Watch out: You may be stepping on a bird!

If Spring warmth with May blossom and birdsong defines that moment when we say, “Ah, it is now Spring!” then winter finds its counterpart in chill woodland walks:  scuffling leaf-fall, cracking twigs, mud and damp, damp, damp.  They are the default for winter, broken only by the magic of snowfall or the unexpected joyfulness of Mistle Thrushes in song.

‘Trudging’ is a good word for winter – either through leaves, wet grass or heavy mud.  In no other season do we give so much attention to where we place our feet, for one step wrong and we can be upended and find ourselves seated in the mire.  And yet, strangely, it is also the season when I am most likely to nearly tread on a bird!

This is not because they are young or injured birds but because each of these three species is so confident in its own camouflage that it calculates that sitting tight, undetected, outweighs the risk of being trodden on.  Only at the very last minute, usually well within 3 or 4 yards, do these birds finally capitulate and explode into flight, vertically and then off into new cover where once again they vanish.

One of these birds is the Pheasant who, in my experience, has the least control of their nerves!  Their upward explosion, usually accompanied by loud calls, nevertheless can make you jump when all about has been quiet.  The other two are closer relatives – both wading birds – the Jack Snipe found in marsh edgelands, and the Woodcock found along woodland edges.

Both possess a plumage so perfectly matching their preferred habitat that the chances are you will have been within 5 metres of them and never known they were there.  The Jack Snipe wins the award for the steeliest nerves and due to its preference for marshy margins is less likely to be encountered on a winter’s walk.  The Woodcock on the other hand, may explode from in front of you on any woodland walk and did so on one of mine just this week.

Despite having a ‘cocker spaniel’ dog – so named for being specifically bred to flush Woodcock – the Woodcock still waited until I was just 5 yards away.  Binoculars straight to my eyes and I caught a brief glimpse of its long bill (nearly 10cm!), brown, non-descript plumage and downward beating wings.  The Woodcock’s flight always elicits a chorus of scolding calls from the small woodland birds who I can only assume believe the Woodcock to resemble a predator, perhaps an owl or hawk.

A Woodcock Scolopax rusticola. Photo by Serkan Mutan

It was these alarm calls that once alerted me to a flushed Woodcock by Verulamium Lake – from the thick bushes just metres from the constant flow of walkers and dogs.  Indeed, Woodcock remains have been found on the Abbey tower, most likely the victim of a Peregrine kill perhaps carried out at night as the Woodcock migrated over the town.

Woodcock are crepuscular – coming out at dusk to feed or fly and returning to hiding at dawn.  This makes them most vulnerable at night when they face not only the nocturnal hunting habits of Peregrines but also the disorienting glare and dazzle of city lights.  Bizarrely, as a result, city-dwellers are more likely to see a Woodcock in broad daylight, sitting exhausted and bemused on an urban pavement – just recently in Farringdon, London.

While Woodcock are firmly associated in my mind with winter woodland walks, they do stay to breed but sadly in decreasing numbers.  In Hertfordshire they are almost absent as a breeding bird but on my annual spring visits to the more wooded county of Kent I have been able to witness another peculiar behaviour of these birds.  Not blessed with song, Woodcock instead fly back and forth over the woods at first and last light, ‘roding’.   This involves the male patrolling his territory while issuing strange amphibian-like grunts and growls punctuated by sharp, far-carrying squeaks.

Most of us will never get to see a Woodcock up close and personal but maybe, on some woodland walk this winter, you will catch a glimpse of something brown and feathered exploding from the undergrowth by your feet and skulking away in flight before you can really get visual purchase.  The chances are it was a Woodcock.

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Please click on the image to read this article as it appeared in the Herts Advertiser on 21st January 2021.

The Marvel of a Starling Murmuration

The sun sank quickly and the already chill air wrapped a scarf of colder damp about my face and neck.   The sky was left a gentle orange and across it began to stream birds, mainly southwards but coming from every corner of my vision.  Long v-lines of gulls heading to their nighttime rest – a London reservoir perhaps – and nervous thrushes, Fieldfares and Redwings, arrowed down to roost.

From my vantage point overlooking the gravel pits I could see the thrushes dive into the thickest parts of scrub, wheezes and chacking notes conveying a sense of dread at fleeing an unseen predator in the shadows.  Towards the water the thick willow scrub gave way to reeds, rustled by the wind and into which dropped little Reed Buntings, vanishing into the camouflage for the night.

