Nature notes March 2020 - into lockdown

March started with much excitement for me, leading my very first nature journalling session, for the BCN Wildlife Trust at their Paxton Pits Environmental Education Centre. After the horrible wet and windy weather of February we were very pleased to have a lovely spring morning, mild and sunny, complete with bumblebee queens and singing birds. The session was fully booked and everyone seemed to very much enjoy being outside in nature!

I took the opportunity when I had an appointment in town, on the 11th of March, to take a walk on a rather windy, but dry, afternoon. It would turn out to be the last time I'd be able to do that! I wandered along the guided busway, which runs for some of its length alongside a series of gravel pits, and the next day had a walk around my local fields looking for signs of spring...

The rapidly changing situation soon resolved into a simple message: stay home. Luckily I already work from home, so there's no change to that part of my routine. The advice to leave your home only once a day for exercise will force changes for me though; at the start of the year I was thinking about perhaps concentrating on nature journalling in the garden as a project. Looks like that decision has been made for me!

Towards the end of March, just when people were being urged to stay at home, we had a spell of good weather. I thought I'd make the most of it by trying something I've wanted to do for a while - a soundscape spread. I picked a nice sheltered sunny spot in the garden and sat for an hour or so, just listening to everything that was going on in earshot. It was a lovely thing to do, and I'll be doing it again!

So, pretty much confined to the house and garden plus the occasional walk round the fields, I'm thinking that pigeons are likely to feature quite frequently in my journal over the next few weeks... Here's a dented and completely cold egg, found under the conifers. Did it fall, was it a predation attempt? Also, the back lawn is covered in fluffy pigeon feathers - looks like one has exploded!

Life at the end of March 2020 is almost unrecognisable compared with the start of the month. We are now in lockdown because of the COVID-19 virus pandemic, which threatens to overwhelm our health services if it should spread unchecked. So, we head into spring and summer living a new routine, a vastly reduced day-to-day lifestyle, essential movement only, the message being stay at home. But the rhythms of the natural world carry on, as they will always do, and we can find comfort and distraction in them, if only we care to look.

Nature notes February 2020 - stormy weather

Well, we've had a mild and quite soggy winter so far, with only a few short cold spells with frosty mornings. It now feels like we're heading into Spring, though you never quite know what the weather will bring (remember the Beast from the East that arrived in March a couple of years back!).

A walk along the bridleway involved negotiating some serious mud and huge puddles, but I was rewarded with a slow fly-by from a red kite, who was evidently inspecting me quite closely, plus a lapwing in the flooded field. I'd seen a big flock of finches and buntings a couple of days earlier when out for a run, but they were no longer in evidence. The nature-friendly farmer puts bird seed down to tide the farmland birds through the winter, and it's great to see so many thriving here as a result.

A little further down the bridleway is 'rabbit alley', and then on an open area of grassland I watched a fox making it's way slowly across the field, looking for a meal I guess. Was hoping to see it do the pouncing move but no luck!

We then progressed from one storm to another - every week it was high winds and rain...

And it didn't stop with Ciara and Dennis, it just carried on. So a very wet and windy February comes to an end with Storm Jorge. Here's to a better March!

Nature notes January 2020 - A new year, what will it bring?

January: the month that just goes on and on and on... Actually, as my birthday is mid-month I don't mind it at all, but the still-dark days after all the celebrations of Christmas can seem to last forever. Happily, if you're a nature lover there are always lots of things to enjoy!

The year here started off generally quite mild and damp. Then Storm Brendan arrived and deposited quite a lot of rain. The River Great Ouse was in flood, as it generally is on these occasions, and the flood meadows (and flood defences) all seemed to be doing their jobs.

In amongst the damp days we had the occasional cold snap, with a heavy frost and clear blue skies. Always a good plan to get out for a walk, and there was lots to see: a flock of fieldfares and starlings, a buzzard silhouetted in a small tree, reed buntings along the ditches, and a fab pair or goldcrests in the hawthorn and blackthorn hedges along the bridleway. The sticky mud of the bridleway was full of tracks - people, dogs, horses and muntjac deer. And a kestrel surveyed a paddock from a telegraph pole in the afternoon sunshine.

Every year for the past decade or so I've kept a list of birds that I see or hear from the house or garden, and I usually get to the end the year with a count of fifty-something species (2014 was my best year so far with 58).

