Seeing us watching a heron fly down the valley over the Go Outdoors camping store, a man stops to tell us of the buzzards that nested a couple of years ago in the row of trees down below Hostingley Lane. He says that one pair of skylarks nests each year on the open fields here but he wonders how they manage as the crop soon grows too long for them. It’s not like the cliff top grasslands on the Yorkshire Coast.
He’s tried inserting square plastic plant pots into the hedge banks for robins to nest in. This year robins have nested not in but on one of them. He gently felt in the well-concealed nest and they’ve already hatched their chicks.
But his most surprising success was with yellowhammers, ‘a million to one chance’ as he put it. He heard a yellowhammer singing and, using his hand, made a little scrape in a grassy hedgebank. To his amazement they did nest in the scrape and successfully raise chicks.