From far and near, Ring-necked Parakeets squawked their way home in small groups of ten or twenty.  With the final squawk they will perhaps number over 500 birds gathered in the tall poplars surrounding the water works.  But they are not the only flock of significance tonight.

As I have watched the drama of the skies so little flocks of Starlings have whizzed in, some right past my head and accumulated on the pylon wires over looking the pits.  From all directions they gather, stringing out like beads along the wires and adding a serration to the usually smooth metalwork of the pylon.

And then, at some unknown signal, they lift in unison and flow out over the water, a mass of dots in sausage formation.  And then it happens with a subtle twist the flock rolls back on itself darkening the thickened part and becoming three dimensional as it does.  Like smoke the flock billows, ebbs and flows in curves and amoebic shapes: an extraordinary performance of close-knit synchronized flight.

Each pulse and wave is breathtaking, back and forth and growing all the time as latecomers race to join the party.  At its peak there must be in excess of two thousand birds and yet, for all its marvel, I know this is just a small ‘murmuration’.  Over the Avalon Marshes in Somerset an estimated one million Starlings flocked over the reedbeds in January this year, darkening the skies in a constant stream and drawing gasps of amazement from the assembled crowd.

It is one of nature’s great marvels and this winter it is happening on our doorstep at Tyttenhanger Gravel Pits.  While the flock can’t compete with that over the Avalon Marshes it nevertheless has the power to mesmerize as walkers are stopped in their tracks to take in this dramatic performance of precision and beauty.

Starling murmurations are perhaps something we have all seen on BBC television programs but there is no comparison to actually standing beneath a real live murmuration.  Nothing can replicate the beauty of the setting, the cool of the evening and the whirring of thousands of wings overhead.

Before long the aerial spectacle is over and as if some great, unseen jug has reached its tipping point the Starling mass pours down into the reed bed and vanishes from sight.  A raucous din of whistles, chatter and Starling excitement fills the last remnants of daylight, as if the reed bed has become one large hissing amplifier.

And then, as if a switch has been flicked and it is finally lights out, the seething mass falls utterly silent and still.  Were you to arrive at the scene seconds later you would be none the wiser as to the two thousand warm little bodies just a stone’s throw from where you stood!

The drama is immense and remarkable when you remember that by day these birds are squabbling scroungers, often in the lowliest of housing estates and town centres, eking out an existence on scraps and bird tables.  And yet their glory is in the twilight hour when they exchange their mortal individuality for a massed aerial body of beauty.

A Starling Sturnus vulgaris Photo by Rupert Evershed

It is perhaps this sense of the spiritual that captivates us as we watch – a miracle of movement that is simply free from conscious clumsiness and instead seems to be an expression of unbridled being.

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Please click on the image to read this article as it appeared in the Herts Advertiser on 24th December 2020.

Nature’s Routine – never a dull moment!

One of the great benefits of spending more time in the garden this year has been what I can only describe as an inauguration into the routine of my garden’s wildlife.  I say this because I have been showered with rain, chilled with wind, sprinkled with leaves and even had a small stone dropped on my head by a passing crow!

With each new day my mostly dawn vigil reveals more and more of the garden’s secrets.  In the spring it was where the Magpies were building their nest and the Nuthatch’s favourite branch.  In the summer it was the Blackbird’s hidden nest bursting into fledged cacophony and the time of day the Buzzards rose on the distant thermals.  Autumn has brought yet more revelations but it is not just the seasonal routine I have been immersed in but also a daily one involving the everyday lives of the garden’s denizens and visitors.

Before first light the Robin’s wistful notes break the silence; indeed they have sung all night.  The first suggestion of a new day brings scolding Blackbirds and the harsh cries of Carrion Crows.  In the dim twilight of morning Wrens strike up their cheery notes and what had appeared to be a leaf on the lawn transmogrifies into a Song Thrush hunting the early worm.

As the sky brightens so a raucous flock of Herring Gulls circle over northwards, perhaps moving from a reservoir roost to daytime feeding grounds.  If you close your eyes you could imagine some seaside port, St Ives in Cornwall perhaps, but not leafy suburbia.

A brief pause and then yet more awake:  Blue Tits, Great Tits and Goldcrests busy themselves in the apple and yew trees.  The Coal Tit pipes up like an irrepressible alarm clock and before you know it Dunnocks, Chaffinches and Woodpigeons are up and about.

