Chiltern Birder

A distressing aspect of driving in this area is the number of dead badgers by the road side. It was refreshing therefore to see a live one on Saturday night. It was about midnight going up Frith Hill from Missenden towards Chesham. Not much activity in the garden, just the usual visitors. With the mild winter I am not replacing foods as they run out and the goldfinches and squirrel have cleaned out the sunflower hearts already.

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...