Green woodpeckers: Listen out for the sounds of these birds having a laugh in trees across Yorkshire

The laughing calls, known as yaffling, will grow in volume in the coming weeks and are their way of attracting the opposite sex and warning off rivals.

The calls are their equivalent of the drumming of Britain's two other woodpecker species, great spotted and lesser spotted.

The green woodpecker is the largest of the three, about the same size as a collared dove,

As their name suggests they have bright mossy green plumage, darker upperparts and a greenish yellow rumps and both sexes have a red cap, black eye patches and 'moustaches' - the males have a bright red spot in the middle of this,

They have a long bill but this is not actually very powerful, It is capable of excavating a nest hole in soft wood but is mainly used for digging holes in ant hills.

Green woodpeckers have exceptionally long sticky tongues for scooping up ants- the tongue is so long that it is coiled behind the skull in order to fit into the bird's head, The tongue also has a sensitive and mobile tip for probing into ant hills.

Green woodpeckers have a single brood of four to seven eggs and quite often return to nest in the same tree for several years,

Unlike some woodland birds, green woodpeckers are doing well and are thought to have more than doubled in numbers since the 1970s although they are still absent from Ireland, the Isle of Man and murch of north west Scotland,

The week saw the first big arrivals of chiffchaffs from southern Europe which seemed to be singing everywhere, also more sand martins and the first wheatears.

On their way out were pink-footed geese and whooper swans on the move in large numbers back to breeding sites in Iceland.