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.

2nd February

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.

3rd February

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.

4th February

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.

5th February

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.

6th February

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.

7th February

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.

8th February

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.

9th February

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.

10th February

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.

11th February

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.

12th February

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).

13th February

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.

14th February

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.

15th February

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.

16th February

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.

17th February

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.

18th February

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.

Song thrushes are singing regularly now in the treetops, especially in the early morning and at dusk. Their songs grow richer and more varied as they use their voices more. When no one is about, they will come out onto lawns and listen with head cocked for worms under the grass.

19th February

THISTLES ARE BENT and broken, and their fluffy seeds are lying waterlogged on the ground around them. Goldfinches, which sat on the thistleheads to pluck out the seeds when they were still standing, are now coming down to the ground to pick them up. Their gold-barred wings flash as they dart nervously away with a silvery twitter, but they soon return. Greenfinches are also coming down to the ground at woodland edges to feed on fallen burdock seeds, which they greatly like. Where early dandelions have flowered, both finches will take the seeds from the dandelion clocks.

The new spring flowers on roadside verges are the lesser celandines. On south-facing hedge banks that catch the midday sun, many of them are fully open: they normally have eight or nine glossy yellow petals of rather irregular shape, but flowers with as few as six or as many as twelve petals can be found. In shadowy ditches the greyish-yellow buds on their long thin stalks are still waiting to unfold.

20th February

WEEPING WILLOWS ARE beginning to put out fresh green leaves, only two or three months after losing last year’s leaves, which still lie like small purple fish on the ground or in the water beneath them. On Lombardy poplars – the tall, slender poplars that line French roads, and also stand along many field edges in Britain – the flower buds are opening, and crimson catkins are coming out of them. These catkins are all male flowers, for the Lombardy poplar is normally without female flowers, and multiplies by putting out shoots. It is missing from the index of some tree identification books, since it is only a variety of the black poplar.

Starlings are changing colour for the summer: they are becoming less spotty, and more black and glossy, while their beaks are turning a brighter yellow. The male’s song is also getting richer, with occasional musical phrases breaking out among the usual whirring, whistling and clacking. He will sometimes sit close to a hole in a tree or a hollow under the tiles, singing to keep other starlings out of this desirable spring nesting place. Starlings that came here from the Continent for the winter are starting to turn homeward.

21st February

THE PLUMAGE OF mute swan cygnets is steadily turning from coffee-brown to white. Until recently they have been swimming with a dutiful air in a small flotilla behind their parents, but since before Christmas they have been able to fly and they are now becoming independent. The adult swans are taking up their own spring territories and turning hostile to the cygnets. Male swans can be seen swimming along the river with their wings arched above them in an aggressive posture. When they are doing this, they look from behind like a giant white meringue. There is usually another swan in their sights further along the river, and if it is a young one, it may clamber up onto the bank and move away from the water in order to feel safer.

Moorhens are also defending their territories, and loud squawking notes and splashing sounds come from the reeds as the males quarrel with each other. Like their cousins the coots, they sometimes fight quite viciously. They are early nesters, and most of them will soon be building their reedy nests in waterside vegetation or right out in the middle of the water. Here and there, very early downy chicks have already been seen swimming with their parents.

22nd February

SEVERAL GREAT WHITE egrets have been seen on marshes in the country recently. They have probably come over from the Dutch reedbeds. Their smaller relative, the little egret, has been breeding in Britain for several years, and is now becoming a familiar sight. It is a dainty, pure white heron and in summer has long white plumes on its breast. The great white egret is found in most parts of the world but, by contrast, is a very uncommon visitor here. It is a large, slow-flying bird, the size of our own heron. It too is pure white, but whereas the little egret has a black beak, the larger bird has a long yellow beak, and in the summer has flowing plumes on its back. When great white egrets are standing fishing, they also have a dramatic-looking kink in their long neck.

