Yellowhammer

 

Borrowed from Surrey Wildlife Trust website

What I have learned about Yellowhammers from that website is that they are Buntings in the Passerine family.

I learned their name in childhood in New Zealand, never saw one in 30 years of living in UK (or Europe), and returned to flocks of them flying about the bay here. Less visible over winter (maybe they had the sense to go somewhere drier), they seem to be returning now and a couple are visiting my bird feeders.

Maybe they are camera shy - in any event any photo by me would be greatly zoomed (at the cost of crystal clarity) and still show you more garden than bird.

The seeds in the feeders are attracting (as anticipated) many many sparrows, along with lots and lots of chaffinches, and now yellowhammers.

Over winter we have also had blackbirds, dunnocks and quails. Thrushes have begun to put in an appearance again. Goldfinches are reappearing one or two occasionally (we get flicks of hundreds in summer), and I saw a Welcome Swallow a couple of days ago. Swallows self-introduced from Australia in the 1950s and have become reasonably well established in some regions.

There are many human-introduced bird species here that came from UK/Europe, some that have even developed into flocks of pest proportion in cropping districts, yet I seldom (or never) saw them in UK.  Redpolls and greenfinches are also regular visitor to gardens here but unseen in our UK garden despite the range of feeders we put out.

A neighbour on the other side of the bay is going white-baiting for the next three weeks and has asked me to water his strawberry plants and fill his birdfeeder.

He feeds sugar water to the native nectar feeders right on the edge of his deck so I might be able to get a half decent photo of the big bully Tui that dominates the feeder and guards it from a tall pine tree nearby.