Nature Notes: March 2022

THE SONG OF SPRING

What a way to start the day! Whatever the weather in February - mild and dreich or dark and bleak, blustery and gusty, shedding tears of rain, or sharp frost and bright sun, every day at dawn as I opened the back door, a speckled throat captured, in rapture - hints of spring from afar. Flinging to the sky pictures and colours of joy and loveliness, in his loud, clear melodies and frolicsome symphonies this beautiful Song Thrush, singing his heart out and proclaiming his territory from the top of the tree, has been my constant and daily delight. Even in the evening he's still singing his sweet refrain. As the English poet Robert Browning once observed, 'wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, is one of our finest songsters alongside the blackbird.'

Deeper in the woods, Great Spotted Woodpeckers have been in reverberating drumming mode, hammering their bills against dead wood (apparently 10-20 times in 2-3 seconds) to attract mates from large distances away whilst male common toads, having migrated back to their breeding ponds, are nightly transmitting a 'qwark-qwark-qwark' vibrating resonance to listening females, that travels through both the air and water. I used to see an 'as yet unidentifiable' small brown bird with an all-white head near the Downs Link but it was frightened off its patch by a loud hum of the man-made variety - one of the generators whilst the electricity company 'maintained' our pylons and supplies around the village.

March will mark two years since the heavenly blue skies, clear air, peace and stillness of our first lockdown. A pause that took us back into nature and re-wound time. We were lucky that the air was balmy and the sun predominantly shone on the things around us. Despite the 'fear' there was an almost detectable 'expectation' in the air and a discerning feeling of healing as a new season came into its own. Ponds sprang up in the village and around Britain as 'lockdown projects' that are now visibly hotting up with frog and toad activity and frogspawn. Not only valuable as a water source of host of creatures, they're also really important in our current climate crisis as carbon sinks - especially the older ones, as they tend to be dominated by thick aquatic grasses, which form a moist blanket which minimises the release of stored carbon into the atmosphere.

This is also the month of the meteorological start of spring (1st March), the astronomical Spring Equinox (20th March) and daylight saving (27th March). As trees, shrubs, flowers, mammals and birds, sensitive to the increasing sunlight and temperature now ramp up their growing, opening and singing accordingly, the Spring Equinox is also the only day, according to folklore, when you can stand a raw egg on its end! However, if you try this at home, you may find you're also able to do this on other days too (if you choose an egg with a bumpy end and balance it on a rough surface). But spare a thought for our chickens and ducks, who as I write have been in their own 'Covid-style' lockdown since November 2021 to try and stop the spread of the largest ever outbreak of Avian flu in the UK.

The full moon on 18th March is known as the 'Worm moon' as it signifies the reappearance of worms and grubs, which is great timing as bird nesting season is fully under way. Whilst Song Thrushes were once one of the UK's most common birds, they're now unfortunately endangered, due to habitat loss, poisoning from people who use slug pellets and the degradation of feeding and nesting habitats. They usually prefer areas such as untouched hedgerows, trees and shrubs around field margins where there is leaf litter and moist ground with large numbers of invertebrates - so with the recent aggressive farmland hedge-trimming, are struggling to find suitable locations. The unraked leaf piles were probably what attracted them to my garden ... and grapes left on the vine which they enjoyed during the winter as they're rather partial to berries and fruit alongside snails, worms and caterpillars. Another poet, Ted Hughes so aptly described their hunting and feeding style, when he wrote of their 'poised dark deadly eye' and how it can 'with a start, a bounce, a stab, drag out some writhing thing' from the lawn.

If you think you may have seen a Song Thrush (also known as a 'Throstle' or 'Mavis' by various poets including Chaucer and Shakespeare'), look for a warm brown head, wings and back with a cream breast covered in dark spots, the shape of upside-down hearts. They're smaller than Mistle Thrushes and also greyer. The females build cup-shaped nests, out of dry plant stems, grasses, twigs, moss and roots, held together with saliva and a smooth lining of mud and although they've been found as high as 40ft, they are usually hidden low down in trees, shrubs or ivy where they hide a clutch of around four to six of the most beautiful glossy sky-blue eggs, kissed with freckles, which hatch around two weeks later. (In 19th Ireland it was believed that the fairies made sure a 'Mavis' built its nest low, near their homes in the grass, so they could enjoy the thrush's song.) Both the parents feed and tend to the chicks, which normally leave the nest after a couple of weeks, but they still need feeding until they're much bigger so will remain nearby.

There is plenty this month to wow our senses in terms of sight, scent and colour, but so much is encapsulated in the 'Throstle's' song - the identifiable 'Filip, Filip, Filip, codidio, codidio, quitquiquit titit titit teret teret tereret', interspersed with a few different notes, such as the mimicry of other birdsong and even the odd man-made sound. I hope it may touch you the same way. If you'd like to attract a pair into your garden, why not introduce any of the missing elements they need? A dense hedge or thick tangle of ivy are great for many kinds of garden birds including thrushes, giving them a cosy but secure place to build a nest, shrubs with berries and leaf- litter will provide the food. As William Wordsworth wrote:

'Hark, how blithe the throstle sings, And he is no mean preacher,

Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher'.