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THE TIMES
A year in
Nature Notes
Derwent May

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

I BEGAN WRITING Nature Notes for The Times in 1981. They first appeared in a back-page section called The Times Information Service, which had been set up by the new editor at that time, Harold Evans. They appeared every Monday morning, and consisted of a thumbnail sketch of the events of the week in nature: "First blackbirds are singing...Blue tits are pairing...Oak buds are bursting". I often used to dictate them over the phone on Sunday afternoons. They were moved to other parts of the paper several times, and were sometimes held over until Tuesday, but never missed a week.

In February 2002, they became a daily feature in the new Register section of the paper, appearing every morning from Monday to Friday. Inevitably, that meant a slight change of character for them. Even in the heady weeks of spring and early summer, to have included eight to twelve species of bird, butterfly or flower in Monday’s notes would have left a certain paucity of material for the rest of the week – not to mention the problem that would have arisen in the almost unchanging days of late December.

So in these daily notes, I give a rather fuller account of what is happening to some of the various creatures and plants mentioned. The principle behind the notes nevertheless remains the same. I try to give a brisk, vivid rundown of what readers may hope to see and hear if they go out into the garden or the countryside each morning. The present book is based on these daily Nature Notes. They are still called by that name, and still signed by the initials DJM.

Of course every year is different, with early springs and cold springs, stormy Octobers and placid Octobers. So this book portrays a hypothetical year, yet one based very closely on real, observed events. Among the seasonal variations I provide some frosty and windy spells early in the year, and some late autumn sunshine.

The timing of events also varies in different parts of the country, between east and west, and north and south. However, it would have been absurd to try to write about an average year for the whole country, so, as in the paper itself, I write about southern England, where I live. Readers in the North of England or Scotland, or in the West of England or Wales or Ireland, know this, and smile smugly or nod ruefully as they note the differences between where I live and where they live. I do also send the notes out on regular excursions from time to time, describing birds or flowers that are only found in Scotland, for example.

One other point about differences is that in the course of the last 20 years, some spring events have started taking place slightly earlier. I was not noticing silver catkins on the sallows in January 20 years ago, for instance, and the first chiffchaff was more often reported in the last week of March than in mid-March. Nevertheless, the change has not been so marked as some newspaper reports every spring suggest. There were always early bumblebees buzzing about in February, always some early swallows dying of starvation, always a few hawthorn – or may – hedges with flowers at the beginning of April.

Yet another difference is the change in numbers of some species, especially of birds. Although it is still not hard to find them, skylarks, yellowhammers and grey partridges have all become distinctly less common out in the cornfields. At the same time, the beautiful and once-rare little egret has become a familiar bird on marshes and estuaries.

At any rate, I hope this book will prove useful to readers in suggesting what they may hope to find going on in the countryside if they venture out, or in giving them a picture of what they are missing if they stay in.

My thanks to the successive editors of The Times over these years for publishing me, and in particular to the present editor, Robert Thomson, for permitting me to reprint the Nature Notes in this book. Thanks too to Peter Brown for his illustrations, and to the editor of the Register, Ian Brunskill, for his unfailing support.

Derwent May

January
1st January

MANY TREES ARE quite easy to identify even in winter when they are without their leaves. Oak trees have a very distinctive shape, with broad, spreading branches that switchback up and down. Their bark, too, is easily recognisable: it is as if the trunk were covered in small, slender tiles, each about twice as long as it is broad. Lime trees have branches that bend gracefully downwards, and very often have swellings on their trunks with reddish shoots growing out of them.

Beeches are best recognised by their smooth grey bark and very sharp buds. They can grow tall and magnificent. Hornbeams also have sharp buds, but their bark is quite different: it generally has twisting silvery-grey patterns on it, as if smoke had settled on the trunk and frozen there.

Hedge sparrows are singing occasionally in low bushes: it is a thin song but has its sweet notes. They were once called hedge accentors and are now more often called dunnocks. They are not related to house sparrows: they have a thin, insect-eating bill, not a broad, seed-eating bill. At a glance they seem dull birds, but when the sun brings out their soft, bluish-grey head and striped chestnut back they look quite handsome.

