Whenever we reach the bottom of this hill, Sitka spruce plantation on one side, hawthorn, alder and willow woodland on the other, the bird call app on my phone detects great spotted woodpeckers nearby. We seldom see them. They have a talent for hiding behind tree trunks when there are people around. What usually follows can often be a game of hide-and-seek, unless I’m with an accomplice who walks around the tree and bamboozles the bird into breaking cover.
But this hungry bird, approaching with characteristic woodpecker-riding-a-rollercoaster undulating flight, had no such inhibitions. She was carrying a spruce cone in her beak and landed in full view, on the trunk of a sallow. Then she wedged the cone into a hole she had already excavated, using that as a vice while she chiselled out the seeds. Later we found scores of discarded, hacked-about Sitka cones under her workbench.
Sitka spruce – a fast-growing north American tree, generally unloved by the British public for perhaps understandable reasons – will forever be associated with dense forestry plantations blanketing upland landscapes, perceived to be devoid of wildlife. Some can be so, but I have also seen the whole 40-year planting and felling rotation, and in their early and final years these plantations can make for good wildlife habitat. The late Alan Mitchell – naturalist and doyen of dendrologists – was also an admirer. He described it as a tree with glamour, one of an elite group of conifer species capable of growing to a height of over 300 feet in their native Pacific Northwest forests.
Veteran specimens can reach 200 feet in Britain, but this plantation, supplying our woodpecker with winter provisions, is nearing the end of its rotation and is destined to be felled long before its trees realise their growth potential. Nevertheless, this year it has produced a magnificent cone crop, clustered at the topmost branches, where we caught a glimpse of a restless flock of small birds. Could they be crossbills?
We stood at the edge of the plantation, with the feeding party overhead, and waited until a cone came bouncing down through the branches. Some of its scales showed tell-tale ragged splits along their length. Crossbills are specialists in extracting conifer seeds, with a beak whose mandibles overlap like scissor blades, splitting cone scales and levering them apart. Their nesting season begins in late winter. This plantation could feed them during the cold months to come.
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