Nature notes April 2020: Lockdown continues

April this year has undoubtedly been a tough time for many, with serious restrictions on movement. Stay home is the message. But of course the rhythms of nature continue, and I can truly appreciate how lucky I am, with a garden and plenty of rural footpaths and bridleways to enjoy in a socially distanced manner. So this month's nature journalling has bee done entirely at home, with records of things encountered while out walking or running, or seen from the house and garden.

The start of the month saw a sad pile of feathers on the lawn near the bird feeders - a sure sign of a sparrowhawk in action. It did give me the opportunity to draw and identify them - I think the victim was a chaffinch.

A really useful resource I've found online for feather ID is Featherbase. It has comprehensive photos of feathers from a wide range of birds; indeed, it describes itself as 'biggest and most comprehensive online feather library in the world', and is a fantastic and highly acccessible non-profit-making project.



The weather, certainly for the first part of the month, was fantastically good - blue sky and warm sunshine. My daily outdoor excursions for exercise were either walks or runs, and with the onset of Spring there's always lots to see. Corn buntings, skylarks, a red kite, butterflies and a watchful hare were all about, and the fieldfares that I'd seen on the bare fields a week earlier had gone, back to their breeding grounds in Scandinavia.

The first fledglings in the garden this year were collared doves (though it's entirely possible that the woodpigeons beat them to it and I hadn't noticed!). This pair of youngsters were perched all day in the rowan tree, occasionally being visited and fed by a parent. The leaves weren't yet out and the youngsters looked quite exposed, but they survived and within a few days the foliage was providing good cover.

 Easter Sunday was another warm and sunny day, much more like summer than spring. Spent most of the day in the garden, and happily spotted my first house martins of the year.

Out for a run around the fields a few days later, it was still warm and sunny, and I saw my first swallow of the year, skimming low over the green field of cereal. And, extra special, I found a wheatear - a summer migrant, most likely on its way north to its breeding grounds, which tend to be uplands and moors and the like. Even better, a few days later I went for a walk up to the same spot and there were three wheatears - that's definitely the most I've seen together!

The weather finally reverted to the normal spring showers, and then got quite chilly once again. I decided to explore what is available online in terms of nestcams, and have found a great webcam on a peregrine nest, run by the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust and Nottingham Trent University. So, it'll be falcon sketching every day for me for the foreseeable future!

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.