2nd January

WHERE THE FARMLAND hedges have not been cut, tall ash saplings are growing out of them and standing up like little flagpoles. They have very smooth bark, and already have the black, claw-shaped leaf buds on them. Blackthorn bushes are putting out long, drooping shoots at the side of the hedges: they end in a sharp spike. Here and there a solitary blue sloe can still be seen. A few green convolvulus leaves are also still trailing over the hedgetops.

On spindle trees, the pink casing of the fruits has dried up to look like brown paper, while the orange berries that were hidden inside are now exposed but are still clinging on. Weeping willows are changing colour and falling at last. The grass or the water beneath is covered with long narrow leaves, yellow on one side, silvery-grey on the other.

Sometimes in the fields one sees a little flock of small, streaky-brown birds that fly up in an odd way, as though they were mounting a flight of stairs. They make a thin, piping call as they go. These are meadow pipits, which are in fact only found on farmland – and on ploughed land, rather than in meadows – in the winter. They nest mainly on moors and marshes.

3rd January

SMALL FLOCKS OF chaffinches are feeding under the trees, especially where there is beechmast lying. Sometimes the flocks consist solely of the drab, yellowish-brown females. This is because among Scandinavian chaffinches the female birds may leave for the winter and come to Britain, while the pink-chested males stay behind, or follow later. The Latin name for the chaffinch, coelebs, meaning ‘bachelor’, is derived from this practice.

When the chaffinches fly up from the ground they are easily recognised by thier double white wing-bars, but they usually disperse very quickly among the treetops and it is not easy to follow them up.

Nuthatches are busy high in the trees, and often make a series of rapid, clipped whistling notes – very like the sound a stone makes when bounced across the ice on a lake. These blue-backed birds bustle about on the branches, and will sometimes walk down a trunk head first. They hold on with their very strong claws. They wedge nuts in cracks in the bark, and break the shells by hammering them with their beak. They also eat insects, and at present can be seen peering into clusters of ash seeds in case there are any small creatures to be found there.

4th January

THE CATKINS ARE already swinging on some hazel bushes. They are next spring’s male flowers. They appear in the autumn as tight green clusters, like a bird’s foot, but loosen as the pollen swells in them and dangle merrily from the twigs, and are then called ‘lambs’ tails’. At present, many of them are a bright lime green, but they will soon be more of a lemon yellow. The female flowers, which are like tiny crimson stars, will appear on the twigs in February.

In woods, coppiced hazels are still sometimes found in spaces between the tall trees. These are bushes that have been cut down so that they grow up again in a circle of long shoots around the base. These flexible shoots are then used in thatching and to make fences. Coppices are good places for woodland flowers to grow in the spring, but the bushes need to be protected from roe deer that nibble the bark.

Pheasants stalk about in the coppices, grubbing up roots to eat under the fallen leaves, but they often fly up onto a high oak bough to roost at night, out of reach of foxes.

5th January

BARK HAS BEEN falling from the trunks of London plane trees (as they are called all the way from Central America to China). The bark flakes off from the middle and upper part of the trunk, leaving creamy patches showing beneath. These patchwork trunks are most noticeable in the autumn and early winter. London planes are very tolerant trees, thriving in most kinds of soil, resisting drought, smog and fog, and accepting both shady and sunny situations. This is why they have been planted so widely, especially in cities and towns. They are actually hybrid trees, a cross between the oriental plane, which grows beside streams in Greece and Turkey, and a much more robust species of plane tree that is native to eastern parts of North America. At present the plane twigs are crowded with bobble-shaped seed balls which will crumble in the spring.

A few wild flowers have survived into the new year. Here and there a large dandelion, often half-closed, can be found in the grass. Many lawns are still sprinkled with a few daisies, their petals closed up when the skies are grey. On bramble bushes, a solitary white flower may linger among the dark green leaves and the withered blackberries.