As the sun rises it is the golden hour and often I am rewarded with more unusual birds.  Cormorants heading to and from the lake in Verulamium Park, Siskins and Redpolls seeking out the birch trees or winter-visiting Redwings and Fieldfares crisscrossing the skies.

All these birds have their routines, their roost sites, their foraging patterns and flyways.  Observe them each day and you come to expect them, to look out for them and of course to notice immediately any changes. 

One regular disruption of the daily routine is the arrival of a predator:  sometimes a fox (if it’s late in the day), or a cat.  At other times I catch birds looking upwards and follow their gaze to a circling Red Kite or Buzzard giving momentary pause to the watchful below.

There is one bird however that slices the garden routine with a knife, striking fear into the hearts of all small garden birds and inducing angry cries from the crows.  Long before I see it, a kind of seizure grips the garden as a volley of stressed calls and alarm notes indicates the presence of a Sparrowhawk.  A truly wily bird, I have observed Sparrowhawks drop like a stone from the sky, torpedo through bushes and even hop along the ground in pursuit of prey.  They watch and wait with menace; sometimes circling high in the sky and at other times perched quietly in a tree.

A Sparrowhawk Accipter nisus with prey Photo by DJE Photography

Its intent is clear and no bird up to the size of a pigeon is safe from those piercing eyes, hooked beak and long-legged talons.  It visits the garden almost every day and always elicits the same response and a state of high alert.  Once the hawk has gone there is a momentary silence, a pause to take stock perhaps, before the daily busy-ness resumes again.

If I think I know the garden routine the Sparrowhawk knows it better.  I can be sure that it discovered the roosting Goldfinches in the apple trees  – a flock of about 15 birds – long before I did.  Patience and chance campaigns may reward it but I wonder how long before the finches must find a new home.

The routine goes on whether I am there to enjoy it or not, but one thing is for sure:  there’s never a dull moment and there are many secrets still to be discovered!

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Please click on the image to read this article as it appeared in the Herts Advertiser on 26th November 2020.

Nature – yoga for the mind

There’s really only one thing to write about this month and that is the discovery of a little bird in my garden that was not just a rarity for Hertfordshire but also the one-hundredth species I have recorded in my garden.  It was a fitting milestone for my garden bird list but also an emphatic confirmation of something I’ve been discovering throughout this crazy year of lockdowns and restrictions: the great richness and wealth of local wildlife and nature right on our doorsteps and in particular in our gardens.

Our gardens and the views they afford, however limited, are windows on the wider world of nature.  The joy of discovering something unusual, or beautiful, or complex in the confines of our often-mundane domesticity enlivens and connects us with an infinite world beyond ourselves.

To be awakened to this world, with all its possibilities, and be drawn out of ourselves, even momentarily, is perhaps one of the healthiest things that can happen to us.  In that moment we are no longer conscious of self with all its needs and wants but present to something outside of us, something totally ‘other’ and, if we allow it, totally engaging.  It is also real and, importantly, not manufactured or maintained by us.

Nature is fresh air and wide-open space for our minds in contrast to the black holes of work and online interaction that, like never before, have merged and deepened the ennui.  If our sitting rooms provide space for online yoga sessions our gardens give us a space to perform ‘mental yoga’ – if we take the time to look and even listen.

Nature exercises our minds because it requires that we watch, we wait and listen and that we learn.  For the most part we simply do not know and this, in itself, is refreshing.  Too often we live in closed worlds unable to see new possibilities or believe there are any and the danger is we stagnate in boredom.  Nature, even in our humble gardens, offers the chance of surprise – that critical element required to break our mental moulds as something totally unexpected happens!

That is precisely the form that bird number 100 took as I scanned through the flock of tits flitting through the garden.  My binoculars settled on a tiny bird, not much bigger than a Goldcrest, and I knew immediately that it was a Yellow-browed Warbler.  True to its name it sported a thin pale yellow eyebrow and similar stripes on its wings.  It is one of the aptly named ‘leaf warblers’ that flit and flutter through the trees, at times looking like falling leaves as they tumble to catch tiny insects in the foliage.

A Yellow-browed Warbler Phylloscopus inornatus Photo by Kajornyot Wildlife Photography

This little bird has been extending its range east from Siberia and has become a regular autumn visitor to coastal counties.  More recently individuals have begun to turn up further inland and the number of records for Hertfordshire has increased too.  My surprise was therefore not so much that it was there but rather that it had chosen my garden and that moment to appear as the 100^th garden bird.  What were the chances of that?!

