Who says Mondays are dull?

‘Had a good weekend?' is the usual question when you get into work on a Monday morning. However, no sooner was this uttered today when it was interrupted as I peered out the window and caught a glimpse of a black, white and red bird swooping onto our feeder.

We’re pretty lucky here that we get some interesting birds out there, like Mark’s grey wagtail, but today’s visitor was equally beautiful and stayed around for much longer!

You possibly guessed that we were visited by a male great spotted woodpecker, one of my favourite birds with it’s flash of red and bold black and white markings. I caught him swooping down, disturbing the chaffinch’s and blue tit’s breakfast (don’t worry for they have returned!).

‘Our’ woodpecker is a fairly infrequent visitor to the feeder, but he didn’t feed for long, before moving off with his distinctive bouncing flight to a nearby tree.

Here he stayed for a few minutes, thankfully with winter now upon us, and the leaves having dropped off the trees, we got a good view of him as he moved up the tree, doing his best to hide from us. He disappeared shortly after into the woodland, possibly off to visit one of the other feeders at a house nearby. I don’t expect we’ll see him again before Christmas, so I hope he’ll return in the new year.

Oh, and by the way, I did have a good weekend!