6th January

SNOW ON THE grass in parks and gardens sends blackbirds, song thrushes and robins under the hedges to look for food. The blackbirds are particularly noisy as they hop about on the dry leaves, and turn them over to look for insects lurking beneath them.

Larger birds such as carrion crows and magpies venture out onto pasture and playing fields if the snow is not too deep, and poke about in it. Birds that feed mainly in trees, such as blue tits and great tits, are affected only if the frost is severe enough to coat the twigs and branches with ice. This makes it much harder for them to get at the small insects and the moth eggs that they normally consume in large quantities. Bird tables and hanging peanut feeders become popular, and in the past year or two long-tailed tits have learnt the trick and started to visit them in hard weather.

All birds puff out their feathers in freezing weather, to insulate themselves with a layer of air and so keep warm. The poet Robert Graves observed that ‘puffed up feather and fearless approach’ indicated hunger in birds, but that in man these signs revealed ‘belly filled full’.

7th January

RABBIT TRACKS IN the snow can easily be identified. There are two oblong footprints side by side in the front, and two similar prints one behind the other in the rear. Oddly enough the two footprints in the front are made by the hind legs, and the two footprints at the back are made by the forelegs. This is because the running rabbit puts its two front feet down one after the other, then vigorously propels its two hind feet together in front of them. And so it goes on, launching forward with its front feet again, and usually travelling a good distance, then bringing its hind legs up and past them as before.

Hares leave a similar pattern in the snow, but their feet – and the hollows they leave in the snow – are distinctly larger. Hare tracks also sometimes show that they have made a huge jump to one side and gone off in another direction – probably to shake off foxes following their scent.

Fox prints in the snow are very like dog prints (but the pads under the dogs’ feet are closer together). The prints appear in pairs, since in snow the animals put their hind foot exactly in the print made by the forefoot.

8th January

THE SNOW HAS made the Lawson (or Lawson’s) cypresses stand out, particularly in parks and churchyards. They are tall, smooth, dark green spires, but there are usually enough ragged leafy edges for snow to settle on them. The leaves are scaly and slightly sticky, and have a resinous smell like parsley. The original trees come from the hillsides of Oregon and California, but they are now the commonest cypresses to be seen in Britain. They lend a gloomy dignity to gravesides. There are also many cultivated varieties, some of them a much brighter green, some golden-yellow. They can be used for hedges.

In the cold weather, blackcaps and chiffchaffs have been coming into gardens. Both of these small species are mainly summer visitors to Britain, but a few blackcaps that nested in Germany have come here for the winter, and a few chiffchaffs that nested here have stayed behind while all the rest have gone to Africa. The chiffchaffs generally stay in the bushes but the blackcaps come to bird tables. The blackcaps are silent, but the chiffchaffs have a sharp ‘hweet’ call that draws attention to them. Neither of them will sing until the spring.

9th January

SKYLARKS FEED ALMOST exclusively on the ground – they take everything from seeds to slugs – so when there is a covering of snow they roam the countryside looking for sustenance. The winter visitors may wander far afield, but the British residents soon return to their own fields and moors. Before long they will be singing again, high in the sky.

Another lark that can be seen here in winter, mainly on the east coast, is the shore lark. These birds are easily overlooked because they crouch on the shore and then shuffle along with their heads down, quite unlike the brisk skylarks. They can be recognised by their yellowish faces, and, in the case of the male, by the two black stripes on the top of his head that end at the back in tiny horns (they are sometimes called horned larks). These features will become sharper as spring nears, and they prepare to return to their homes in the Arctic tundra.

In the woods, the first shoots of dog’s mercury are coming through. The jagged-edged leaves will soon be unfolding and in a fortnight the first green flowers will be out. In some places they will carpet the whole woodland floor for a while.

