Saturday, February 05, 2011
Burnham Beeches
A 50-strong flock of redpolls was feeding high in a wind-swayed birch. A goldcrest sang from the top of a holly tree, and two song thrushes were also singing.
I wandered down McAuliffe Drive with its odd, stunted oaks. The boles look swollen and lumpy, the trunks slender and drunkenly twisted, and somehow thwarted in their growth. If it's pollarding, it seems to be of a different kind to that elsewhere in the Beeches, just above ground level and resulting in this rather airy, dwarf woodland. I think this is where the rhododendrons used to be, so they might be to blame for the slaloming of the tree trunks (a silver birch in the background also exhibiting this feature).
There was a big flock of chaffinches on Abbey Park Farm's fields, so I parked near the sharp bend and walked along the track to the corner of the hedges. I scanned the chaffinch flock for bramblings but the only white rump I could see belonged to a jay. A goldcrest came flying towards me and foraged nearby.... 
Not so many years ago, you could see yellowhammers along these hedgerows in winter. Let's hope they come back. (There was quite a lot of chaffinch song today, but the first of the year for us was on Thursday, in the grounds of St Mark's Hospital, Maidenhead, where Greger went for an X-ray.)
// posted by Christine @ 5:53 AM 
