The unenclosed hill slopes or ffridd are a mosaic of bracken, scrub, heather, grass and wet flushes that lie between the pasture fields and the mountain plateaus. Around the Elenydd mountains in mid-Wales, ffridd is rich with small birds including redstarts, yellowhammers, tree pipits, whinchats and stonechats. Redpolls, siskins and mistle thrushes are common in the adjacent young conifer plantations. Kestrels nest on the crags and hobbies hunt over the hills. What is not here are the merlins nesting on the edge of the moors in old carrion crow nests in the conifer plantations. Perhaps because the numbers of its main prey, meadow pipits, skylarks and wheatears, are now so reduced. The moorland has changed with less sheep on the hill and it appears far fewer carrion crows, but also more extensive stands of bracken and purple moor grass Molinia caerulea. Added to which, the warm, rain free springs are drying the land out and the insects in the turf on which the moorland birds depend are consequently reduced. Merlins are being replaced by hobbies in this warming world.

Along the upland rivers there are goosanders, common sandpipers, grey wagtails and dippers; one adult dipper is feeding a recently fledged young that sits by the riverside and begs for food with a high pitched call that rises over the sound of the tumbling river. In fact, early June is the time for feeding young; we find redstarts enticing young out of the nest with beakfuls of insects and even a fine redcurrant, and a young great spotted woodpecker gorging on beetle larvae that have been excavated from a dead stump by his father.