It was the perfect reward for the increased time spent in the garden this year, watching and waiting, often first thing at dawn, and another highlight in an extraordinary year of garden birdwatching.

Of course, it may not be birds that capture your attention.  I sometimes think the enjoyment of nature is like a bus journey with the option to get off at various stops.  One stop is birds but others might alight on insects – butterflies, moths or beetles – or fungi, or flowers.  Wherever you step off there is the opportunity to drill-down and plumb the depths of whatever facet of nature has taken your interest.

I have yet to set a moth-trap overnight but I know many people have since lockdown.  It is the first step to uncovering a nocturnal world of wonder as these oft-dismissed creatures are drawn to the light in all their variety and surprising splendour.  They might be fodder for birds and bats but theirs is a world equally rich and diverse and there every night in our gardens for the discovering.

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Please click on the image to read this article as it appeared in the Herts Advertiser on 29th October 2020.

Reaping Nature’s Rewards

Patience plays a big part in the enjoyment of nature and if you are willing to wait you will reap the rewards.  But patience is more than just passive waiting; it also demands an abstinence from the actions we would normally feel compelled to take.

This spring I deliberately left a patch of thistles to grow in a corner of the garden.  Normally considered a weed these prickly plants are painful underfoot if they find their way into the lawn and their seeds proliferate.  However, they are also a magnet to wildlife and my reward has been not just the magnificent purple flower heads but also the chance to witness firsthand the full lifecycle of ladybirds on display in June. 

Now they stand brown, dead and dry – an eyesore perhaps – with seed fluff blowing in the wind.  A renewed temptation is to pull them up, to tidy up: after all they are now dead.  And yet I haven’t and this morning I was rewarded with a moment of gold – a ‘charm’ of Goldfinches that alighted to strip the seed heads.

A Goldfinch Carduelis carduelis Photo by Tarpan (Shutterstock)

Of course, Goldfinches are just one of many species reaping the rewards at this time of year.  Seed is aplenty and trees and bushes are weighed down with a particularly abundant crop of fruit and nuts – some would say an omen for a hard winter ahead.  Either way, this provides the fuel for onward travel as millions of birds take to the skies, moving south for winter.

I recently ventured up to the rugged northern limits of the Peak District in search of an immense and rare bird – a Bearded Vulture or Lammergeier – that has taken up residence in the area.  With a wingspan of 2.5 metres this bird impressed not just me but my non-birding companion too.  Just by opening its wings and catching the thermals the vulture could cross valleys and peaks in minutes that it would take us days to walk.

It was undoubtedly the highlight of the trip but below its roost and all the time we were waiting for it to take to the air another show played on.  Ring Ouzels – the hardy blackbirds of the moors – gorged themselves on the red fruit clusters of Rowan trees, their harsh and grating calls echoing off the rock face behind them.  These bright red berry beacons would sustain the ouzels’ journey south, all the way to northwest Africa for the winter.

Their reward is my reward too, for on occasion – and this is the stuff of great birding – these passing migrants will reveal themselves along their journey.  In April this year I was lucky enough to hear two Ring Ouzels flying over my garden at night, calling as they went.  Another St Albans resident photographed one feeding on their lawn.  Such encounters are special, not just because they are rare, but because our own gardens, that are so familiar and tame, are suddenly connected with the distant moorland wilds and mountain slopes of the ouzel’s homeland.

Almost every day this last month I have sat out in the garden at first light to have breakfast.  Aside from the enjoyment of this year’s Indian summer, it gives me an opportunity to watch migration as it happens, overhead and through the garden.  Once again patience is required as not all mornings produce many birds on the move.

After five days of waiting and watching the first Meadow Pipits arrived on 6^th September together with Siskins and then a Lesser Redpoll on 14^th.  In addition to these northern arrivals a trickle of departing Swallows and House Martins continue to join the southerly movement but the 9 Swifts high in the blue sky on 1^st September will be my last this year.

Witnessing this great movement of birds south makes sense of autumn’s bounty.  The fruit, nuts, seeds and berries are the birds’ reward but watching it all happen is ours.  In another moment of gold, on September 17^th, 10 Golden Plovers appeared high over my garden in V-formation.  Like the Ring Ouzels, they brought with them echoes of their distant moorland homeland, drifting down to me in their calls as I sat in my leafy suburban garden.

