Stonechats on Trendlebere Down and Tunnicliffe’s Brooke Bond Bird Portraits

There’s a female Stonechat, Saxicola torquata, on Trendlebere Down on Dartmoor. It’s flying to the highest perch in this low scrubland. It’s on top of yellow gorse, and that would make a wonderful photograph, but I never manage to catch it just right:

Back home I look at Charles Tunnicliffe’s illustration in the Brooke Bond Tea Cards album of Bird Portraits.

It shows a male on top of beautiful yellow gorse bushes:

I love the description:

“Wherever there are rough areas of gorse, on cliff tops of rough hill land, there you may expect to see the bobbing, perky form of the stonechat. This pleasing little bird is a native and in some parts of the country remains the whole year.”

Next time I’ll get a photograph on gorse.