw one down at Watermead a few weeks ago, near where the kingfisher lives. At first I thought it was a tree creeper. It seemed to dart up and down the bark of the trees and moved every couple of seconds. This made photography very difficult. In the end, I was just lucky to be filming a spot that it moved to.

These little birds eat tiny insects that live on the bark of trees. If you want to see some of these in your garden then you need to plant flaky bark trees like Yew and Juniper. Here is an interesting fact; there are as many Goldcrests in this country as there are unemployed but they are harder to see because they don't queue up at the job centre.