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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.