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Please click on the image to read this article as it appeared in the Herts Advertiser on 1st October 2020.

When does Autumn begin?

I know I am not alone in wondering exactly when autumn begins.  Many times on social media this summer I have come across people asking the very same question.  I can imagine it has followed on from a moment of resigned dismay – perhaps synonymous with living in Britain – at wind, rain and chill when it was meant to be summer!

Of course, the answer to the question is no great mystery albeit taking the form of two options: a meteorological one or an astronomical one.  Generally it is the astronomical date that is taken as the start of autumn, a date around 22^nd September when day and night are roughly equal: the autumn equinox.  For practical reasons, the 1^st September is sometimes taken as the start of autumn – for instance by meteorologists – so that the seasons fit neatly into three month periods.

But this is not what is really at the heart of the question at hand.  Instead it is a far more subjective matter about when autumn starts for you.  The answer you give will be far more to do with your own feelings and observations, even memories and traditions, than the science of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

Maybe your autumn doesn’t start until late in October when leaves pile up and the air turns chill.  For you the autumn is ‘the Fall’ with all its colours and glowing glory of fading foliage.  Or maybe, it is the first damp day when moisture lingers beyond dawn and the sun seems to struggle to dry everything out – even though it’s August.

Was it maybe when the Swifts left?  I remember the day back in late July when suddenly the skies over my garden cleared of Swifts.  Their constant screaming acrobatics had gone and instead a few days later I espied a flock of several hundred moving as one, high across the skies.  A new purpose had possessed them and like little iron filings they had aligned with some unseen magnetic field.

There is a twinge of sadness in these moments, a sense of loss and that is maybe part of what autumn means to us.  By the end of the first two weeks of July the songbirds have virtually fallen silent, the Blackbirds’ soft meditations subsumed in the heat of summer and not to be heard again till next Spring.  Conkers appear and toadstools push up in damp corners, the natural scene begins to shift once more.

The more time you spend out in nature the more evident the shifting seasons will be and perhaps that is why I have heard this question of autumn’s entrance being asked more this year than ever before.  The truth about autumn is one that we’d perhaps prefer not to hear for, in the natural world, autumn follows spring not summer!

Summer is our own construct – our hoped-for season of holiday rest, of lazy days and carefree moments.  But in the natural world autumn has begun and perhaps we sense it instinctively too on those occasions when we wonder, “Has autumn arrived today?”  Though this may come with a sense of sadness as we feel our summer slipping away there is no such melancholy in nature.  Instead, change is apace, bringing new variety and interest if you know where to look!

I asked myself the same question recently and I know the answer:  for me autumn began this year on 12^th June (yes that early!), with the arrival of two small birds at the local gravel pits.  Feeding quietly at the back of a shallow lagoon, two Green Sandpipers heralded the start of the great move south for winter involving millions of birds across Britain, Europe and beyond.

A Green Sandpiper – Tringa Ochropus
Photo by Rupert Evershed

These little waders most likely bred in Finland and Russia and their arrival alerted me to the changing season, sharpening my senses to the likelihood of further new arrivals and drawing my attention to the myriad of subtle shifts.  These little signs are there to be discovered and, come September, are declared, in aggregate and officially, to constitute a new season: Autumn.

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Please click on the image to read this article as it appeared in the Herts Advertiser on 3rd September 2020.

What does nature mean to us?

I read an interesting statistic this week!  The statistic came from a new government survey – The People and Nature Survey for England – set up to collect data on how people experience and think about the environment.

Among other things the survey has shown, perhaps unsurprisingly, that since the coronavirus restrictions began more people are spending more time outside and with that there has been an increase in ‘wildlife watching’ as an activity. However, the statistic that really struck me was this: “The large majority of adults agreed that, ‘being in nature makes me very happy.’”

For me as a long-time convert to the world of nature this is a heartening statistic and one that sparks hope for the future.  Such a grassroots re-acquaintance with nature might lay the foundation for the kind of seismic shift in social attitudes that is needed to bring about the environmental change we often feel so helpless to enact.

The global threats to the environment are increasingly well documented – plastics, pollutants, the over-exploitation of natural resources, to name but a few – but often we need look no further than our own back garden or street.  Day in, day out mature trees are cut down, hedges replaced with fencing, gardens tidied to within an inch of their life and areas covered over with concrete and cars.

