Birdwatching from your kitchen window is one of the quiet pleasures of British countryside living, and it costs nothing but patience. You do not need binoculars to begin, though a pair of 8x42s will repay you later. What you need is a habit: the same chair, the same mug of tea, ten minutes of listening before the day properly starts.

The trick is to learn one bird at a time. Trying to memorise twenty songs at once leads to muddle. Pick the bird already on your feeder, learn its voice, and only then move on to the next.

Reading the dawn chorus

Birds sing to defend territory and attract a mate, so the chorus follows a rough order. Robins often start while it is still dark, blackbirds follow, and the tits join in once the light is properly up.

• First light: robin, song thrush
• Sunrise: blackbird, great tit
• Early morning: blue tit, coal tit, chaffinch, dunnock
• Afternoon: occasional snatches, plus alarm and contact calls

A quiet afternoon is actually easier for learning, because you can pick out one voice instead of forty.

The robin: small bird, big voice

Robins sing almost all year round — one of the few British birds to do so — which makes them an excellent first lesson. The song is a thin, wistful, liquid warble: high, silvery notes that rise and fall with a mournful, hesitant quality. It often sounds sadder than it is; the bird is simply telling every other robin within earshot to keep away.

Visually the adult is unmistakable: brown above, orange-red face and breast, whitish belly, dark eye. Males and females look identical, which is unusual among our garden birds. Juveniles in summer are a different creature entirely — mottled brown, with no red at all until their first autumn moult. A speckled brown bird following you round the flowerbed in July is very likely a young robin, and it will be singing by Christmas.

Behaviour tells you plenty too. Robins are territorial and surprisingly fierce, and will happily come within a metre of a spade to snatch worms.

Blackbird and song thrush: the low, fluty notes

The blackbird's song is the one people mean when they say a bird is singing beautifully: rich, low, fluty phrases delivered slowly, with clear pauses between them, usually from a rooftop or the top of a hedge. It sounds relaxed and unhurried — quite unlike the robin's thinner, more hurried notes. The alarm call is the other half of the story: a sharp, metallic "tchook-tchook" that sends every small bird in the garden into the hedge.

Male blackbirds are glossy black with a bright orange-yellow bill and a yellow eye-ring. Females are dark brown with a paler throat and a faintly streaked breast. Both run a few steps across the lawn, then stop, head cocked, listening for worms.

The song thrush is less common in gardens but worth knowing. It repeats each phrase two or three times before moving on, giving its song a deliberate, almost mechanical feel — and it smashes snails against a favourite stone, which is a giveaway if you find the shell fragments.

Blue, great and coal tits: tiny, busy and easy to mix up

Tits are the busiest birds on the feeder and the easiest to confuse, so start with the great tit. Its voice is the most distinctive: a ringing, insistent two-note phrase like a squeaky gate, often written as "teacher-teacher" or "see-saw". Loud, clear and repetitive, it is everywhere from January onwards.

• Great tit: black head, white cheeks, black stripe down a yellow breast — broader on males. Larger and bossier than the others.
• Blue tit: blue cap, white face with a dark line through the eye, yellow-green back. Hangs upside down on feeders. Song is a high, thin trill, "see-see-see", easy to miss.
• Coal tit: black cap with a bright white patch on the nape, greyish back, dainty build. Song is a fast three-note "if-he-see". It darts to the feeder, takes a seed and leaves rather than lingering.

Coal and blue tits are both high-pitched; if you struggle to hear them, it is not your imagination. Hearing loss affects high frequencies first, and playing a recording quietly on a phone can help you confirm what you are hearing.

A few gentle habits that make it stick

• Learn one bird a week. Five songs learnt properly beat twenty half-learnt.
• Listen at the same time each day. You will start to notice what has changed.
• Write it down. A notebook with date, time and a one-line description becomes a genuinely useful record of your garden.
• Watch the beak. Birds sing with the bill open; seeing the movement and hearing the sound together forms the link quickly.
• Offer food and water. A shallow dish, refreshed daily, brings in more species than almost anything else.

Give it a season. By next spring you will hear the first robin before you see it, and know exactly who it is.