So far, as of the end of January, I've seen/heard 28 different bird species from the house and garden. In order of appearance they are: woodpigeon, house sparrow, blue tit, starling, dunnock, robin, blackbird, song thrush, great tit, carrion crow, magpie, herring gull, stock dove, collared dove, wren, goldfinch, jackdaw, chaffinch, coal tit, greenfinch, treecreeper, great spotted woodpecker, kestrel, long-tailed tit, red kite, goldcrest, green woodpecker and pheasant. Twenty-eight in January is a good start, and I'm looking forward to seeing the summer visitors!

And finally, the last weekend in the month saw the RSPB's Big Garden Bird Watch. The weather seemed better than last year, but the birds were definitely lurking - I counted for an hour and saw 13 individuals of just six different species. Still, an hour well spent!

Autumn into winter

As we head into winter, I thought I'd take a look back over the last couple of months. Autumn this year seems to have been rather rainy and generally damp, but this has meant some fabulous fungi!

And I've had fun doing some spore prints too...

I've had a couple of lovely autumnal days out at the local nature reserve, Paxton Pits...

The rowan tree was once again a magnet for winter thrushes - bare by mid-November. And this year I spotted a brambling in the mix - only the second time I've seen one here in nearly 10 years...

We've had some beautiful crisp clear autumn days, but we've had plenty of gloomier days as well; the muted colours really caught my eye...

So the seasons turn and the year grows old, but there's always the promise of more encounters with nature and the wild, if only we take the time to look.

Butterflies and shifting baselines

Have you taken part in this year's Big Butterfly Count yet?

Take 15 minutes to sit or walk in the location of your choice, and count the butterflies you see. Repeat as often as you wish, until the 11th of August, and send your sightings to the Big Butterfly Count site to be added to the many, many others gathered from all over the UK, and add to data accumulated over the last decade or so.

I've submitted my lists for a few dates so far this year - my garden, in a village on the edge of arable farmland, has so far yielded half a dozen or so butterflies in a 15 minute slot - Holly Blue, Large White, Small White, Gatekeeper, Meadow Brown, Peacock, Red Admiral, and one solo Brimstone. So, not great numbers, but not too bad on species count.

But contrast this with a trip I took a couple of weeks ago, to the National Trust's Wimpole Estate. I'd seen on social media that someone had taken some nice photos of the Marbled White, a butterfly I'd never seen before, and as Wimpole is only a 20 minute drive away I thought I'd pick a nice warm afternoon and go looking. I was not disappointed!

I found my Marbled White within minutes - and not just one, but half a dozen or so, along with Meadow Browns, Gatekeepers and Skippers too numerous to count (I didn't try!). It was actually a little overwhelming; certainly the highest density of butterflies I've ever seen. In fact, it reminded me of a couple of things I'd recently read...

The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden (1906) is a favourite of mine, and probably, ultimately, the inspiration for my own scribblings and sketching. On July 21st 1906 she wrote: "Along a lane just above Balsall, I came suddenly upon a great flock of Meadow Brown Butterflies; I had seen numbers of them all along the way, but here the air was thick with them, flying hither and thither..."

And in an article titled 'Habitat fragmentation and the New Forest' in British Wildlife, Chatters and McGuire say: "To the modern naturalist, historical descriptions of butterflies in the Forest are astonishing. ... In 1892, S.J. Castle Russell described the butterflies at Ramnor as being 'so thick that I could hardly see ahead and indeed resembled a fall of brown leaves'."

I'm guessing that the parkland at Wimpole Estate must reflect the shocking 97% of meadows that have been lost since the 1930s; a glimpse of how things used to be in much of the countryside. All of which reminded me of something else I read recently: George Monbiot on selective blindness and shifting baseline syndrome.  He says:

The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion.

I, like many others of my age, remember the huge amounts of flying insects in the summer that plastered the front of the car on long journeys. My Dad remembers the abundance of fish (mackerel) when he used to go sea fishing. I marvel at the half a dozen or so skylarks that sing in the local fields, and then can't help but wonder how many more there would have been, and how they might have sounded, a hundred years ago.

It can be hard to be optimistic in the face of such loss of habitat and decline in wildlife, but every little thing we can do all adds up to a greater sum of support for the wild world. So, make those changes, join that wildlife organisation, appreciate the wild we still have. As Jane Goodall has said:

Above all we must realize that each of us makes a difference with our life. Each of us impacts the world around us every single day. We have a choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place - or not to bother.