Yellowhammer

To bring it a bit further up to date, on Friday I went to Pages Wood, one of the Forestry Commissions new, volunteer-run woodlands, on the road into Harold Wood and set in former farmland, for a bike ride when I heard one of my favourite sounds, a sound one hears all to infrequently and which belongs to one of my favourite farmland birds. Often transribed as "a little bit of bread and no cheese" it is seven scratchy syllables followed by a longer, higher note. I found the bird not perched openly, but lower in the vegetation. It was of course, a Yellowhammer. The singer, a male with a bright yellow head and breast, darted out of the bushes and was away, but I was able to get quite close to the pretty, slight more subdued but still yellow female, who perched openly for a while in the branches of one of the low saplings.  Yellowhammers are beautiful, and not infrequent about these young, planted woodlands although I rarely seem to see them anywhere else. The distinctive call, a sound which takes me back to my childhood, when I seem to recall them being much more common, is something to listen out for next time you're over there or walking across some rough farmland. A proper nice little bird.

Pages Wood also seems to be infested with Green Woodpeckers. There were so many of them, usually appearing in pairs and leaping out of the long grass in response to my approaching bicycle. (I don't like to speed around, but the hard surfaced paths there just call for it.) They are not usually seen in trees. There were also a number of long-tailed tits about and something which flew by in front of me and could have been a whitethroat. It would have been my first of the year if I was confident of the ID. The light was fading and the birds increasingly appeared as silloutes against the sky.

As the sun set on the way back, and I stopped to enjoy it from beside Hall Lane, where the hill on which Upminster sits falls away to the West, towards Hornchurch and London.