Juve

After yesterday's Custard Yellow Clouded Yellow excitement I had a quiet day today, trying to catch up on admin. I'm off on my travels again tomorrow, and I'm always more relaxed about that if my desk isn't piled high with festering paperwork and overdue to-do tasks when I leave.

Best of the day was this juvenile Green Woodpecker, which R told me had been very busily digging ants out of the far end of the top lawn when he first saw it, before moving up closer to the house. By the time I arrived the bird had settled down for a rest, which worried me a little because it's unusual behaviour, but although he's fully grown and moulting through into adult plumage (and in the process disclosing his sex, as the red centre starts to appear within his moustache) he's still pretty young to be digging up his own breakfast. The adult Green Woodpeckers usually bring their newly-fledged young to the garden and teach them about ant nests before kicking them out to fend for themselves, but even so I'd guess it's tiring and a bit discombobulating when you first find yourself having to look after all your own needs. He chose quite a good spot to settle, because this is the most open area of grass in the garden, allowing a good view all around and making it hard for any potential predator to surprise him. I expected that when he'd rested for a while he would go back to digging ants, but after about five minutes he saw or heard something he didn't like, and flew off into the trees.

It's nice to know that we have another generation of yaffles in the village. They're our biggest woodpeckers - at around 30cm they're 10cm longer than a Great Spotted Woodpecker, and they weigh more than twice as much. There are around 50,000 breeding pairs in the UK, and they're quite sedentary, with young birds rarely moving far from their natal areas unless they need to find new sources of food. They live mainly on ants, which they extract from ant hills with their long, sticky tongues, but they will also eat beetles and other invertebrates. They're mainly ground feeders, lacking the strength and physique to drill into hard wood, but I sometimes see them on telegraph poles as well, exploring existing wounds made in the wood by their Great Spotted cousins. On average they live around five years, but the oldest ringed bird yet recorded was fifteen.

There are more Green Woodpecker facts and figures here.