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.

30 Days Wild 2019

It's that wild time of the year again! The Wildlife Trusts' 30 Days Wild happens in June; last year I did a nature journal entry every day, but this time round I thought I'd take a more relaxed approach and simply add things as and when, to complete a spread each week. So here are my pages for this year...

Highlights from week 1 included a wasp beetle rescued from the conservatory, and a woodpigeon with a missing patch of feathers that made it really easy to spot. The swifts are here, but yet again the house martins that have regularly nested in the village for some years have not appeared (second year running -  guess we've lost them, sadly).

Out for a run during week 2 I spotted a muntjac deer down the farm track ahead of me, emerging from a field of beans. It watched me getting closer before bounding off across the track and into the field on the other side. Very wet weather courtesy of Storm Miguel made for some rather soggy garden birds, and a large group of long-tailed tits have been passing through.

Week 3 saw an exciting find for me - a smooth newt, hiding under a plant pot in the greenhouse. It's the first newt I've found in the garden here, and it was an unusual golden-yellow colour. I've since found another one under a log in the log pile, this one the more usual brown colour. A hedgehog tackled a huge earthworm, images caught on the trailcam in the front garden. I also puzzled over the flower preference of bumblebees, and discovered that it's all to do with tongue length!

Another first for me in the final week - a white-letter hairstreak butterfly, that I spotted in a garden during our village Open Gardens afternoon. Then a few days later, one appeared in my own garden! The recent wet weather has resulted in some quite fabulous fungi in the log pile - oyster mushrooms, which I was very tempted to pick and eat (but didn't in the end and now they've been very nibbled by the slugs and snails). Out for a run I saw and heard a corn bunting, with it's jangling-set-of-keys song. Very nice to see this farmland bird, which is in general decline, like so many...

A wake of buzzards

Glancing out of the window the other day I noticed a small flock of large birds drifting across the sky. My first thought was that they were gulls - I see small groups fairly often, drifting over the fields. But on a second look I realised that it was a group of buzzards - seven of them!

I've never seen so many all together; I'm assuming it was a family group, floating on the thermals up on high. As I watched, through my binoculars, two of the birds started some play-fighting on the wing, chasing, swooping, and throwing talons up at each other. I managed to grab a few very distant and fuzzy photos but mainly just enjoyed watching them for a few minutes, until they eventually all drifted out of sight.

Buzzards are the UK's most common and widespread bird of prey, although things haven't always been so rosy for them. They suffered greatly from persecution at the hands of gamekeepers, and also following the introduction of myxomatosis in the 1950s, which reduced the population of their rabbit prey. Organochlorine pesticides took their toll too. However, thanks to the withdrawal of the pesticides and a reduction in persecution, buzzards have increased greatly.

When I was growing up, in the 70s/80s in the Midlands, I only ever saw buzzards when we went on holiday to Wales or the West Country. I remember looking out for the occasional bird perched on a telegraph pole, and listening out for their mewing calls. And now I've seen seven all together, floating across the sky in Eastern England. Fabulous.

Bluebells along the bridleway

It seems that spring has properly arrived this week and we're in for a lovely sunny long Easter weekend. Perfect!

I regularly run along the bridleway to the neighbouring village, and I've been keeping an eye on the progress of the bluebells that flower here. So, on a warm afternoon this week I decided it was time to get the nature journal kit out and go do some observing!

These bluebells are the native species Hyacinthoides non-scripta. The Woodland Trust's bluebell page has some useful info. These have the classic English bluebell nodding flower stem with the flowers mostly on one side, and curled back petal tips. The one thing I can't verify is the scent, as I'm blocked up with a cold at the moment!

The bluebells are flowering under the trees along a narrow strip either side of the path, only a few metres wide either side, with arable fields beyond. I'm wondering if there was once a bigger area of woodland here.

I'm lucky to have some lovely woodland nearby that's spectacular for spring bluebells. Pictures from previous years, Papworth Wood and Waresley Wood, in Cambridgeshire:

If you get a chance, I recommend you visit your local bluebells!