10th January

TAWNY OWLS ARE hooting in the night – a long, sonorous set of notes, often wavering slightly. They also have a sharp ‘kwick’ note, probably more often used by the female, and the two sounds together constitute the legendary ‘tu-whit, tu-whoo’. They fly around noiselessly in the dark on their soft, rounded wings, alert to any sight or sound of movement, and swoop down on careless mice or small birds roosting in the bushes. Sometimes a tawny owl is caught in a car’s headlights, standing on the ground eating its prey. It looks up with its large gleaming eyes before it flies off rapidly into the shadows. In the daytime, they sleep in hollow trees, or pressed up against a tree trunk hidden in deep ivy. If they venture out in the daytime, they may be mobbed by small birds and forced to flee.

11th January

IN SPITE OF the recent cold weather, the first leaves of many of the spring flowers are coming up at woodland edges and on muddy roadsides. The bright green, fern-like leaves of cow parsley, or Queen Anne’s lace, are already quite thick. There are beds of goosegrass, which at this early stage of its life looks like a trim little green pagoda. Later it will sprawl and cling to clothes – hence its other name of ‘cleavers’. The fan-shaped leaves of mallow are also up here and there, though the flowers will not follow until June. The leaves of garlic mustard, or jack-by-the-hedge, are pushing up through the leaf mould: they are like crinkly hearts, and already smell faintly of garlic when crushed. There are also small, frail-looking dock leaves, and neat rosettes of thorny thistle leaves close to the ground.

Jackdaws plod about on the ground looking for food. They have prospered in recent years, partly perhaps because of the wide range of food that they will take. They are mainly black birds, but have a grey hood and pale grey eyes. The pairs often sit side by side in the trees, in winter as well as in the spring.

12th January

WHITE-FRONTED GEESE ARE wandering in small flocks around southern England, especially near the Severn Estuary and in farmland near the Kent and Sussex coast. They settle on flooded fields where the water is not frozen, and graze around the edge of the pools. The whole flock moves forward on the ground together, walking slowly and tugging energetically at the grass as they go. When they are startled, they leap up into the air with remarkable speed, climbing almost vertically on their powerful wings. They fill the air with cackling cries like a kind of wild laughter.

They are streaky brown geese, and their ‘white front’ is a white band above the beak. The birds in the south of England come here from northern Russia, while other white-fronted geese from Greenland visit the Irish bogs and some Hebridean islands, particularly Islay. Hard weather on the Continent brings more Russian birds here.

The first shoots of winter wheat and barley are coming up steadily. There are also tufts of scentless mayweed still flowering in the rain-sodden soil, although many of the flowers have lost their white petals and only the spongy-looking yellow centre remains.

13th January

SONG THRUSHES ARE singing vigorously in treetops in the dawn, with repeated, ringing whistles and triple notes. They put what sounds like enormous urgency into their songs. In well-lit gardens and parks, some of them are singing for half the night. They also have a more subdued, rambling song, called ‘sub-song’ by ornithologists, which can be heard from lower down in the vegetation. This probably comes from young males who are practising their song – and still learning it from the treetop birds.

Blue tits are more often seen now in pairs than in flocks, and are looking round for suitable holes or boxes to nest in, but they will not start building until April. The lengthening hours of daylight are beginning to bring all the birds a little closer to breeding condition, and the warmth in the air is contributing to the process.

14th January

PIGEONS AND DOVES breed nearly all the year round, and in the sunshine are already showing signs of spring. Wood pigeons can be seen making their aerial displays. They fly sharply up into the air from a roof or treetop, clap their wings, then glide down. They may do this several times before they settle again. They are laying claim to a territory on the land beneath them, and showing off to potential mates.

Collared doves are singing on television aerials: their loud triple coo is sometimes mistaken for a cuckoo’s call, but the cuckoos at present are all in central or southern Africa. Collared doves like to look around when they are perched, stretching their long, flexible necks and peering about with an anxious expression. Town, or feral, pigeons, which are mainly descended from wild rock doves, make their grunting, groaning song from holes in walls.

In the woods, the little heart-shaped leaves of sweet violet are beginning to push aside the leaf mould.

