It’s three years this week since I first came across the nuthatch nest in the big ash beside the river. It wasn’t hard to see, facing the footpath, perhaps 15ft up. By mid-May the chicks started to make themselves heard, and clamoured at the entrance hole. Nuthatches often use caked mud to resize the entrances to their nests, but this one – probably dug out at one time by a great spotted woodpecker – must have been handily nuthatch-sized when they found it, and had been left unamended. I wasn’t there when the chicks fledged. In fact, I never saw those birds again. I haven’t seen or heard a nuthatch in that stretch of riverside woodland since.
A mile or so upriver, and on higher ground, they’re all over the place. Here thick oaks and beeches rise through a shivering froth of Hockney-green new foliage. Against an effervescent sonic backdrop of blackbird, wren, chaffinch and robin song – undampened by the steady rain – the nuthatches chelp, chelp, chelp fruitily from tree crotches and first-fork branchings. Once in a while one will make a brisk, unexpected trill.
Slate-blue above and faded sunset-yellow underneath, and with a bold black eyeliner, the nuthatch (Sitta europaea) is crisply dapper and endlessly busy. Its tree-trunk explorations – up, down, around, across – have none of the furtiveness of the treecreeper; its manner (and its formidable bill) are more woodpecker-like, but the nuthatch is less easily spooked. In the course of an hour I watch three pairs foraging in the half-light of the sub-canopy.
When you watch closely, there’s a sort of bounding or bobbing quality in the nuthatch’s short flights between tree trunks – a fractional, gratuitous bounce – which reads to me like a jaunty disavowal of the laws of gravity. Not today, thanks! Lands at a good 20 degrees from the vertical without any faff. Pauses, cocks its head; hammers at a fault in the ridged oak bark (at this time of year it’s after live prey, larvae and caterpillars). Chelp, chelp comes another call, from not far off. A male on a snapped branch-end. Then on again it goes. Up, down, around, across.
