This beauty far from winging it
Tranquil churchyards surrounded by the stately splendour of ancient trees have long given sanctuary to some of our bestknown birds.
Tawny owls love to hunker down against ivy-clad trunks of ash and cherry to stave off the cold and rain on winter nights. Tiny goldcrests dangle from yews as if they were sparkling baubles, voices ringing from dawn to dusk.
On the uppermost boughs of lime and whitebeam, mistle thrushes deliver lilting songs to warn of coming storms. Far below, robins, blackbirds and dunnocks flit among posies of wild flowers.
If one bird feels more at home than any other on consecrated ground, it is the spotted flycatcher. These unobtrusive birds are plumed in varied shades of dowdy brown and decorated with only the merest of streaking.
For all the drabness of their plumage, these insect-catching specialists are mesmerising on the wing. One moment they are sedentary, their beady eyes alert, the next they helter-skelter through foliage until they capture some luckless insect with a loud snap of the bill.
I was shown my first churchyard flycatcher at a family christening, not long after catching the birdwatching bug as a youngster back in the late 1960s.
Over the years, church grounds have served up many sightings of these migrants from Africa. Sadly, summer encounters have become rare, with flycatcher numbers across Britain crashing by 88% between 1970 and 2018.
Yet come autumn, flycatchers continue to materialise at regular migrant hotspots. I must have seen at least a dozen along the Chiltern Hills in recent weeks as they take on extra calories in woodland glades or hawthorn-covered slopes, with one or two even posing for the camera.
What appears to be happening is that their breeding range is edging northwards because of the warming effects of climate change, and the birds I am witnessing are likely to be of Scottish or Scandinavian origin.
Encounters are rare with numbers crashing by 88% from 1970 to 2018