15th January

MANY SMALL CREATURES may be revealed if a piece of bark is broken off a fallen tree trunk. Woodlice lurk in the darkness of the rotting wood in order to keep moist, with several of them often clustered close together to make the process more efficient. One species of woodlouse rolls up, when exposed, into a shiny ball that looks as if it is armour-plated, and drops to the ground to escape. At one time, these little rolled-up crustaceans used to be prescribed as medicine by quack doctors, because of their resemblance to a pill.

Centipedes may also be found lying under the bark in winter, keeping very still, but they too come to life when exposed to light and air, and fall to the ground writhing violently as they go. This startles and confuses a bird that might want to eat them.

The bark may also conceal millipedes – which do not have a full thousand legs, but have two pairs of legs on each segment of their body, as opposed to the centipedes, which only have one pair on each segment. On warm nights, centipedes go hunting for other tiny animals, while millipedes and woodlice eat dead plant matter, such as soft, rotting leaves.

16th January

SNOWDROPS ARE IN flower under the trees at the edge of damp lawns, and their leaves are coming up everywhere in woods. The pure white bells nod daintily on the green stalks; if you lift their heads and look inside, you see green, crescent-shaped blotches. They have a strong, sweet scent. The flat, grey-green leaves continue to grow after the flowers have opened. In some woods, especially in warm places such as the Inner Hebrides, they will soon be covering the whole woodland floor like a fall of snow. On valley sides, they can look like flowing white streams. They are members of the daffodil family.

A new voice in the woods in late January is that of the stock dove, whose song is a soft, rumbling ‘woo, woot’ that is easily overlooked. The bird too is elusive, since it is much shyer than the wood pigeon. It is a blue-grey dove, with a green sheen on its neck, and without the conspicuous white wing-bars and white neck-mark of the wood pigeon. Instead, it has a noticeable dark edge to its wings. Stock doves suffered badly from eating chemical seed dressings in the 1950s, but their numbers have since recovered.

There has been a considerable influx of waxwings from Scandinavia. These striking pink birds, with a crest like a quiff and red and yellow marks on their wings, feed on the decaying berries in hawthorn hedges, and on cotoneaster berries in places like supermarket car parks and roundabouts. At present they are steadily moving inland from the east coast.

17th January

HAZEL CATKINS ARE beginning to turn yellow as the pollen forms in them. But even on the same bushes as these loose-swinging catkins, others are still small and hard. Last year’s lime tree seeds, like miniature drumsticks attached to a wing, and last year’s hornbeam seeds, like Chinese lanterns, can also still be seen here and there on the branches. On ash trees, there are still dense clusters of seeds, or keys, very dark and damp-looking.

Black-headed gulls are beginning to acquire their chocolate-brown summer hoods. In winter, when many of them come inland, they have only a small mark behind the eye, but already more of the head is getting darker. Sometimes this process begins with another dark mark next to the first, like a pair of inverted commas. Juvenile black-headed gulls can be picked out by the brown bar on their wings and their black tail-band. Some of them stay on playing fields when the adults have gone to their nesting colonies.

18th January

THERE IS MORE life stirring in the woods. Grey squirrel males are chasing the females, with two or three of them sometimes joining in the pursuit: they go round and round the trunks and along the branches, with much excited chatter and daring leaps from tree to tree. Green woodpeckers are beginning to make their mating and territorial call: this is a soft, mellow laugh, easily distinguishable from the harsh, clattering laugh they make when they are alarmed.

The small, bright green leaves of wood sorrel are coming through on damp woodland banks. They have long stems and three heart-shaped leaflets with folds down the middle. These leaves are very sensitive and mobile: they close up when they are exposed to bright light, when it rains, and when night falls. The flimsy white flowers, with pink or purple veins, will not open until April.

19th January

ON ROCKY BEACHES all round the coast, turnstones are turning over the pebbles with their beaks to see what crabs or other sea creatures they can find beneath them.

Sometimes it is the clicking of the pebbles that draws attention to them, because they have mottled brown backs that camouflage them well against a background of dark shingle and seaweed. They also frequent sandy shores where there is a chance of finding mussels. They are winter visitors from the north, some of them from as far afield as Greenland and Canada. Before they leave for their nesting grounds in spring, their backs will turn a rather beautiful tortoiseshell and orange.

