Yellowhammers and the importance of hedgerows

HAS anybody seen a yellowhammer recently? Has anybody seen a flock of yellowhammers, asks Damien Enright

The literature says they feed in flocks in winter. I suppose I once saw such flocks but I best remember them on roadside telegraph wires in summer, brilliant yellow against the blue summer skies as my pals and I pedalled past heading for a swimming hole on the Suir in Tipperary or westering home with a song in the air after a day at the lakes in Mayo.

The song in the air was the cock yellowhammer celebrating his nest-full of fledglings in the hedge beneath the wires. Now, I see no yellowhammers and, often, no hedge. No hedge that you could call a hedge, anyway. I see shorn ditches, as scalped as my skull, running for linear miles along straight roads.