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The Times A Year in Nature Notes
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.
MISTLE THRUSHES ARE now singing more regularly. They sit high in the treetops, and their loud, challenging song is like a trumpet blast. It often ends abruptly, as though the performer has just been shot; then the bird starts all over again.
A pair of mistle thrushes can frequently be seen now out on a playing field, looking for worms. The two birds may be quite far apart, but they are very aware of each other, and if one of them goes up with its churring alarm call, the other will swiftly fly over to join it. When they stand in the open facing the low morning sun, their spotted breasts look more yellow than buff. They are large birds, and when they fly away with a flash of silver under their wings, they look as much like doves as thrushes.
On larch trees, the leaf buds are like fat little tubs along the bare brown twigs. They will soon show a tiny spot of green on the top of the tub, and the beautiful, fresh green needles that will emerge will be among the first leaves of the spring. Horse chestnut trees are also among the earliest trees to come into leaf, and their pointed buds are now very large and sticky.
WRENS, WHICH WERE still singing vigorously in November, have fallen silent during the past two months. The short hours of daylight have kept them busy all day, searching for enough insect food to see them through the long, cold night. Their tiny bodies quickly lose heat in the chill air. But with February their rapid song begins to be heard again from the dead bracken and the hedge bottoms. As the month proceeds they will start to sing higher up in the bushes and trees: they are advertising for a mate, or disputing with their neighbours over territorial boundaries. Two males can sometimes be seen waving their wings at each other in an aggressive display, or even fighting quite fiercely with beaks and claws among the branches.
On oak trees, the scaly brown buds are arranged in spirals along the twigs, with a cluster of buds at the tip. A butterfly that lays its eggs exclusively on oak twigs is the purple hairstreak, an almost-black butterfly with a purple sheen that flies in July. The eggs lie on the twigs, well glued to them, from August to April, when the caterpillars emerge and eat the young leaves.
NOW THAT THE weather has turned milder, winter aconites are beginning to open. When the temperature is below 10°C, the flowers stay closed up in tight buds, but once the air around them reaches that level of warmth, they unfold. They have six bright yellow petals, and a little green ruff round the stalk beneath. The larger leaves will develop around them. They are found mainly in woods on damp hillsides, often with snowdrops.
There is also a sprinkling of soft, bluish-green leaves in the woods. These are the leaves of honeysuckle plants that have wound themselves round bushes and slender tree trunks. When the leaves first open they are in the form of a cross, with two larger and two smaller leaves facing each other, and also a short column of unfolded leaves in the middle. The sweet-smelling flowers will not appear until June. Honeysuckle is classified as a shrub, and may be found in tree guides as well as flower guides: it can clamber up to 15 feet above the ground.
ROOKS ARE BACK in their treetop rookeries, beginning to prod at their nests and rearrange the sticks still left from last year. But they will not start serious rebuilding for a while yet, and will lay their eggs in March. It was always said that rooks went around in flocks while crows were solitary birds, but since carrion crows have grown more common, flocks of young birds are often seen feeding together. Rooks are best distinguished by the bare, whitish skin at the base of their beaks, but crows’ beaks can also glint and look white when they are wet and the light catches them. Rooks in flight can sometimes be recognised by their deep, relaxed-looking wing strokes and the more ragged ‘fingers’ at their wing-tips, compared with the crow’s tidier wings and more plodding flight. They also have a yelping kind of caw that is not heard from crows.
In the branches of poplar and apple trees, as the white berries disappear from the mistletoe clumps, small greenish-yellow flowers take their place at the joins between the stalks.
THE FIRST BLACKBIRDS are singing. They have one of the most beautiful songs of all the British birds, with its leisurely, fluting notes, flung out so casually by the singer. After a few phrases, the song sometimes deteriorates into a careless jangle of notes, as if the singer were suddenly bored – but a moment later the bird is in full, mellow voice again.
Some birds, such as carrion crows and magpies, stay mated all the winter, but blackbirds, like our other resident song birds, are now forming pairs for the coming summer. Generally, the male bird finds an attractive territory and starts singing in it, and the female bird goes looking around local territories until she and a male form a mutual bond. Then they settle down together – though they are not always faithful to each other. Like the other birds, blackbirds also sing in order to warn other males of the species against venturing onto their plot of land. Their fine notes are a threatening as well as an alluring sound.
More daisies are opening on garden lawns; at night they close up into red buds. In wooded valleys, the snowdrops look like streaks of snow lingering on the valley sides. The male flowers are out on yew trees and hedges: they are like tiny yellow sponges on the underside of the shoots. A few flowers, such as groundsel and red dead-nettle, have survived the winter and can be found in little groups in sheltered places.
