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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.