Another winter visitor from the Arctic is the purple sandpiper, which is sometimes seen in the company of turnstones. It has purplish-brown plumage, and is often very tame. It pokes about among the seaweed but does not flip stones over like the turnstones.

20th January

GREENFINCHES ARE FLYING about noisily in the treetops, and one or two have started to make their spring call. This long, wheezing note is usually heard a few weeks before they begin their chortling song. The male greenfinches are also acquiring brighter plumage, with a vivid green rump and golden-yellow patches on their wings and tail. This happens as the dull tips of their winter feathers slowly wear away. The females remain duller, browner birds, but they too have the yellow patches.

On some beech hedges and hornbeam hedges, dead brown leaves are still dense on the twigs, and the wind rustles in them. But the new buds, which the leaves have been sheltering from the cold, are showing through – in both these species, long spiky buds.

21st January

ON MANY HOLLY bushes, there are little yellow blotches on the upper surface of the older leaves. Sometimes a whole tree can be affected. Inside the blotches there lives the tiny grub of the holly leaf miner, tunnelling away. Its parent is a small fly that laid an egg there.

It is hard to get rid of these insects. Insecticidal sprays run off the shiny holly leaves. Blue tits are better at the job, and can often be seen pecking at the leaves to extract the creature inside. However, leaf miners do not seriously affect the basic health of the tree they colonise.

Blue tits are also beginning to sing their spring song – but it is not very noticeable. It is not much more than a run of their usual thin call-notes followed by a short trill. On a fine morning, they can already be seen looking into nest-boxes and other holes where they might decide to breed in the summer.

Great tits are now singing regularly. They have a variety of double or triple song phrases, vigorously repeated, but the one most frequently heard is a repeated double note that is like the steady, rhythmical wheezing made by a squeaky bicycle pump.

22nd January

THERE ARE MANY tufted ducks on lakes and large ponds at the moment. The drakes stand out with their black bodies and silvery-white flanks. If they roll over to preen, they look almost completely white. The females are brown birds, but they too have lighter, yellowish flanks.

Both sexes have bright golden eyes, and a little ponytail of drooping feathers at the back of the head. They are diving ducks, leaping forward when they go under and spending much of their time beneath the surface. In the next few weeks some of the tufted ducks that came here for the winter will be heading further north again. Sometimes a drake that was a winter visitor takes one of our native females with him.

In the bare wild rose bushes, a large gall called robin’s pincushion, or bedeguar gall, is noticeable now. In the autumn it was a ball of bright pink, tangled hairs but by now some of the hairs have fallen out and most of the others have turned black. The larvae of a small gall wasp are still inside the ball and will emerge as wasps themselves in May. A few rotting red or black hips also linger on the thorny wild rose twigs.

23rd January

MORE LEAVES OF wild flowers are coming up on roadside verges and in ditches.

Lesser celandine has kidney-shaped leaves, shiny and dark green, each growing on its own long stalk. Later they may take on a purple tinge. They grow in damp places, and the glossy yellow flowers will soon be following them, turning their faces to the sun. Buttercups, which belong to the same family, are also pushing up their leaves, which are deep-cut and fern-like. There are two common species, the meadow buttercup and the bulbous buttercup. These are best distinguished, when the yellow flowers come out in April, by the way the sepals of the bulbous buttercup hang down beneath the petals. The jagged-edged leaves of dandelion are sprouting everywhere: they grow in small rosettes that lie flat on the ground. All this progress towards spring could be arrested by frost or snow.

Chaffinches and blackbirds are starting to take up their spring territories, and the first of them should be heard singing in the next week or so.

24th January

COAL TITS, LIKE the blue tits and great tits, have now started singing their spring song. This is a more high-pitched, liquid-sounding version of the great tit’s ‘teacher, teacher’ song, and is usually delivered more rapidly. A variant, with a repeated phrase of three short notes, can also be heard. The coal tits often sing from high in a fir or redwood tree. In parks and woodland where they are common, they answer one another: each bird is warning its neighbours to keep out of its territory. They are small, restless birds, with a black cap and a noticeable white nape.