Drake teal are swimming round the females on secluded lakes, making soft but far-carrying whistles that can be heard across the reedbeds. They are showing off their fine plumage – especially their chestnut heads and bottle-green eye patches – in the hope of winning a mate. Even those teal that will be leaving next month for northern Europe like to pair up before they go.

23rd February

THE LESSER SPOTTED woodpecker (after which so many other ‘lesser spotted’ things are named in jest), is much less common than the great spotted woodpecker, and much more elusive. It haunts the top branches of trees and is not much bigger than a great tit. But if seen, it is easily distinguished, not only by its size but also by the fact that it has narrow black and white bars all down its back, not the big black and white patches that give the great spotted its other name of ‘pied woodpecker’.

Lesser spotted woodpeckers are most easily found in late February and March. They draw attention to themselves by drumming on dead boughs like the larger bird, though the sound is not very different. But they also have a distinctive spring call, a slow, weak ‘pee-pee-pee’ – rather similar to one of the nuthatch’s spring calls, but not so vigorous.

Bramblings have invaded the Lake District to feed on the abundant harvest of beechmast there this year. They are like chaffinches, but with an orange rather than a pink breast, and a dark head rather than a blue cap. They also reveal a noticeable white rump when they fly. They come south from Scandinavia in the winter, and go wherever they can find beechmast. I have heard that in Cumbria just now ‘every beech tree seems to have its flock of bramblings’.

24th February

BADGERS ARE SPRING-CLEANING their burrows or ‘setts’. In the autumn, they took in bracken or fallen leaves to make a warm steamy chamber for the winter, but now they are pushing it out with their black and white snouts.

They are also pushing out a lot of earth, and taking in new moss and early plants such as dog’s mercury. The badger cubs are about to be born, and they will need plenty of fresh, clean bedding. The cubs will not appear above ground until April or May, by which time they will look like small versions of their parents.

Oak trees are still quite bare, but the pale brown buds are swelling slightly. Once they open, the cluster of buds at the end of each twig will go on producing new bursts, or ‘flushes’, of leaves throughout the summer. There are many tiny insect eggs on the oak twigs and branches, and blue tits and long-tailed tits are busy searching for them.

On holm oaks, which are evergreens, the dark leaves are looking dry and shrunken as winter comes to an end, but there are minute buds on the twigs from which paler green leaves will spring.

25th February

ON SALLOW BUSHES in damp places, flowers like silvery buttons are coming out along the twigs. These are the male catkins, which will turn from silver to gold, since they will be covered before long with little flecks of bright yellow pollen. The ‘pussy willow’ twigs, as they are often called, are broken off and carried in church processions on Palm Sunday, the last Sunday before Easter. As the catkins are starting to appear so early, it must be hoped that there will still be some left by then. The stringy, green female catkins appear at the same time as the golden pollen, and are fertilised with the help of the wind. Early bees and other insects also come to the sallow catkins.

There are two main kinds of sallow, the common sallow and the great sallow or goat willow. The great sallow is a larger tree with larger, rounder leaves. The common sallow is more of a shrub. Both of them have leaves with downy white undersides, but the narrow leaves of the common sallow usually have some rusty hairs beneath them too. However, the two species grow side by side in hedges, and they have a strong tendency to hybridise.

26th February

THE HIGH WINDS drive the coots off large lakes and reservoirs to forage for food on the banks and grassy causeways. They stalk about confidently on their sturdy green legs and lobed feet, poking around with their beaks in the low vegetation. Even in heavy rain with little wind, they will stay on the water and continue diving for waterweed, but they feel uncomfortable on choppy water.

Most small birds take shelter on a windy day, but greenfinches can still be seen flying high, making their harsh twitter. Blackbirds skim very low across the lanes on their way from one hedge to another.

Flowers are opening on the elm twigs: they are hairy crimson tufts that give the whole tree a reddish look for a week or two. Very few large elm trees have survived Dutch elm disease, but there are plenty of small elms in the hedges. They come up as suckers, and flourish for ten or twenty years, but then they, too, die and fresh suckers replace them.

