IELTS Speaking Part 2: IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card

Describe a common bird in your country

: You should say

What is it
How it looks like
Where can you see it
And explain some common characteristics of this bird

: Sample answer

I live in England, and we are lucky in that we have many birds that visit our gardens as lots of people like to put out food to feed them, especially in the winter months. I’m going to tell you about one such common but distinctive bird. I will explain what it is, describe its appearance as best I can, let you know where you can see it and share with you some of its most common characteristics

The bird I’m thinking of is the Robin, sometimes it’s referred to as robin redbreast, and it often features on wintry scenes on Christmas Cards

These birds are very distinctive and enormously popular, in fact, earlier in 2015 it was voted Britain’s favourite native bird, and I’m not at all surprised. They are easy to identify, and very confident around people, so everyone knows a robin near to where they live. Size wise I think they are about five to five and a half inches in length. They have a distinctly rounded appearance, when they fluff up their feathers for warmth in winter they can appear almost spherical, it makes you wonder how they can fly! The male and female are similar in colouration. Despite their name ‘redbreast’ in fact, they have an orange breast and face lined with grey, then brown upperparts and a whitish belly. It is the orange which is the most distinctive though, I don’t think a robin has ever been wrongly identified! I have been told the reason they are called ‘redbreast’ even though their colour is clearly orange, is because years ago there wasn’t a word for ‘orange’ in the English language, and red was the nearest approximation, I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s possible

You can see robins in gardens everywhere. They are noisy and territorial so you will often only have one, or a pair in any patch of property. Although they are thought of as friendly because of how domesticated they appear with people, they can be pretty vicious with each other. It is not uncommon to see a robin furiously hurling itself at its own reflection in a window pane, attacking the glass with its wings and beak, thinking it is seeing off a rival. They are unconcerned by humans, not necessarily tame, but habituated to people they have learned that they can benefit from some human behaviours. For example, they will be attracted by the smell of newly turned earth, so if you are gardening, or sweeping leaves it is a very common experience for a robin to come and join you. They will come really close, standing on the handle of a garden fork to watch for worms or insects which they will then fly down and eat. It is very satisfying if you are digging to turn up a worm and see a hungry robin seize it – less satisfying for the worm I suppose!

If you are living in the UK or even parts of Europe, I’m sure you’ll know this bird already, but even if you don’t I’d be surprised if you hadn’t seen one on a Christmas card or in a Christmas film at some point – they get everywhere