Sometimes just a momentary experience can release a whole theatre of memories. Walking a nearby country lane, I glimpsed a flash of yellow atop the hawthorn hedgerow and heard a hoarse jingle that conjured up the seemingly endless summers of childhood. A yellowhammer. The first half of the name is clear enough; while the second half probably comes from the Old English amer, meaning a bunting, so they are really ‘yellow buntings’. The males have brilliant canary-yellow heads in spring, with a paler suffusion on the underparts – to my eye, a much happier blend with the palette of colours in the English countryside than the harsh yellow glare of the rape fields I see beyond. The hoarse song is traditionally rendered as ‘a little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese’, though it actually sounds more like the less grammatical ‘little-bit-of-bread, cheeeeze’ (a stutter followed by a wheeze). The song isn’t exactly euphonious –Coleridge likened it to someone filing brass – but they will now go on singing this refrain tirelessly until autumn and its repetition would be grating if it wasn’t so evocative of hot summers, dusty roads and healthy hedgerows.
A Yellowhammer. Photo: Jenny Desoutter.
One of the yellowhammer’s old country names was ‘scribble lark’, because their eggs are delicately inscribed with a loose series of wavy lines resembling even worse handwriting than mine. Other regional names invoke different associations. The Welsh name (is melyn yr eithin, meaning ‘yellow bird of the gorse’; while I hesitate to explicate the Scots name yorlin, which Robbie Burns exploited in a double-entendre so coarse that the BBC’s spoken rendering of his poem, ‘The Yellow, Yellow Yorlin’, comes with a trigger-warning …
To recite these scraps of folklore may be thought to view the yellowhammer through a golden haze of nostalgia, however. The countryside is changing. The rape fields whose colour seems garish and alien to me have been with us since the 1980s, so are already a part of a new tradition for others. And one remembers how the nineteenth-century peasant-poet John Clare bitterly lamented the enforced replacement of his familiar open-field landscapes with the very enclosing hedgerows that we in turn seek to preserve and restore. Nonetheless, if the yellowhammer eventually joins the other local casualties of intensive agriculture like the corn bunting, the turtle dove and the tree sparrow, I can’t just view that as an inevitable secular process. I feel these losses as an impoverishment, not just another change. And it’s no consolation to have this diminution of our natural heritage diagnosed in technical Eco-speak as the ‘Shifting Baseline Syndrome’, whereby each generation adjusts to a new and diminished ‘normal’. What we need is an Ascending Recovery Scale.
Jeremy Mynott 4 May 2025
Migrants
21 Apr 2025
Seven different warbler species singing in the bushes and reedbeds, plus a fine male whinchat perched on the fence at Lavender Cottage!
Jeremy
Nature Note:Â Local Knowledge
Grass starts growing again at about 10°C (50°F) and you can track the movement of that isotherm across Europe from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, a green wave travelling north at about fifty kilometres a day, bringing with it a new season of light, warmth and growth – and a feeling of renewal. Surfing that green wave are our migrant birds, and none bears a greater freight of these associations than the swallow and the swift, arriving here from southern Africa, respectively in mid-April and in early May. I eagerly look out for them at their due dates every year, usually returning faithfully to exactly the same place at the same time. And I get a fizzing shot of adrenaline when I first see and hear them back again. I’m not alone. These two species have been among our traditional spring and summer markers for centuries, welcomed back each year with relief, as the poet Ted Hughes put it, ‘that the globe’s still working’.
A swallow, photo: Laurie Forsyth.
Swallows and swifts were the favourite birds of the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White, who inspired a new tradition in nature writing in Britain. White was an obscure country curate who lived all his life in the same house in the equally obscure village of Selborne in Hampshire (population about the same as Hollesley). But his account of the daily changes to nature in his village through the seasons, The Natural History of Selborne (1789), became one of the most widely-read books in the English language, still in print today in multiple editions. Its attraction was precisely its parochial focus, stressing the richness of the local, the particular and the familiar – or at least what you thought was familiar until you really looked at it. He urged the importance of deepening one’s knowledge instead of just extending it: ‘Men that only undertake one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with.’ Not in favour of eco-tourism, then!
