Bird of the Month: Yellowhammer
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
It is no longer true to say the song of the yellowhammer or, in Scotland, yella yites ( Emberiza citrinella – a bunting, Emberizidae), popularly described as ‘a-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese’, is second only to ‘cuckoo’ in familiarity. The deprivations caused to its habitat and diet by industrial farming mean that Mark Cocker’s Birds Britannica description of its place in his Norfolk childhood may well ring bells denied to younger generations who now have probably never heard even a cuckoo’s call.
The yellowhammer’s hypnotic song has a Proustian effect on me, recalling the dusty silence of August lanes in the late 1950s, when the harvest fields on the Norfolk coast were still full of flowers, and the telephone wires would utter harp-like harmonies at the touch of the onshore breeze. These would be the only sounds in a vast, slumbering landscape and intensify the mood of solitude, stillness and anticipation. I can recapture that August voice, that listening stillness, only in the lines of William Allingham:
Little cow-boy what have you heard Up on the lonely rath’s green mound? Only the plaintive yellow bird Sighing in sultry fields aroundChary, chary, chary chee – Only the grasshopper and the bee. From The Fairy Shoemaker: A Hundred Poems for Children, 1927
Yellowhammers are one of the few birds to continue their spring song through to early autumn – the best time to hear them because theirs is often the only song. These farmland birds depend on spilt grain and weed seeds. The last ones I saw were in a deserted corn-storing shed open to the elements. Long ago, they were the bird one associated with edge-hedged country roads, their bright yellow heads – dimmer in the female – instantly identifying them. In winter, they flock and their yellow turns greenish.
In the 19th century, yellowhammers fell victim to one of those intermittent, ham-fisted human interventions that have afflicted birds down the ages. In the mistaken belief they were insect-eaters, large numbers were shipped to New Zealand in the 1860s to deal with a cornfield pest. Partial to corn and uninterested in the pest, the yellowhammers too were soon being outlawed. Enough survived to become a common New Zealand bird but now they are in decline there for the same intensive-farming reasons as here.
Clipped rural hedges are the best place to find the coarse nest and see the delightfully odd marking of the eggs, described thus by John Clare (1793-1864):
Lined thinly with the horse’s sable hair Five eggs pen-scribbled o’er with ink their shells Resembling writing scrawls which fancy reads As nature’s poesy and pastoral spells. From The Yellowhammer’s Nest
Its old Welsh name was ‘servant of the snake’, the scribbles seen as snakes; its tongue was said to carry the devil’s blood and the scribblings evil messages. In western Britain, the predominant gorse is a favoured refuge and nesting site.