The Times A Year in Nature Notes. Derwent May

white in winter to match the snow – although they keep the black tips on their ears. Others turn only partially white. If the snow melts before they have turned bluish-brown again, they become very conspicuous as they streak across a heathery or grassy hillside, and their winter camouflage becomes a disadvantage. In summer they can be distinguished from brown hares because they are smaller, and lack the brown hare’s distinctive black tail, or scut.

      Ptarmigan on the Scottish mountaintops also turn white in winter. They stay among the snow, burrowing beneath it for heather leaves and dried bilberries. They will soon be exchanging their white feathers for a mottled grey plumage, which in summer will disguise them equally well on the rocky slopes. Even at that season, however, they reveal unmistakable white wings when they fly.

      Red grouse, unlike the ptarmigan, have been coming down into farmland when the snow has made it hard for them to find food, but they will return to the moors when it has cleared, and will start gorging on fresh heather shoots.

      

8th March

      FLOCKS OF REDWINGS are singing in the treetops, often alongside a field of springing corn. It is a murmuring, babbling chorus, only audible from quite nearby. These thrushes that visit us for the winter sing like this when they are beginning to contemplate their return to Iceland or Scandinavia. Their real spring song is a brief, delicate warble, only heard when they get back home. The singing flocks are very wary, and if one gets near the trees, most of them quickly fly out. For a few moments, the sky is full of the birds, flying with a curious, drunken-looking flight, tipping to left and right as they go.

      Colts foot flowers are opening on bare ground beside field paths. They are like small suns, with a dark yellow centre and bright yellow florets round it. Each flower grows on a scaly, pink-and-green stem. The leaves will follow the flowers and become very large, while the flowers will give way to untidy seed-clocks.

      

9th March

      COOTS ARE BEGINNING to collect reeds for their tower-like nests, which are usually some distance out from the bank of a lake. Sometimes the reeds they carry in their beaks are as wide as the birds are long. Deeper in the reeds, water rails are calling. They make loud squeals when they are fighting or courting, and they also have a repeated sharp note that they sometimes use when they come out into the open. Recognising this note can help one to spot them. They are like bluish-grey moorhens with long red beaks and striped flanks, and step delicately in and out of the reeds, but they never stay exposed for long.

      On lakesides and river banks, the large, soft leaves of common comfrey are growing fast: they look like green cows’ tongues. The bell-like flowers that will follow in April are very varied: they may be pink, purple or white, and there is a form called Russian comfrey with flowers that start pink and turn blue.

      

10th March

      THE FIRST PRIMROSES are opening in woods and along grassy railway embankments. They are often found in oak woods or ash groves, where the leaves come out later than they do on other trees, and the primroses have sunlight for longer. The pale yellow flowers have five notched lobes, and are a darker yellow at the centre. They seem to grow on separate stalks, but if one looks more closely at the base one finds that they are arranged in rosettes of four or five blossoms. The crinkly, pale green leaves also spread out in a rosette near the ground. The scent of the flowers is fragrant but faint. The name of the flower comes from the Latin prima rosa, or first rose.

      

11th March

      TWO KINDS OF bunting are singing in farmland hedges. Yellowhammers, or yellow buntings, now have the primrose-yellow heads of their summer plumage and are singing intermittently about a ‘little bit of bread and no cheese’, as their song has long been thought to say. More prosaically, the song is a buzz followed by a long wheezy note – the ‘cheese’, which actually is often missing (literally no cheese.) Corn buntings are sturdier, duller birds, and when they fly from bush to bush they let their legs hang down. They have a far-carrying song, a sort of jangling trill like a bunch of keys being rattled.

      Cranes are rare in England, but are sometimes seen at this time of the year, anywhere from Gloucestershire to the Scottish Highlands. Unmistakable birds, they are taller than a heron, with long legs and a long neck. They are mostly grey; their heads are black, white and red, and the tail is a bustle of drooping feathers. When they fly, they stretch their necks forward, unlike a heron, and trail their legs behind. These passing birds are probably migrants already heading for northern Europe. One or two pairs nest each year in Norfolk.

      

12th March

      A GREEN TINT is appearing on trees and hedges. Hawthorns are sprouting more widely. On horse chestnut trees, the first of the big sticky buds are opening, and the leaves when they emerge look at first like green paws. On weeping willow trees there is a faint wash of green on the drooping boughs.

      There are flower buds on the crab apple trees: while they are still closed they look like little pink cherries but they will open into white flowers. Sallow bushes are turning into golden lamps on the riverbanks, as the button-like silvery catkins that line the twigs swell everywhere into bushy flowers covered with yellow pollen.

      At dawn, blackbirds, song thrushes and robins are now singing all together but as soon as it is light enough they come down to the ground and start searching for food. This is not yet the full dawn chorus, as there are some individuals of these species that have not started singing yet, and there are also more wrens, chaffinches and greenfinches to join in, besides the summer visitors to come in April.

      

13th March

      THE FIRST BUMBLEBEES are sweeping along the lanes, humming loudly as they go. They gather for the golden pollen on the sallow trees. Many of these early bumblebees are members of a small species with an orange-red tail; larger ones will follow. They are all females who were fertilised last autumn – the males died afterwards – and they have hibernated in warm crevices or behind moss. Now they will start looking for underground holes where they can build up a store of wax and pollen and lay the eggs from which a new generation will spring.

      Skylarks are singing over the fields. Sometimes they move forward slowly into the wind, but when their flight speed is the same as that of the wind confronting them they hang motionless in the sky. They are like flags, flying above a territory that they have staked out on the land below. If other skylarks come into that space, they drop down and there is a skirmish, with the rivals flitting to and fro just above the ground. Later they will build nests of grass under a tussock, or in a hollow beneath beet leaves. They are good runners as well as good fliers.

      

14th March