A wryneck passes through Beddington on its way south

A wryneck stopped at Beddington Farmlands last week, one bird, reported on 10 September among the grassland, scrub and lakes being built back on the old sewage-farm ground beside the Wandle.¹ It drew a steady line of birders, which is the usual reception for this species in Britain now.

The wryneck (Jynx torquilla) is a woodpecker that does not act like one. It is a little larger than a sparrow and slimmer than a song thrush, grey-brown all over, barred and mottled so finely that a bird sitting still reads as a piece of bark. A dark stripe runs from the crown down the back. The tail is square and grey, and its feathers are soft rather than the stiff props a great spotted woodpecker braces itself with, so a wryneck does not climb trunks. The bill is short and pointed, made for probing soil, not chiselling wood. Look for it low: on a path edge, a bare patch, the foot of a bramble. It moves with slow, jerky hops, flicks its tail and keeps turning its head. When cornered it twists its neck round in a slow, snake-like writhe, and that habit gave it its name.

It lives almost entirely on ants. Photographs at Swiss nests found ants in 95 percent of feeds, and most of what the birds carried in was not workers but larvae and pupae, dug straight out of the nest chamber. It reaches them with a sticky tongue that extends something like ten centimetres beyond the bill on a bird under twenty centimetres long. The ants it takes most in Europe belong to genera such as Lasius and Tetramorium, colonies that sit in warm, dry, bare ground or under short turf, which is why a wryneck's whole life turns on the presence of open ground it can get its tongue into.² On migration it will use almost any open place with a few bushes, including ground with no trees at all. Beddington, with its rough grassland, scrub edges and the disturbed earth of ongoing restoration, offers that kind of ground, though the record does not say what the bird was doing there.

Nearly every wryneck seen in Britain now is a passage bird. They move between breeding grounds in Scandinavia and wintering grounds in Africa, and they turn up here on easterly winds, mostly in September, mostly on the east coast, with a scatter inland like this one.³ The British Trust for Ornithology puts the annual total at around 360 birds. Two centuries ago the wryneck bred across southern England. The last English pair nested in 1985, a few hung on in Scotland into the early 2000s, and the species is now considered extinct as a British breeder. The leading explanation is a loss of the bare ground and short vegetation its ants need, along with intensified farming and pesticides, but the case is not closed; the bird has also fallen steeply across western and central Europe while holding on in the east and south, and some researchers suspect the problem lies partly on the African wintering grounds. A single bird hopping through a restoration site in September is what the species now looks like here: passing, briefly, on ground that happens to be open.