Hit The Nail On The Head

Here he is again – but who is he? He sits on the hedge watching us pass, sniggering to himself.

“I know something you don’t know,” he says with a smirk. It’s got to the point where we almost pretend not to notice him sitting there. His yellowness doesn’t seem so out of place, now the varying shades of brown and grey of the bare branches have been replaced by the pale green of the new Hawthorn leaves.

We are becoming more and more inclined to believe that he is a Yellowhammer. The RSPB has him on the Red List, but either he needs a fairly large territory or we have several pairs along our daily walk route.

I’ve long supported the idea that all wild flowers should be genetically engineered to have a bar code label on the back of their leaves – to assist in identification. We definitely need something similar for birds.

Perhaps we could revive the government ID scheme but this time extend it to include all flora and fauna.