White was an amateur in its literal sense and he touched a chord with thousands of ordinary people. He also attracted the admiration of such different figures as Charles Darwin, John Constable, William Wordsworth, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, all of whom remark on the book’sapparently artless simplicity and charm. White had effectively invented a new literary genre and so became the patron saint of today’s many nature diarists. He also kept a daily journal and one of his most striking diary entries is an ecstatic two-word exclamation on 13 April 1768, greeting the first returning swallow to Selborne by its then scientific name:
The channels are dug and the scrape nearly finished. On a quick walk round there was a little egret in one of the new channels, a party of about ten pied wagtails around the newly dug scrape and a common snips shot up from the reeds. All the while a barn owl was patrolling the ditch. Very promising!
Jeremy
Nature Note: Martha’s month
Here’s a little quiz question. Which famous Martha died in September 1914? One clue: she was called Martha after George Washington’s wife. Here’s another: fifty years before her death there were 10 billion others like her. Final clue: she was the last of her kind. Answer: Martha was the last ever Passenger Pigeon, once the most numerous bird on earth, and she died at 12 noon on 1 September 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo, Ohio. It’s the best-recorded extinction in history, and perhaps the most extraordinary. Up to the mid-nineteenth century huge flocks of these birds darkened the skies of America. We hear of one in 1813 so vast that it spread from horizon to horizon and took three days to pass over. Yet in a few decades the bird was no more. What could have happened?
The main cause was simple in fact. The immigrants from Europe had poured into America and spread west, dispossessing the native Indians, clearing the land and destroying the forests as they went. The pigeons were wholly dependent on these forests for food and nesting sites. They were also easy to hunt and their flesh was both a staple diet for the settlers and a valuable export, so they were slaughtered on an industrial scale. In the killing season extra trains were put on to convey thousands of barrels of pigeon bodies east to cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.
Martha the Passenger Pigeon. Photo courtesy The Smithsonian.
The name ‘passenger pigeon’ isn’t a macabre reference to these train journeys, but probably derives from the French pigeon de passage or some equivalent Indian name. This was a permanently mobile species, moving on restlessly until they literally ran out of forest. It should really have been called the ‘wandering pigeon’ or ‘peregrine pigeon’.
This isn’t the only extinction of a charismatic bird, of course. Think of the great auk, last recorded in Britain in St Kilda in 1840 and killed by fishermen who were terrified by its unearthly shrieking and clubbed it to death, thinking it a witch. Or the dodo, which has entered our language as the very symbol of extinction, ‘dead as a dodo’. That was a sort of giant pigeon, too, in fact. The last of them died in 1662 in Mauritius – a fat, clumsy and trusting bird which was butchered by sailors grateful for an easy meal.
It couldn’t happen again, could it? But when did you last see or hear the British cousin of the passenger pigeon, the turtle dove? That used to be the soundtrack of summer with its gentle purring song. They were common here once, but I didn’t hear one anywhere this year, or last …
Jeremy Mynott 3 September 2024
curlews
10 Jul 2024
25 curlews on the mown Oxley Dairy field – start of autumn passage?
Jeremy
barn owl
12 Jun 2024
A barn owl over Shingle Marshes this evening at 9pm. Very welcome since they have been rarer than usual this year.
Jeremy
Stonechats
23 May 2024
We are doing well with the resident stonechats this year. I think we may have three paris. Theeasiest to see are those by the tennis courts, often sitting uo nicely on a tall stem. The name? Their call is just like someone clicking two stones together.
Jeremy
Short-eared owls
16 May 2024
These charismatic owls are winter migrants here from Scandinavia, usually arriving in October and leaving by March, but this yera two or three of them hung on into May, arousing much speculation whether they might even stay to nest somewhere like Orford Ness. The bird photographers seem never to be sated in getting better or closer images, but please don't enter private land.
Jeremy
Whitethroats
10 May 2024
Privileged to have both whitethroats (Common and Lesser) singing from my back-garden. The latter was rare here last year so it's particularly welcome to witness its return. Its song is a rather tunelss, repetitive rattle, but I haven't tired of it ... yet.
