The Times A Year in Nature Notes

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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.