Female flowers are opening on the hazel bushes: they look like tiny red hats balanced on top of the leaf buds. The wind will blow the pollen onto them from the dangling yellow catkins.

27th February

SOME RARE IVORY gulls have been seen this winter along the coasts of the Shetland Islands and around the far north of Scotland. Recently one has been haunting the Black Rock Sands at Criccieth in northwest Wales. It is a pure white bird that looks something like a dove when it is standing on the sand, though when it flies it is obviously a gull. This individual has been feeding on the carcass of a porpoise on the shore.

Ivory gulls breed only in the highest Arctic, from Canada to Siberia, and normally spend the winter out on the pack ice, mixing with seals and eating their corpses when they die.

Wild rose, or dog rose, is putting out its first green shoots in the hedgerows. Some bushes also have some of last year’s shrivelled fruit still clinging to them, once red, now black.

28th February

SOME OF THE signs of spring that were sparsely distributed at the beginning of this month are now to be found almost everywhere – they are no longer signs of spring, they are spring itself. The white bells of snowdrops are nodding on innumerable lawns and wooded hillsides. Now that the temperature is often above 10°C, the yellow winter aconites are staying open most of the day. Elder bushes are sprouting on all their grey twigs. Chaffinches are singing sturdily in orchards and country lanes. Blackbirds are singing everywhere.

Long-tailed tits are going in and out of dense bushes, prospecting busily for nesting sites, although some of them will build their domed, lichen-covered nest in a completely bare hedge.

On yew trees the yellow flowers have developed into tiny jar-like shapes with a mass of pollen clustered at the top. If the branches are shaken, a dense white cloud of dust seems to rise from the tree as the pollen breaks free.

March
1st March

ROOKS ARE NOW seriously repairing their nests in the treetops. The male flies in with a beakful of mud or a stick, and the female works it into the structure, to the accompaniment of much cawing by both of them, and also among their neighbours. Later in the month, when the female will be sitting on four or five blotchy green eggs, the male will bring her worms and insects to eat.

On the woodland floor, the leaf mould from last year is rapidly disappearing beneath a growth of fresh green leaves. In many places there is already a complete carpet of dog’s mercury, with its wispy, greenish-yellow flowers. The glistening tips of the bluebell leaves and the soft, many-lobed leaves of wood anemone, or windflower, are also coming through.

On grass verges the cow parsley leaves are growing thick, sometimes with a dark purple leaf among the green ones. Hogweed is also pushing up fast. Like cow parsley it belongs to the umbellifers, the family that has flowers like a circle of open umbrellas. It will grow very tall, and its coarse white flowerheads will be around until Christmas.

2nd March

THE GLOSSY YELLOW stars of lesser celandine are now opening everywhere on muddy roadside verges. The petals are often streaked with purple beneath. The heart-shaped leaves grow all around them on separate stalks. Where there is rich leaf mould all along the edge of a ditch, there can be long, strung-out beds of lesser celandines, but in some of these only a few flowers are open as yet, glittering brightly among the dark, shiny foliage.

There is also a flower called greater celandine, but it is not a relative, and will not come into bloom until April. It is a larger plant with four yellow petals and is often found in old gardens, since its sharp juice was used to put on warts.

The name ‘celandine’ comes, through the Latin and the French, from the Greek word for ‘swallow’: it is the flower that supposedly comes with that bird. But in Britain the name is apt only for the greater celandine, not the lesser. There are no swallows here yet – unless someone somewhere has seen a precocious one.

3rd March

IN THE WIND, bramble bushes look as if they have burst into white flower, as the leaves turn on their stalks and show their pale undersides. The thorny bramble stems are also growing vigorously: they make it difficult to walk along woodland paths without tripping up. Many gorse bushes have been in flower throughout the winter. Their bright yellow flowers are surrounded by dark green thorns and pointed leaves that look like still more thorns. The straggly gorse shrubs found on railway embankments and roundabouts are survivors from heathland that has been ploughed up or built on.