Long-tailed tits are still going round in flocks but these will soon be breaking up and the pairs will be looking for nest sites in gorse and hawthorn bushes. Unlike the other common titmice, long-tailed tits have no spring song, though a rapid, bubbling repetition of their squeaking and churring notes has been recorded.

Long-tailed tits use lichens to camouflage their domed nests. These strange crusts that appear on trees and stones are formed from an alliance of fungi and algae. They thrive in the sunlight in winter, when there are no leaves to cast their shadows on them.

25th January

FOXES ARE MATING, both in country and town. The dog foxes make short, dry barks as they move around in the night. When a vixen is ready to mate, she will let one of them approach her, and will start making bloodcurdling screams.

Her cubs will be born underground in the spring, and both parents will feed them, bringing rats and other creatures to the earth, which is often an enlarged rabbit hole. The cubs are born with blue eyes, but as they grow up their eyes turn to the familiar golden-yellow.

Mallards are going about in pairs. They are early nesters – some of them starting in February – and will soon be wandering around on land, looking for suitable nest sites. They may nest in nettle beds or under hedges, above ground in a hollow tree, or even in a hanging flower basket. They line their nests, which are skimpy affairs, with their own soft down, and often lay a dozen or more eggs. The female does all the incubating and rears the ducklings by herself; they skitter about on the water round her. It is the female that makes the loud quacking that is heard when mallards fly up in alarm.

26th January

THE COLD SPELL has sent birds fleeing to more agreeable places. Little grebes are dumpy, pinkish-brown birds that feed quietly among the reeds at the edges of lakes, diving for small fish and insect larvae. Ice on the water has driven many of them down to sheltered stretches of the coast – but they will stay there no longer than necessary. Some kingfishers have also found the fishing easier by the sea. Dippers live on fast-flowing streams, flitting from rock to rock and walking under the water, but harsh weather can send them down to the shore too.

Other birds have flocked to the milder western parts of the country. The two visiting winter thrushes, the redwing and the fieldfare, are always very mobile. Both feed in small parties on open fields, as well as in hawthorn and suchlike berry-bearing trees, so where the snow has been deep they have mostly flown away.

Some song thrushes have probably followed them, but as they are solitary birds their movements are harder to detect. They depend largely for food on earthworms, which are not easy to find under snow or, even worse, in frozen ground. But some have stayed put and have gone on singing, however frosty the dawn.

27th January

ALONG THE SCOTTISH coasts, the eider duck – or eider, as they are generally called – are courting out on the water. Up to eight or ten of the black-and-white drakes swim round a single dusky-brown female, throwing their heads back in the air and displaying their brilliant white throats with the feathers puffed out. As they display, they make deep cooing notes, and each tries to edge closer to the female, who may eventually choose one and pair up with him. Though it is a soft sound, the drakes’ cooing carries far across the water.

Silver birch trees now have small, hard, male catkins on the dark crimson twigs. At a distance the whole tree looks purple, with the branches and twigs drooping gracefully around a silvery trunk with diamond-shaped black patches. The catkins will soften and turn yellow as the spring advances.

28th January

GROUND IVY LEAVES are coming up among the dead leaf litter at the edge of country lanes. They will soon cover large stretches of ground but most of them will be crowded out by other plants and die before flowers have appeared. The leaves are soft, round and rather furry, and have a rich, sweet smell, like the leaves of other members of the mint family. The lipped, bluish-violet flowers will start to come out next month, and will be found among the other low vegetation until midsummer.

Ground ivy should not be confused with ordinary ivy plants, with the familiar five-lobed leaves, which sometimes spread across the ground instead of climbing up trees and walls. The ivy plants that live on the ground do not normally flower or have berries but the climbing plants are in fruit now, with many big black berries where the birds have not yet eaten them. The larger members of the thrush family – mistle thrushes, blackbirds, and the fieldfares currently wintering in Britain – are particularly fond of ivy berries, which help greatly in sustaining them through winter. A pair of mistle thrushes will sometimes defend an ivy-covered oak against other birds.