The destruction of the environment it seems is not just the work of the ‘bad boys’ of industry but is built into the very fabric of society and ‘the way things work’.  It can be very hard to marry this with the fact that we are, at least statistically, a nature-loving nation.

Almost one in eight of us are members of one of the great conservation organisations – the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), the Wildlife Trusts, the Woodland Trust, to name but a few.  The RSPB, to take just one example, enjoys a membership that, when taken as a proportion of the national population and compared with like organisations in other European countries, is the twice the size of the Dutch, three times the size of the German, 25 times greater than the French and 87 times more than the Spanish equivalents.  Few nations on earth it seems care as much about the environment as the British.

Despite this apparent national support for wildlife the UK State of Nature reports continue to provide stark warnings of decline with a significant proportion of species assessed facing extinction.  What then, I wonder, does nature really mean to us?  I think perhaps this contradiction between the state of nature and our professed support of nature suggests there is a profound difference between appreciating nature and loving nature.  The difference, I believe, lies in our proximity to nature.

It is one thing to visit a beautiful nature reserve, woodland or beach and another to feel daily connected to the nature on our doorstep, on our route to work or in our local park.  One experience leaves us as just consumers of nature – getting a green fix.  The other demands of us a more integrated connection and one where if nature is lost we feel that loss or if nature thrives we recognize our part in that.

Lockdown and the coronavirus restrictions have afforded a time like never before to reconnect or maybe connect for the first time with the everyday business of nature: the simple routine of garden birds, the appearance of wildflowers in unkempt areas and the visits of butterflies to bramble borders.  This is the bread and butter stuff of British wildlife and does more for our love of nature than the celebrity Barn Owls or Kingfishers we might encounter from the sheltered hides in luxuriant nature reserves.

A Blackbird Turdus merula finds rich picking in an unkempt corner of the garden

Such basic encounters awaken a deeper kind of appreciation in us – dare I say – a real love for nature that could well be our salvation as far as the environment is concerned.  We save what we love but for that love to be real it has to be connected and that means local and lived, not exotic and visited.  That 74% of us are “taking more time to notice and engage with everyday nature, such as listening to birdsong or noticing butterflies” is surely a reason to hope!

Link to Government report “The People & Nature Survey for England: Monthly interim indicators for May 2020”:  https://bit.ly/2P2n1lU

To read this article as it appears in the Herts Advertiser please click here.

Variety is the Spice of Life

As the poet William Cowper declared, “Variety’s the very spice of life, that gives it all its flavour.”  If so, then nature at this time of year is very spicy!  Almost everywhere I go I am stopped in my tracks by the busy-ness of wildlife.

Last week it was the squeak of baby Tawny Owls from deep within a wood.  I couldn’t see them in the twilight but could tell there were at least three from their squeaked geography.  Another tree let out a rasping yet pleading call telling me that a family of Little Owls had just fledged.  In the gloom of dusk I made out the shape of a large adult fox, just ahead of me, sniffing at the remains of the day.

This week, as the sun shone down, it has been insects that have distracted my attentions.  A multitude of Marbled White butterflies have emerged – on one small bank I counted upwards of one hundred, fluttering and dancing through the tall grasses and settling briefly to secure a mate.  In between these larger butterflies wove Meadow Browns, Ringlets and the tiny skipper butterflies so easily dismissed as moths.  Large, Small and Essex Skippers all superficially little orange butterflies and yet each distinct in its own right.

Essex Skipper Thymelicus lineola

Large Skipper Ochlodes sylvanus

Small Skipper Thymelicus sylvestris

Walking on past some old oak trees I espied more fluttering butterflies at the very top of the leaf canopy.  These were Purple Hairstreaks dancing in relentless and dashing courtship circles in the warm evening light.  And then, in a moment I shall never forget, the glimpse of purple I had been longing for – not a hairstreak but the lord of butterflies:  a Purple Emperor, quietly resting beneath a fold of oak leaves.  As I watched he slowly opened his wings just enough for me to glimpse that mesmerising purple upper-wing.  It was a rare treat and my first ever encounter with “His Imperial Majesty” as butterfly enthusiasts are wont to call him!

My first ever Purple Emperor Apatura iris

It is not just the immense variety between different species either and recently I encountered the extraordinary evolution of just one species across a few plants in my garden.  I have left a stand of self-seeded tall thistles to grow and they are just about to flower.  Hopefully I am not unleashing a thistle plague on neighbouring gardens but the appeal for wildlife is too great an opportunity to miss!