House sparrows have disappeared from many town centres but they are still quite common in villages. Sometimes a flock of male sparrows will pursue a female into a bush, chirping in a noisy chorus, displaying their dark bibs and trying to peck at her underparts. This usually happens when they see a male chasing his mate, and they join enthusiastically in pursuit. No one is quite sure why they have vanished from towns but the process began half a century ago with the disappearance of the spilt grain from horses’ nosebags. Nowadays there may be competition for food with pigeons, and fewer nesting places.

4th March

RAIN MAKES THE moss grow on garden lawns, leaving them a patchwork of different shades of green. The dead stems of teasel and rosebay willowherb resist the downpours and still stand tall in waste places: the egg-shaped teasel seedheads remain prickly and guarded by a ring of sharp spears, though they are empty of seeds by now, while the willowherb has bedraggled tufts of feathery seeds still clinging to it. More leaves of spring flowers are coming through, including the pale green leaves of primroses.

Birds are not much affected by the rain though most of them try to keep out of it. They have waterproof feathers, but after getting wet they shake themselves and preen vigorously to make sure their feathers are overlapping properly. Rain is more serious for them later in the spring, when it can wash caterpillars that they need as food for their young off the leaves. Surface-feeding duck such as mallards and shovelers keep to the shelter of the bank when it is raining, but birds such as tufted duck and pochard go on diving out in the middle of a lake.

5th March

A CURIOUS GOOSE that is found mainly on lakes in Norfolk but often turns up by other waters is the Egyptian goose. It is a fat, buff-coloured bird that looks as if it has just received a painful black eye, and it also has a disconcertingly long neck. It is an early nester, and some pairs already have a nest with eggs under a bush, or in a large hole in a bank. Not many of the broods are successful. It is really an African bird, widespread on that continent, and some were brought here from South Africa as long ago as the 18th century.

Conspicuous at the edges of lakes just now are the disintegrating heads of the bulrushes – known to botanists as great reedmace, and also sometimes called cat’s-tail. The brown sausage-shaped heads are breaking up into fluffy white seeds, and look very ragged as the wind tears at them and carries the seeds away. Where the heads are still firm, male reed buntings are sitting on them and singing. Their song is a monotonous repetition of a few dry notes, but they are handsome birds, with a black head, a white collar and a back like rich orange-brown tapestry.

6th March

BRIMSTONE BUTTERFLIES ARE on the wing on sunny mornings. They have just come out of the ivy or holly bushes where they slept all winter. The males have beautiful sulphur-coloured wings – hence the name ‘brimstone’ – and they are very conspicuous as they fly down a wide woodland path with the bare trees on either side. The females are a very pale green, almost white, and on a cursory look might be mistaken for a large cabbage white. Brimstones are long-lived butterflies. The new brood comes out of the chrysalis and flies in July, feeds up on plenty of nectar, overwinters, and – as the ones now emerging will do – lives on till the next June or July. They have a very long proboscis, and can reach with it into runner beans and teasels to extract the nectar that lies deep in those flowers.

Bluebell leaves are now coming up all over the woodland floor. The plants need to develop before the new leaves on the trees cast too much shade over them. The bluebell leaves are glossy green and sharp-pointed. On a bright morning, when the wind blows, little waves of silver seem to pass over the ground as they bend and catch the light.

7th March

MANY MOUNTAIN OR blue hares in Scotland are pure white in winter to match the snow – although they keep the black tips on their ears. Others turn only partially white. If the snow melts before they have turned bluish-brown again, they become very conspicuous as they streak across a heathery or grassy hillside, and their winter camouflage becomes a disadvantage. In summer they can be distinguished from brown hares because they are smaller, and lack the brown hare’s distinctive black tail, or scut.

