Chiltern Birder

A walk this morning took in Cowcroft Wood again. Bluebells are now out but not in any great numbers, there are wide areas where they are just in leaf. I must read up on wild flowers, I recognise the celendine and primroses, both giving fine shows but ther are others that I can't identify. On the birding front the walk was mostly the usual suspects, tits, chaffinches, blackbirds, robins, wood pigeons and assorted corvids. I heard skylarks and pheasants, it was very striking how far the pheasant's call will carry. The high spots were a green woodpecker in the wood and house sparrows in Ley Hill. The sparrows seem to concentrate at one end of the village where there are a lot of privet hedges. Red Kites are no longer unusual although always special but the number circling over Great Missenden on Easter Day were striking. I didn't make an exact count but it was the sort of sight that I used to associate only with the villages along the escarpment from Chinnor down towards Benso

I was thinking recently that I hadn't seen many jays around and promptly saw two last week and two more today. That is about the most intertesting thing in the bird line locally at the moment. I still have no starlings coming into the garden and waiting for the swallows. I have heard that they have arrived in the south of England but none have climbed this hill yet. The woodland flowers are appearing with some nice displays of cowslips. In Cowcroft Wood the first few bluebells are just coming out.