Corn bunting

One of my favourite birds, ever.  For the last couple of weeks, as we head into Spring, I've been looking and listening for the corn buntings back on their breeding territory a few miles from Bishop Wilton.  And today as we headed back from a shopping expedition, there was one singing on top of a hedge.  I went home for the camera, and returned to find him singing from a young ash tree.  He wasn't being very cooperative though, every time I got anywhere close, he was off to another perch out of range.

The corn bunting is one of the suite of birds associated with arable landscapes in England, and it's undergone a dramatic decline in distribution and numbers in the last 50 years.  It's now extinct from the whole of Ireland, and became extinct in Cumbria in the time I lived there.  It is said to be more sedentary than most farmland birds, and its populations are becoming smaller and more fragmented, and hence once lost, it can be difficult to get it reestablished.  Its difficult to say why there is a small population left at this location, while it's missing from so much apparently similar habitat in the vicinity of the village.

He doesn't have the striking colours of the yellowhammer, he's bigger and more dumpy, and his song is a series of jangly sounds, repeated over and over (and sometimes likened - not very convincingly - to a jangling bunch of keys).  But for me at least, he has an elusive charm, and it brightens the day to hear his unmistakable song.  Watching this one for 15 minutes as the late afternoon sun shone brightly was the perfect end to a day.

Most of the day was spent back-filling a big hole in the space behind the extension - as we try to create a back garden after all the building works of the last couple of years by us and our neighbours.  It's the main project for the Easter weekend.  I'm backblipping this on Easter Monday, worrying that I have lost the blipping momentum that I built up in January and February.  Worse, I've not been using the camera much either, not even the phone camera.  It's just not been possible to keep all the plates spinning.