Ptarmigan on the Scottish mountaintops also turn white in winter. They stay among the snow, burrowing beneath it for heather leaves and dried bilberries. They will soon be exchanging their white feathers for a mottled grey plumage, which in summer will disguise them equally well on the rocky slopes. Even at that season, however, they reveal unmistakable white wings when they fly.

Red grouse, unlike the ptarmigan, have been coming down into farmland when the snow has made it hard for them to find food, but they will return to the moors when it has cleared, and will start gorging on fresh heather shoots.

8th March

FLOCKS OF REDWINGS are singing in the treetops, often alongside a field of springing corn. It is a murmuring, babbling chorus, only audible from quite nearby. These thrushes that visit us for the winter sing like this when they are beginning to contemplate their return to Iceland or Scandinavia. Their real spring song is a brief, delicate warble, only heard when they get back home. The singing flocks are very wary, and if one gets near the trees, most of them quickly fly out. For a few moments, the sky is full of the birds, flying with a curious, drunken-looking flight, tipping to left and right as they go.

Colts foot flowers are opening on bare ground beside field paths. They are like small suns, with a dark yellow centre and bright yellow florets round it. Each flower grows on a scaly, pink-and-green stem. The leaves will follow the flowers and become very large, while the flowers will give way to untidy seed-clocks.

9th March

COOTS ARE BEGINNING to collect reeds for their tower-like nests, which are usually some distance out from the bank of a lake. Sometimes the reeds they carry in their beaks are as wide as the birds are long. Deeper in the reeds, water rails are calling. They make loud squeals when they are fighting or courting, and they also have a repeated sharp note that they sometimes use when they come out into the open. Recognising this note can help one to spot them. They are like bluish-grey moorhens with long red beaks and striped flanks, and step delicately in and out of the reeds, but they never stay exposed for long.

On lakesides and river banks, the large, soft leaves of common comfrey are growing fast: they look like green cows’ tongues. The bell-like flowers that will follow in April are very varied: they may be pink, purple or white, and there is a form called Russian comfrey with flowers that start pink and turn blue.

10th March

THE FIRST PRIMROSES are opening in woods and along grassy railway embankments. They are often found in oak woods or ash groves, where the leaves come out later than they do on other trees, and the primroses have sunlight for longer. The pale yellow flowers have five notched lobes, and are a darker yellow at the centre. They seem to grow on separate stalks, but if one looks more closely at the base one finds that they are arranged in rosettes of four or five blossoms. The crinkly, pale green leaves also spread out in a rosette near the ground. The scent of the flowers is fragrant but faint. The name of the flower comes from the Latin prima rosa, or first rose.

11th March

TWO KINDS OF bunting are singing in farmland hedges. Yellowhammers, or yellow buntings, now have the primrose-yellow heads of their summer plumage and are singing intermittently about a ‘little bit of bread and no cheese’, as their song has long been thought to say. More prosaically, the song is a buzz followed by a long wheezy note – the ‘cheese’, which actually is often missing (literally no cheese.) Corn buntings are sturdier, duller birds, and when they fly from bush to bush they let their legs hang down. They have a far-carrying song, a sort of jangling trill like a bunch of keys being rattled.

Cranes are rare in England, but are sometimes seen at this time of the year, anywhere from Gloucestershire to the Scottish Highlands. Unmistakable birds, they are taller than a heron, with long legs and a long neck. They are mostly grey; their heads are black, white and red, and the tail is a bustle of drooping feathers. When they fly, they stretch their necks forward, unlike a heron, and trail their legs behind. These passing birds are probably migrants already heading for northern Europe. One or two pairs nest each year in Norfolk.

12th March

A GREEN TINT is appearing on trees and hedges. Hawthorns are sprouting more widely. On horse chestnut trees, the first of the big sticky buds are opening, and the leaves when they emerge look at first like green paws. On weeping willow trees there is a faint wash of green on the drooping boughs.