Many of the thistles are beset with dense swathes of black aphids cashing in on the thistles’ sap but not far off lurks the aphids’ nemesis – ladybirds!  There’s nothing that ladybirds enjoy more than to feed on the rich and no doubt sweet aphid hoards and in this they do the weakened thistles a service.  After a closer inspection of each plant I realised the whole thistle stand was a nursery for developing aphid-munchers!

Underneath one leaf, just out of view, stood the bright yellow, miniature bowling-pin eggs of the ladybirds.  On another plant a ladybird larva was hungrily tucking in to the aphids, unrecognisable from the adult ladybird this larva possessed none of the attractive qualities of the shiny red and spotted fairy book adults.  On yet another plant an orange pupa stood upright, perpendicular to the leaf, as if performing some kind of pupal gymnastics maybe in a bid to be finally freed to fly as an adult.

The eggs of the Harlequin Ladybird Harmonia axyridis

Harlequin Ladybird larva Harmonia axyridis

Harlequin Ladybird pupa Harmonia axyridis

Each stage of the ladybird’s growth to adulthood was so different from the next that viewed alone no connection could be made to the bright shiny bug we know and (mostly) love.  In just one small area of ‘weeds’ I felt I had uncovered a thousand mysteries, barely scratching the surface of the true variety on offer.  All the while a rotation of bees dived into the newly emerging purple spikey petals, eager for the new nectar within.

The adult Harlequin Ladybird Harmonia axyridis

Later in the year, as the thistle heads dry and die, I hope they may draw down a flock of Goldfinches, their tinkling notes and red and gold adornment ensuring that variety continues long after summer is gone.  It is this variety that means that nature is never bland and, if we allow ourselves to be distracted by it for a moment, our lives will be flavoured all the more richly.

To read this article as it appears in the Herts Advertiser please here

 

Swifts – a piece of summer heaven

There is one bird that has occupied my thoughts this last month.  I have puzzled over how to describe it and express it in words that would somehow do it justice and distill, dare I say even bottle, in words, a little of its magic.  The bird itself offers no fine plumage detail that would warrant colourful prose or even a voice that we might call a ‘song’.  It is essentially dark brown all over and its voice is best described as a scream; and yet it is master of the skies, unrivalled in aerial dexterity, a resident of the heavens and but a brief visitor to earth.  I am of course talking about Swifts.

Swifts usually appear in our St Albans skies around 20^th April each year and this year was no exception with my first Swift cutting a determined line north over the garden on 22^nd.  It is not until May, however, that Swifts find their element in the warming air drawing up a platter of fresh insects to greet them.  From May onwards Swifts become subsumed into the blue ether and we may not notice them unless we are drawn to their screaming calls or scan the skies with binoculars.

They inhabit another world from ours – an apparently limitless aerial sea.  Like shearwaters cutting the waves over the ocean, Swifts shear the thermals, unrivalled and unrestricted in their manoeuvres.  Watch a Swift for a while and you will soon realize that the usual bounds of space and even time do not apply.  Never is there a sense of effort, only play.  I can imagine that wide-open gape hoovering up hapless flies while gliding at 70mph or plummeting like a stone only to twist and turn upside down to greet a fellow Swift.

Swifts Apus apus – photo byMircea Costina (Shutterstock)

Occasionally two become one as the next generation is conceived, the only clue to those watching from below is that momentarily the Swift’s form is thickened as two fly as one in perfect unison and yes, scream in delight!  Their young that fledge later this summer may not land for two years when after 300,000 miles of non-stop, inter-continental flight they will finally touch solid matter for the first time to breed.  It is a short and even awkward pause in their aerial existence and their new fledglings will strain eagerly towards the skies until they too can answer the call of the clouds and leave the nest.

The skies are one vast playground and while buzzards, kites and gulls all seek out the thermals, spiraling upwards on heated drafts, Swifts have no need of such ‘kettles’.  All the sky is theirs and the slopes and peaks of their topography are insect-lined and defined.  Following these peaks and finding airspace steeped in insect life can take Swifts on daily forays hundreds of miles long, across counties and even countries.

