MRS C spotted the first one, about six weeks ago, a flash of white bars and a little blur of red. Now there are four of them and the nut feeder on the silver birch has never been so busy.

So Global Warming has come to Curmudgeon Corner and - I shall be crucified for saying this - it is most welcome this wet, windy and turbulent summer.

Never before have we had a family of lesser-spotted woodpeckers in our back garden. Neither has anyone else in the Dale, as far as my enquiries reveal. They shouldn't really be this far Up North, you see. According to my trusty field guide to European birds, which admittedly has been with us for many a year, the LSW (we call him Dick, as in pudding) thrives in open woodland and old orchards.

Well, we do have a couple of Bramleys, and they are pretty old, but they hardly consist an orchard. This, after all, is not Kent or Somerset, where the cider apples grow, not even Herefordshire, where they are pretty good cider makers too. This is the Yorkshire Dales, that of high fells, of stonewalls and heather moorland, which is great for your grouse and your curlews, not the aforesaid LSW.

This, according to the field guide, inhabits the southern part of England, the cissy bit, and stops where the Pennines start, just south of Sheffield say. And (thankfully, some might say) Beggarsdale lies a fair stride north of the former city of steel.

But that was before global warming. Now, almost every week, there are stories in the papers of creatures moving north as the climate warms.

Sharks - other than the indigenous and harmless basking shark - are being seen regularly in southern waters, which might not be good news for the holiday resorts of Devon and Cornwall.

Those sharks are also being accompanied by various species of fish, jellyfish and even the odd turtle, more often to be found in the Caribbean or, at their most northerly, off the Canaries. Many, many more birds are coming across the Channel and - this really is heroism - some species of butterfly are now regularly crossing the sea from Brittany and Normandy to spend summer with us Brits. That's a long flight for a fragile creature like the swallowtail.

Now some of these visitors are welcome, others not so. Mosquitoes are said to have appeared in some parts of the south and doctors fear that, in a few years time, malaria might become a threat.

Well, the southerners can keep them - and the sharks and the jellyfish - but I suspect it will be a very long time indeed before mossies appear in Mar'ton: apart from anything else they like to breed in stagnant water, and water doesn't stand still enough in this part of the world to get stagnant.

However, a family of lesser-spotted woodpeckers has done much to bring interest into what has so far passed for a summer (by the time this is published, inevitably, we shall have a drought and Yorkshire Waster will have imposed a hosepipe ban).

The only creatures that seem to be offended are the great tits, because the woodpeckers have knocked them off the top of the heap when it comes to feasting at the nut feeder.

Now if we could only train woodpeckers - or any other bird for that matter - to feed on the blackfly which have devastated my broad beans this year, that would be a real step forward. Do you think an anteater might do the trick?

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.