There are flower buds on the crab apple trees: while they are still closed they look like little pink cherries but they will open into white flowers. Sallow bushes are turning into golden lamps on the riverbanks, as the button-like silvery catkins that line the twigs swell everywhere into bushy flowers covered with yellow pollen.

At dawn, blackbirds, song thrushes and robins are now singing all together but as soon as it is light enough they come down to the ground and start searching for food. This is not yet the full dawn chorus, as there are some individuals of these species that have not started singing yet, and there are also more wrens, chaffinches and greenfinches to join in, besides the summer visitors to come in April.

13th March

THE FIRST BUMBLEBEES are sweeping along the lanes, humming loudly as they go. They gather for the golden pollen on the sallow trees. Many of these early bumblebees are members of a small species with an orange-red tail; larger ones will follow. They are all females who were fertilised last autumn – the males died afterwards – and they have hibernated in warm crevices or behind moss. Now they will start looking for underground holes where they can build up a store of wax and pollen and lay the eggs from which a new generation will spring.

Skylarks are singing over the fields. Sometimes they move forward slowly into the wind, but when their flight speed is the same as that of the wind confronting them they hang motionless in the sky. They are like flags, flying above a territory that they have staked out on the land below. If other skylarks come into that space, they drop down and there is a skirmish, with the rivals flitting to and fro just above the ground. Later they will build nests of grass under a tussock, or in a hollow beneath beet leaves. They are good runners as well as good fliers.

14th March

THE BLUE FLOWERS of common field speedwell, or Persian speedwell, are making bright borders alongside the young corn and oilseed rape. The plants are tall and sturdy, with broad leaves, while the flowers have three blue lobes with dark veins, and a whitish lower lobe. The speedwell family is a large one, and two other species will soon be following at the field edges. One is ivy-leaved speedwell, a sprawling, weedy-looking plant with small lilac flowers and leaves shaped as the name indicates. The other is the most handsome of the speedwells: the germander speedwell, or bird’s-eye, which has gleaming blue flowers with bright white centres.

Great tits are now singing for much of the day. Besides their best-known song, the loud, repeated ‘teacher, teacher’, they have a number of others, including a triple-note variant of that song, and a strange combination, also steadily repeated, of a thin note and a faint click.

15th March

MAD MARCH HARES are out in the fields. They rise up on their back legs and box with each other. These pairs of pugilists were long thought to be bucks fighting each other, but now it is believed that they are generally a female hare fighting off the attentions of a male.

At any event, this is the mating season for hares, and the females, or does, will soon give birth to three or four leverets. Unlike young rabbits, these are born above ground without the protection of a hole. They lie in hollows in the grass or green corn all day, and their mother comes back to suckle them at night. Many of them are caught by foxes.

Badgers already have small cubs in their setts, which can be whole underground palaces of tunnels and sleeping chambers. The parents have dozed away much of the winter, but now they are coming out to dig for earthworms, and to snap up any other food they can find, from nuts and fungi to frogs and young rabbits. The cubs stay below in their bed of dry grass, waiting for their mother’s milk. They will venture forth in April, and then will soon start fending for themselves.

16th March

THE FIRST CHIFFCHAFFS from the Mediterranean have arrived and are singing their metallic ‘tink-tank’ song in the treetops. These little green warblers roam around when they first appear, looking for insects on sallow flowers or wherever else they can find them, but as more birds come in at the end of March or the beginning of April they all settle down in their summer territories.

Butterbur is in flower at the edge of streams and in damp woods. It has a long pinkish spike of little florets on top of a pink-and-white stem, which makes it look more like a ‘pointed hat’ toadstool than a flower. Sometimes the flowers are white or cream-coloured, and it often grows in colonies that take over a whole stretch of stream bank. The leaves come after the flowers, and grow until midsummer, by which time they may be a yard wide. They were once found convenient for wrapping up pats of butter.