Theirs is a world we do not see and perhaps can only simulate on an app like Google Earth and yet it is one we profoundly influence.  Very little in nature threatens the Swift.  Bad weather may condense and press the insect-scape to flatter plains and then, with no less speed, they will descend to ground level, their feeding frenzy bringing an intense drama to sultry summer evenings.  Occasionally a Hobby, that most agile of falcons, will snatch a complacent Swift from the flock, but having only seen this once in all my years birding I think Hobbies prefer an easier diet of dragonflies!

Instead it is our modern world that has shrunk the world of Swifts, so much so that we now only have half of the Swifts we had in the mid-1990s.  Air pollution and our relentless pursuit of tidiness have thinned their invertebrate-filled skies and filled, plugged and eliminated those cracks and gaps in our buildings that were homes to Swift couples year on year.

It is perhaps not until we consider a summer without Swifts and skies no longer enlivened by their screaming calls that we begin to capture something of their magic that mere words cannot embody.  The loss of Swifts would shrink our world too and remove from it a piece of heaven.

For more information about Swifts see www.swift-conservation.org

To read this article as it appears in the Herts Advertiser please click here

Wings in the Dark – the Secret Migration of Birds at Night

It all started with a tweet – not a real bird tweet but a Tweet on the social media app Twitter.  It read, “Well, blow me down! 2 groups of Common Scoter heard calling in the dark from my back garden at 9.31pm and 9.37pm.”  And there it was:  like a line cast to a waiting fish:  a simple message from a nearby fellow birder and I was hooked.

I rushed outside, it now being quite late and completely dark, and after a nervous wait, with ears bent to the skies, at 10.50pm I picked out the calls of my first flocks of Common Scoters flying north over my garden!

It’s difficult to describe the thrill, in part made up of the knowledge that these were sea ducks, spending the winter in huge rafts of thousands off our coasts – the last bird I would expect to record over my garden.  In part too the excitement came from the sense of a new door being opened in my birding experience.  If this most unlikely of birds was flying over on an early April evening what else might also be chancing it over my suburban patch?

This is the question at the heart of a growing new trend in that ancient hobby of birdwatching.  Known as ‘nocmig’ (short for nocturnal migration) an increasing number of birdwatchers are becoming nighttime listeners too as the sheer variety of bird life moving over our gardens at night becomes revealed.

In many ways it is nothing new and should really be obvious:  if thousands of birds that were in the south suddenly appear in the north, and we didn’t see them move, then logically they must have done so at night.  However, what is new is that more and more people are recording these movements and with access to better technology and social media are able to quickly share and confirm their findings

With the first report of Common Scoters flying over Hadfield in Derbyshire on 31^st March a huge and spontaneous citizen science project was sparked.  Over a period of four nights hundreds of people across the UK reported hearing scoters flying over their gardens in the dark.  This allowed a basic mapping of the scoters movement on a scale not achieved before and gives a significant insight into the movement of thousands of these birds northwards over our country at this time of year.

Common Scoters Melanitta nigra at home on the sea. Photo by Keith Pritchard

Of course it’s not just scoters that migrate at night.  Many people will have heard the thin ‘tseep’ calls of Redwing, a small thrush, on winter’s nights as they return to the UK from their Scandinavian breeding grounds.  Since first going out to listen to the scoters I have added eleven new species to my garden bird list, among them migrating waders such as Whimbrel and Oystercatcher but also some local birds – ducks, Moorhens, Coots and even a Little Grebe.

All these birds I’ve heard quite clearly as they navigate their way in the dark but many birders are taking it a step further and actually recording the sounds over their house at night.  This of course allows them not to be present and to simply analyze the recordings the following day.  As a result there is a whole new body of data building as to the variety and numbers of birds flying overhead at night.  It turns out that Moorhens, Coots and Little Grebes move around quite a lot – or at least are very noisy when they do!

Of course it helps if you are already familiar with these birds daytime calls and most of the time they sound pretty similar at night.  However, many birds do have specifically nocturnal calls and that is where it can help to listen to others’ recordings to identify what you heard.  Inevitably it is never possible to identify every sound and I have a growing list of unknown calls – who knows, some of them might even be the local cat!

What is clear is that never before has there been a better time to explore this new frontier of birdwatching.  With fewer trains and planes, quieter roads and streets, sitting outside at night under the stars has become more peaceful and tranquil than ever.  If you find yourself unable to sleep one night give it a go!  You may not hear any birds but I’m sure it will be therapeutic.

To read this article as it appears in the Herts Advertiser please click here