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.