Christine's walking & birds blog

I thought I'd made a mistake when I got out of the car yesterday, late afternoon. The trees were black against a dark sky and there were a couple of spots of rain, although they didn't come to anything.

A pair of Mandarin ducks zoomed past. A goldcrest hopping about in a holly tree trying to sing reminded me that I had seen one in Maidenhead the previous day, singing lustily from trees by the library. There were loads of redwings about, some nuthatches and a treecreeper.

And then, impossibly high and distant through a fretwork of branches and twigs, a lesser spotted woodpecker was seen foraging restlessly in the canopy. The usual male, I supposed.

The bird faced me for a few seconds and I was quite thrilled by the absence of a red crown. Where it should have been was a patch that looked, at this distance and in this dimness, dirty white. A female! My first definite since January last year, although the bird in Dorney Wood a few days ago was a possible female.

She swooped away into the gloom where I could not follow and was gone.