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The Times A Year in Nature Notes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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