29th January

RING-NECKED PARAKEETS FROM Asia are now living in woodland colonies in southern England, as well as in the Netherlands and Belgium. They appear to have no difficulty in surviving the winter cold, and some are already laying their eggs in holes in trees. They were first found breeding here in the wild in 1969 and their numbers have now grown to about four thousand birds.

No one knows whether the first birds escaped from captivity or were deliberately introduced but they are a dramatic addition to our bird life. They are often first detected by their screeching cries as they fly past or by their loud, ringing calls in the treetops. They shoot through the sky at great speed, their long pointed tails very noticeable and resembling the tail of no other British bird. In the trees they are often quite hard to detect, but a good view reveals their light green plumage and red, hooked beak. The male also has a narrow pink-and-black ring round its neck.

Winter gnats come out in the sunshine, even on cold days, and dance in the air in the shelter of a bush or a wall. They look as if they are moving up and down on elastic strings.

30th January

GREAT NORTHERN DIVERS come down to our shores in the winter from frozen Arctic waters. They are mostly seen off the coast of northwest Scotland but a few are usually found inland on reservoirs after rough weather They are large, handsome birds with a long neck and a spear-like bill, and can easily stay for a minute underwater pursuing fish. In the summer they have a brilliant, spangled back, but at this season they are a dark, oily brown above, with the trace of a black-and-white collar on their neck. They drift far out on the water, usually half-hidden by the waves, or only showing their heads above the surface, but sometimes they will come into a small harbour. In winter they are silent birds, but in summer, when they nest on the shores of islands in great lakes around the Arctic Circle, they make loud, wailing cries. In North America they are called common loons, and these eerie calls have featured in many Hollywood films. They are the national bird of Canada.

Common scoters can also be seen off the coast now, especially the Welsh coast. They are diving ducks that feed on mussels. The drake is completely black except for a yellow patch on his beak; the female is brown.

31st January

CORMORANTS ARE NOWADAYS found in winter on rivers and lakes almost anywhere in Britain. These large black birds may be seen perching high up on bridges or cranes and studying the water far below, or floating in the water with only their head and beak and shining green eyes visible above the surface. They dive for fish, and can swallow an eel as long as their long neck, though that may take them some time and effort. Most of the adults go back to the coast to breed, but some of the white-bellied juveniles stay inland.

Their smaller relative the shag is much rarer inland, and is usually only seen when blown in by storm winds. These victims of the weather are often young birds that have come down from Scottish cliffs to the Wash. Thirty of them came down to roost one winter on a church roof in Bedfordshire, and four were seen on Peterborough cathedral. They are quite often reported in Norwich. When it is difficult to estimate their size, it is not always easy to distinguish them from cormorants, but they have thinner bills and a noticeably steep forehead. In summer they are glossy green and have a quiff on the front of the head.

February
1st February

THE FIRST CHAFFINCHES are singing in the cold sunshine. They have acquired a richer pink on their breasts and a blue cap, and are now beginning to assert their claim to their territory. Their song is a brisk run of ringing notes, followed by a whirling flourish. It has been compared to a bowler running up faster and faster to the crease, then swinging his arm over. When they begin singing, they often produce a rather creaky version of their song, or a truncated version without the flourish. But soon there will be many of them, all singing the pure, classic form. Most of the other birds that are singing at present have been heard intermittently throughout the winter. The chaffinch is the first real spring songster.

A tree that comes into flower early is the cornelian cherry, which is a native of southern Europe once widely planted here. Nowadays Chinese witch hazel is preferred for late winter flowering. Cornelian cherry is a low, bushy tree, with clusters of cowslip-yellow flowers on silvery stalks. They are just coming out. The leaves will open later: if they get torn, the two halves can still hang together with a kind of latex exuded from the veins.