The heartbreaking story of Pecky, a young green woodpecker

Ever since I was a child, I’d always yearned to see a green woodpecker. With its scarlet cap and lime-green body, it looks far too colourful and exotic to be a native species. But it very much is, as you can tell from the fact that it has a rustic nickname — the yaffle.

This, incidentally, is how Professor Yaffle — the carved wooden bookend which comes to life as a drily academic woodpecker, the ‘font of all knowledge’, apparently based on Bertrand Russell — in the 1970s children’s TV series Bagpuss got his name.

But I digress. The point is, I never did get to see a green woodpecker till my mid–forties when I moved to the country. They’re so common round us that I spot them every time I go for a walk, identifiable by their loud, urgent, laughing call, their swooping flight pattern and the green on their back which looks more like yellow in sunlight.