Francis Hickenbottom’s Nature Notes.
7th July 2010
Birds have been busy raising lots of young in the grounds of Ackworth School. Most of these have done this unobserved but I have seen a few families of fledglings.
Behind the Sports Hall, there is an ash tree which has been tunnelled into by woodpeckers in lots of places over a number of years. This year, I noticed that greater spotted woodpeckers were using a nest hole high in the tree.
Several times, I watched as an adult landed in the tree and called ‘tchick’. At this sound, the other adult would leave and fly away from the tree. From this behaviour, it was clear that the woodpeckers had eggs and were sharing the incubation.
As the summer progressed, foliage made it impossible to observe the nest directly but I could hear the chicks calling as the adults brought food. Then, the youngsters began to be seen in the grounds, sometimes finding themselves close to people, who they had not learnt to be wary of.
In recent years, pied wagtails have taken to nesting in a space on the inside of a louvre window. This year the window was closed but the wagtails successfully raised several chicks after building a nest in a recess above a door, in plain view of anyone walking past. Once they had raised this family, they found another louvre open a short distance from the first one, so they are now raising a family of five in a newly built nest.
Swallows nest at several sites around school. One spot which is used every year is
in the shelter of a covered passageway, not far above the heads of the many people
who use the passageway every day. This week, the five chicks left the nest and could
be seen sitting shoulder-