An elusive little sprite

It's hard to imagine a bird that weighs less than a two pence coin travelling all the way from Siberia to end up near my home in Somerset. But that's exactly what the tiny creature making its way through the dense foliage of ivy and sycamores in front of me had just done.

Pallas's warbler is one of the smallest of all British birds - just nine centimetres long and weighing a mere seven grams. So it's difficult to believe that it can migrate at all, let alone fly several thousand miles from the forests of northern Russia all the way to Britain.