Little brown jobs

LBJ's are the delight or the curse of birding, depending on your taste. Among the most devilish are the pipits, a whole series of stripy brown sparrow-sized birds that, depending on your point of view, are an identification challenge or a pain in the aspidistra.
At the moment, I am totally alone in East Anglia, everyone else having dashed to Wales to see a vagrant pipit called a Pechora Pipit, which breeds in Siberia and should be somewhere in SE Asia by now, but isn't. The picture above eloquently reveals the plumage features which separate it from the other pipits. Well, it does, doesn't it? Right.
We have four pipit species: Meadow, by far the commonest; Tree, a summer visitor; Rock, a coastal species; and Water, about which I know little, except when you flush it, it flies high and only comes back to land after several kilometres. After that, there are several vagrants: Richard's, which has a liking for Witcham; Tawny; and Red-throated, which I have seen in Turkey.
But I am happy not to have gone to Wales in pursuit of the Siberian, because, this frosty morning, I had a new bird feeding below my plum tree: a Brambling, which is a winter visitor, cousin to our Chaffinch. Be honest: when it comes to sexy, my Brambling beats that Siberian interloper hands down.