Читать книгу The Times A Year in Nature Notes - Derwent May - Страница 25

GREENFINCHES ARE FLYING about noisily in the treetops, and one or two have started to make their spring call. This long, wheezing note is usually heard a few weeks before they begin their chortling song. The male greenfinches are also acquiring brighter plumage, with a vivid green rump and golden-yellow patches on their wings and tail. This happens as the dull tips of their winter feathers slowly wear away. The females remain duller, browner birds, but they too have the yellow patches.

On some beech hedges and hornbeam hedges, dead brown leaves are still dense on the twigs, and the wind rustles in them. But the new buds, which the leaves have been sheltering from the cold, are showing through – in both these species, long spiky buds.