GREAT SPOTTED WOODPECKERS are drumming in the trees. They find a trunk or bough with resonant qualities, and hammer at it with their powerful beak with great speed. The vibrating note sometimes sounds like a creaking branch, and goes on for about five seconds. It can be heard a long way off, and neighbouring male woodpeckers will answer each other, the second one often beginning before the first has finished. Each bird is challenging the other not to invade its territory. They can occasionally be found using a metal plate on a telephone pole as a sounding board: it does not seem to harm their beak. Recently one was seen at a racecourse drumming on a megaphone attached to a pole. The megaphone was even pointing at another great spotted woodpecker, which was hammering more feebly on a tree a hundred yards away. Great spotted woodpeckers are black and white birds with a blood-red smudge under the tail and the males also have a red patch at the back of the head.
Another loud spring announcement that can now be heard in the woods is the ‘cork-cock’ note of the cock pheasants. They make the call with their long tail pressed to the ground and their head held high, and follow it by energetically flapping their wings. The buzzing sound of the flapping wings can also be heard clearly in the silence of the woods, and they too answer each other.
STONECHATS ARE CONSPICUOUS when they sit on the top of gorse bushes, on the tall, dead stems of hemlock in waste ground, and on fences in farmland. They are about the size of robins, to which they are related. The males are coming into spring plumage, with a shiny black head, a white half-collar and an orange-red breast.
The females, which look like faded versions of the males, usually sit on a lower perch, beneath their mates. From their spying points, they watch out for insects moving on the ground below them, then drop swiftly down and take them. A few flies are now buzzing about when the sun is warm, and the stonechats will also fly up and catch these in the air. They have a sharp note like small stones being knocked together.
Many of them are still wintering away from their territory in warmer spots that they have found, but they will soon be returning to heathland and to the gorsy seaside slopes that they favour. After that, some time early in March, the male will begin his sketchy little song. Gorse bushes have been in flower all through the winter, but the yellow pea-like blossom is now multipying on them.
MOORHENS ARE BEGINNING to build platforms of reeds at the edges of rivers and ponds. Each pair builds several platforms, and one of them may be used later as the basis of a nest, but at present this activity is part of the pair’s courtship ritual. They also walk around each other with their beaks down and their tails turned up, showing off the white patches under the tail that look like a pair of traffic lights.
At a distance moorhens look dull black but, in fact, they are dark brown above and deep blue beneath, with a red-and-yellow beak and green legs adding further colour.
Ferns still provide some green in the bare woods. By the side of streams and ditches, there are often large, feathery clumps of male fern (this is the name of the plant, not the sex). Some of the fronds are still growing upright, some have jack-knifed with their top half drooping, some are old and brown and are already half-submerged in the water.
On wet rocks and walls, and on hedge banks, there are tufts of hart’s-tongue, which has long, leathery leaves like straps, with the brown spores visible in rows on the underside.
ONE OF THE first hedgerow shrubs to show leaves and flowers is the cherry-plum. Here and there bright green leaves are already appearing along the twigs, and the brilliant white flowers will soon follow. Cherry-plum is often confused with blackthorn because the flowers are similar, but the dense masses of blackthorn flowers come out well before the leaves, and the blackthorn twigs are far more spiny. Also, the blackthorn is unlikely to be in flower for another month yet. Tightly woven blackthorn hedges full of young twigs are like lines of misty purple along the field edges just now.
Flocks of black-headed gulls are still out in the fields, all standing facing the wind so that their feathers do not get ruffled. In winter they spread all over Britain except onto mountain tops, and many come here from as far away as Poland or Russia. Some of them now have almost the complete chocolate-coloured hood of their summer plumage. They will soon be returning to their noisy nesting colonies, which are found not only among sand dunes and on saltmarshes along the coast but also inland on the reedy edges of lakes and tarns.
LONG-EARED OWLS are mysterious birds that are found in most parts of Britain but are rarely seen. They normally come out at night, and during the day sit in the depths of bushes and trees. They can sometimes be detected looking out from these roosts with their cat-like faces. They stare at one with orange eyes, and if they are alarmed they raise their long ear-tufts. Even when the bushes are bare, the streaky brown body of these owls blends with the twigs and helps to camouflage them. At this time of the year they are most often found near the sea, where there may be several of them roosting in a single large bush.
Short-eared owls have relatively unnoticeable ear-tufts. They hunt over marshes and lonely farmland for mice and voles, and are often out and about in daytime. They wheel round in the air, then flap and glide, with wings held in a V shape, just above the grass. They will take a small bird if they can. They sometimes come down to earth and crouch low. In summer they nest chiefly on moorland. There are more of them around in winter, since we often have large numbers of visitors from the continent.
IN THE MOUNTAINS and along craggy coasts, male ravens are showing off to the females. They nose-dive from high in the sky, and sometimes even roll over in the air and glide on their backs for a moment. They will also soar around in wide circles.
Although they are much larger than their equally black relatives, the rooks and carrion crows, the size of a distant bird in flight is often hard to judge. However, they can usually be picked out by their massive beaks and longer-looking necks. If they call, there is no mistaking them: they have a deep, vibrant croak that is almost as much like a rumble in the earth as a cry in the sky.