17th March

FROGS ARE MATING in ponds. The males attract the females by raucous croaking. When they mate, the male climbs onto the female’s back, and clasps her with his forelegs. They stay there for a while as if they were glued together. She deposits the fertilised frogspawn in the water while he is still holding her, and he only lets her go when she has finished laying. After that the frogspawn is left to itself, and floats about in jellied masses. One female may lay as many as three thousand eggs. The little black specks in the jelly start turning into tadpoles after two or three weeks, after which it takes another three months for the tadpoles to develop into baby frogs.

Toads have drier, more warty skins than frogs, and live a more solitary life, often far away from ponds. One of them may live for years in a cellar or under an old water butt. At this time of year, when they are going back to water to breed, many of them are run over on the roads. Their spawn is quite different from the frogs’, consisting of long strings of jelly with double rows of black eggs, wound round reeds and water weeds.

18th March

IN SPITE OF cold winds, the creamy white flowers of the blackthorn are opening. They come before the leaves, and soon the hedges across the fields will look as if they are covered with snow. This shrub is named after the black bark on its trunk but even in winter this is usually concealed by the dense mass of thorny grey twigs.

There is a brief lull now in the growth on other trees and bushes but on sycamores the buds are fat and green, and the springy twigs curve up as if eager to break into leaf. Young sycamores often grow close together, and their bare tops rattle against each other in the wind. A small moorland hawk that can be seen along the shore, or on farms near the sea, is the merlin. It is a brisk flyer, and chases small birds of the open country such as skylarks and meadow pipits. It generally flies low over the ground, now beating its wings rapidly, now gliding. Like other hawks, it will turn to beetles when it cannot find larger prey. The male has a noticeable blue back; the female, which is a larger bird, is a pale greyish-brown. In the summer, merlins nest in heather on the moors, or take over an old crow’s nest in a fir or pine.

19th March

GREY SQUIRRELS LURKED in their dreys when it was cold but they are out and about again. They keep their dreys neat and tidy; the ragged-looking assemblages of leaves and twigs one often sees in the treetops are abandoned dreys. They feed on acorns and other nuts, and in the summer strip bark from the bottom of young trees, often killing them in the process. Older trees that are dead at the top may also be victims of their bark stripping. It is not known why they do this. They may be marking out their territories, or they may like the sweet sap.

In Britain, red squirrels are now found almost exclusively in northern pine and fir woods. However, in the south they survive on the Isle of Wight, which the grey squirrels have not reached. Grey squirrels do not normally attack the red ones, but since they were introduced here from America at the end of the 19th century, they have pushed our native squirrels out of most of their old territory simply through being more powerful animals and more successful. The red squirrels feed mainly on pine and fir seeds.

The violet flowers of lesser periwinkle are sprawling about on hedge banks. They also like to clamber over fences, and can be found at the edge of gardens and beside rural railway platforms.

20th March

WHOOPER SWANS ARE on their way back to Iceland. Their black-and-yellow beaks distinguish these magnificent birds from our resident mute swans, which have orange beaks. Whoopers also fly with a swishing sound, rather than the deep throbbing of the mute swan’s wings. They winter here on lochs and estuaries, but just now they are turning up on many other stretches of water, as they rest on their northward passage.

The other wintering swans are the small Bewick’s swans, many of which stay on the wide watery spaces of the Ouse Washes. They will soon be returning in family flocks to the Siberian tundra. They were named in honour of the great 18th-century engraver, Thomas Bewick. An attempt was recently made to rename them ‘tundra swans’, but this name has been abandoned again since no one would use it.

While the buds have opened on some horse chestnut trees, others are still quite wintry-looking. The most advanced trees are showing little parachutes of unfolding green leaves. Once all the leaves are out, the trees will have a majestic dome of foliage, which the flower spikes will quickly cover with white blossom.

