The bird came to occupy a particular place in our affections, partly because it didn’t desert us with the onset of winter like so many other species (hence its starring role on many a Christmas card), and also because it can exhibit astonishingly tame behaviour. More than any other species, it will readily eat from your hand if you invite it, displaying its fearless, have-a-go nature.

Celebrated also for its famously pretty song, it makes an appearance in the poetic lines of, among others, John Keats and William Cowper. It is the subject of the famous murder inquiry, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, and the focus of a brilliant ornithological study of 1943 by David Lack, which taught us more about this fascinating bird than we had ever known before.