The large leaves of cuckoo pint, or lords and ladies, are now coming up in many ditches. They are like glossy-green arrowheads, often stained with shapeless black blotches, and frequently growing in clumps. They will be followed before long by the distinctive greenish-white hood curling round a purple, truncheon-like spike.
Growing about them in the ditches are young, fresh-green nettles (which already sting).
GREY, OR COMMON, herons are busy rebuilding their nests in treetop heronries. These are generally beside lakes or on islands, and in clumps of trees which have dense vegetation such as rhododendrons beneath them. The birds come back to the same nests year after year, and the nests get bigger and bigger as more sticks are added.
The herons greet their mates at the nest with curious ceremonies. A bird standing on the nest will point its long neck and beak up vertically as its mate lands in front of it, then they will bow their heads low and snap their beaks with a loud clattering sound. It seems to be a bonding display.
Sweet violets are opening on hedge banks and at woodland edges. The flowers rise on fragile-looking single stems from a rosette of heart-shaped leaves, and they nod in the wind. The side petals droop, while the lower petal is like a lip. The sweet scent is remarkably strong for such a small flower, and the flowers were once strewn on the floors of houses. Sometimes pink or white flowers can be found. Dog violets, which are very similar but scentless, will not be out for a while yet.
ON ELDER TREES, the first new leaves are opening. Their fresh green colour stands out against the dry-looking grey stems, which are full of fissures and which crack easily. Inside the stems there is a soft white pith that has a surprising human use: it holds botanical specimens firm while they are being sliced into thin sections. Later in the year the white flowers will be used to make a scented cordial and the black berries will help to make a wine. On sycamore trees the pointed, egg-shaped buds are growing plumper: they are noticeably green already.
Here and there tufts of green leaves, like small whisks, are breaking out of the hawthorn twigs. It is usually the same tree or same patch of hedge that comes out so early each year. Occasionally, there is some forsythia entangled in a hawthorn hedge, and the yellow flowers are opening now.
NOW THAT THE ground is frozen again, blackbirds, song thrushes and robins are finding it hard to get the earthworms that they feed on. This is an important time to put food out for them. A robin will come to a bird table, but the other two species prefer to feed on the ground, and the song thrush will not venture far from the shelter of a hedge or bush. Bread, cheese or any scraps will help them but it is also possible to buy mealworms from bird-food firms and in some garden centres, and these will be particularly appreciated by these birds.
In February and March it is also important to keep on providing nuts and seeds for the mainly seed-eating birds, such as greenfinches. Although spring is slowly coming on, last autumn’s wild seeds are running out by now, and there is greater food shortage among birds than there was in midwinter. The new season’s insects will help to remedy matters as it becomes warmer.
In the woods dog’s mercury is coming up everywhere through the leaf litter in spite of the return of cold weather, and the dry woodland floor is starting to look greener. Some dog’s mercury plants already have little green flowers.
BY NOW, ALDER trees at the edge of rivers have catkins that are changing from hard little sausages to soft, loose-hanging lengths like coloured curtain cord. As they grow longer, and the pollen swells in them, the catkins become a mottled crimson and yellow. Also in the alder branches there are many small black cones. The seed has mostly fallen out of them by now, but siskins, goldfinches and lesser redpolls are teasing out any remaining seeds with their well-adapted narrow beaks.
Ivy is still providing food for birds. The large black berries go on ripening until it is almost spring, and blackbirds sit in the middle of the thick creeper gobbling them up.
Out in the fields, a loud, whistling ‘whee-oo’ rings across the springing corn from fieldside trees. This is the sound of a courting little owl. Little owls, which are natives of the Continent, were introduced here in the 19th century and are now found all over Britain except in the north of Scotland. They are about in the daytime far more than tawny owls. They bob up and down on a low branch or field gate as they scrutinise the ground for prey.
BLACKBIRDS ARE NOW singing at dawn and dusk as they start to settle down in their spring territories. Even if the weather remains cold, the lengthening hours of daylight continue to bring birds closer to breeding condition. The blackbirds may abandon their territories temporarily to find food when it is hard to come by, but they will return and will sing for longer periods each day as the spring progresses. Their fluting notes sometimes drift across from a low branch of a tree, sometimes float down from a roof or chimney pot.
Some butterflies have survived the winter in hibernation. Small tortoiseshells and peacock butterflies have been sleeping in the shadows in dark sheds and other cavities, with their bright wings closed and only the dusky undersides showing.
Brimstone butterflies sleep on ivy, where their veined, closed wings can be taken for greenish-yellow leaves: they will soon be on the wing.
BARREN STRAWBERRY FLOWERS are opening at the edge of footpaths. They are similar to the flowers of the true wild strawberry, but they have distinct gaps between the white petals, while the ring of wild strawberry petals all touch each other. Both plants grow very low on the ground, often in the same places, but the wild strawberries will not flower until March or April. The fruit of the barren strawberry is small and dry and greenish in colour, and cannot be confused with the sweet, red berries of the wild strawberry. Cinquefoil, which belongs to the same family, also sometimes grows nearby, and the creeping leaves are already out.