21st March

SUMMER VISITORS ARE now beginning to flood into Britain. More chiffchaffs are singing in the treetops, and coming down to the sallow bushes for the insects that fly around the catkins. Wheatears have been seen on the South Downs, feeding among the sheep on the cropped grass, and these lively blue-grey and white birds will soon be heading further north for the moors. Sand martins are wheeling over lakes and rivers, and a few house martins and swallows, which belong to the same family of small fork-tailed birds, have been seen in similar places. They are rebuilding their strength with insect food after their journey. The sand martins will soon head for the quarries where they nest in holes, the swallows will go back to farmyard barns, and the house martins to the buildings where they make their mud nests under the eaves. Ospreys, which are large, white fish-eating hawks, are on their way to the Scottish lochs.

22nd March

LADYBIRDS ARE SITTING on leaves, warming up. After they come out of hibernation, they cannot fly until they have sat for some time in the sun’s rays. Most of these early ladybirds are seven-spot ladybirds. They take off in a rather awkward way, with the wing-cases first lifted into a V behind their head and the wings then popping up from beneath them. The smaller two-spot ladybirds will soon appear; there are also ten-spot, eleven-spot, and yellow-and-black fourteen-spot ladybirds. They will have many broods, and they and their larvae will feed on aphids all the summer long.

Some red dead-nettles survived the winter; now a new crop of them is springing up everywhere. They have rich purple to pink flowers, which nestle at the top of the stem in a little rosette of purple leaves, so that the whole crown is coloured. Countless thousands of them can spread across a field of old stubble that has not been ploughed in.

The bold yellow blossoms of the dandelion are starting to line the roadsides, wherever there is an open patch. On hazel bushes, some of the male catkins have already shed their pollen and are turning brown.

23rd March

NEST-BUILDING IS UNDER way. Female song thrushes are constructing deep nests of twigs and grass in hedges and evergreen shrubs, and will line them with a thick, hard layer of bare mud. (Blackbirds’ nests can be distinguished from song thrushes’ nests by the further lining of dry grass that the blackbirds add.) The female song thrush will lay about four or five sky-blue eggs with a few black spots on them, and will do most of the incubating. The male will sing in a treetop for most of the day while she is sitting there, but he will come down and help to feed the young.

Hedge sparrows are starting to nest in similar places, and they too will have bright blue eggs, but smaller and unspotted. The female will sit on the eggs, but she has complicated relationships. As well as her chief mate, she may have subsidiary males to help her feed the chicks. Pairs of long-tailed tits can be seen close to each other on a bough, both of them tearing off green-grey lichen with which to camouflage their domed nest. Some robins have also started to build, while others are prospecting holes in walls, hedge banks and even fallen flowerpots and old kettles.

24th March

THE SHARP-POINTED HORNBEAM buds are a streaky pink and green as they start to swell and open. If the warm weather continues, the leaves will soon be out. The natural hornbeam trees are broad-spreading and rather drooping. There is also a common cultivated variety, called fastigiata, with tightly bunched, upward-pointing branches that give the young trees the shape of a flame.

White dead-nettle flowers are opening along the lanes. There were some plants still in flower in early January, but these flowers come from the new spring buds. The leaves look like nettle leaves, but do not sting. However, young, pale green stinging nettle leaves are also coming up, and these can sting just as painfully as the older leaves.

Lesser celandines are now flowering in profusion, with beds of gleaming yellow flowers sometimes stretching for yards alongside ditches. There are also thick beds of cuckoo pint leaves, some with purple spots.

25th March

THE HAWTHORN HEDGES are getting greener every day. On many of them small flower buds are also appearing now. They are like tiny, white-tipped drumsticks, and generally grow in groups of three. On some more advanced patches of hedge, in sunny spots, a few of the white flowers have even opened. The other name for hawthorn is may, since that is the month in which the flowers traditionally open. In fact, they are often out in abundance in April – and in a warm, early spring they are not May flowers but March flowers. Under the hedges, the March flora are mostly yellow, with lesser celandines, dandelions, coltsfoot and primroses flourishing everywhere.

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