The Times A Year in Nature Notes. Derwent May

      THE BLUE FLOWERS of common field speedwell, or Persian speedwell, are making bright borders alongside the young corn and oilseed rape. The plants are tall and sturdy, with broad leaves, while the flowers have three blue lobes with dark veins, and a whitish lower lobe. The speedwell family is a large one, and two other species will soon be following at the field edges. One is ivy-leaved speedwell, a sprawling, weedy-looking plant with small lilac flowers and leaves shaped as the name indicates. The other is the most handsome of the speedwells: the germander speedwell, or bird’s-eye, which has gleaming blue flowers with bright white centres.

      Great tits are now singing for much of the day. Besides their best-known song, the loud, repeated ‘teacher, teacher’, they have a number of others, including a triple-note variant of that song, and a strange combination, also steadily repeated, of a thin note and a faint click.

      

15th March

      MAD MARCH HARES are out in the fields. They rise up on their back legs and box with each other. These pairs of pugilists were long thought to be bucks fighting each other, but now it is believed that they are generally a female hare fighting off the attentions of a male.

      At any event, this is the mating season for hares, and the females, or does, will soon give birth to three or four leverets. Unlike young rabbits, these are born above ground without the protection of a hole. They lie in hollows in the grass or green corn all day, and their mother comes back to suckle them at night. Many of them are caught by foxes.

      Badgers already have small cubs in their setts, which can be whole underground palaces of tunnels and sleeping chambers. The parents have dozed away much of the winter, but now they are coming out to dig for earthworms, and to snap up any other food they can find, from nuts and fungi to frogs and young rabbits. The cubs stay below in their bed of dry grass, waiting for their mother’s milk. They will venture forth in April, and then will soon start fending for themselves.

      

16th March

      THE FIRST CHIFFCHAFFS from the Mediterranean have arrived and are singing their metallic ‘tink-tank’ song in the treetops. These little green warblers roam around when they first appear, looking for insects on sallow flowers or wherever else they can find them, but as more birds come in at the end of March or the beginning of April they all settle down in their summer territories.

      Butterbur is in flower at the edge of streams and in damp woods. It has a long pinkish spike of little florets on top of a pink-and-white stem, which makes it look more like a ‘pointed hat’ toadstool than a flower. Sometimes the flowers are white or cream-coloured, and it often grows in colonies that take over a whole stretch of stream bank. The leaves come after the flowers, and grow until midsummer, by which time they may be a yard wide. They were once found convenient for wrapping up pats of butter.

      

17th March

      FROGS ARE MATING in ponds. The males attract the females by raucous croaking. When they mate, the male climbs onto the female’s back, and clasps her with his forelegs. They stay there for a while as if they were glued together. She deposits the fertilised frogspawn in the water while he is still holding her, and he only lets her go when she has finished laying. After that the frogspawn is left to itself, and floats about in jellied masses. One female may lay as many as three thousand eggs. The little black specks in the jelly start turning into tadpoles after two or three weeks, after which it takes another three months for the tadpoles to develop into baby frogs.

      Toads have drier, more warty skins than frogs, and live a more solitary life, often far away from ponds. One of them may live for years in a cellar or under an old water butt. At this time of year, when they are going back to water to breed, many of them are run over on the roads. Their spawn is quite different from the frogs’, consisting of long strings of jelly with double rows of black eggs, wound round reeds and water weeds.

      

18th March

      IN SPITE OF cold winds, the creamy white flowers of the blackthorn are opening. They come before the leaves, and soon the hedges across the fields will look as if they are covered with snow. This shrub is named after the black bark on its trunk but even in winter this is usually concealed by the dense mass of thorny grey twigs.

      There is a brief lull now in the growth on other trees and bushes but on sycamores the buds are fat and green, and the springy twigs curve up as if eager to break into leaf. Young sycamores often grow close together, and their bare tops rattle against each other in the wind. A small moorland hawk that can be seen along the shore, or on farms near the sea, is the merlin. It is a brisk flyer, and chases small birds of the open country such as skylarks and meadow pipits. It generally flies low over the ground, now beating its wings rapidly, now gliding. Like other hawks, it will turn to beetles when it cannot find larger prey. The male has a noticeable blue back; the female, which is a larger bird, is a pale greyish-brown. In the summer, merlins nest in heather on the moors, or take over an old crow’s nest in a fir or pine.

      

19th March

      GREY SQUIRRELS LURKED in their dreys when it was cold but they are out and about again. They keep their dreys neat and tidy; the ragged-looking assemblages of leaves and twigs one often sees in the treetops are abandoned dreys. They feed on acorns and other nuts, and in the summer strip bark from the bottom of young trees, often killing them in the process. Older trees that are dead at the top may also be victims of their bark stripping. It is not known why they do this. They may be marking out their territories, or they may like the sweet sap.

      In Britain, red squirrels are now found almost exclusively in northern pine and fir woods. However, in the south they survive on the Isle of Wight, which the grey squirrels have not reached. Grey squirrels do not normally attack the red ones, but since they were introduced here from America at the end of the 19th century, they have pushed our native squirrels out of most of their old territory simply through being more powerful animals and more successful. The red squirrels feed mainly on pine and fir seeds.

      The violet flowers of lesser periwinkle are sprawling about on hedge banks. They also like to clamber over fences, and can be found at the edge of gardens and beside rural railway platforms.

      

20th March

      WHOOPER SWANS ARE on their way back to Iceland. Their black-and-yellow beaks distinguish these magnificent birds from our resident mute swans, which have orange beaks. Whoopers also fly with a swishing sound, rather than the deep throbbing of the mute swan’s wings. They winter here on lochs and estuaries, but just now they are turning up on many other stretches of water, as they rest on their northward passage.

      The other wintering swans are the small Bewick’s swans, many of which stay on the wide watery spaces of the Ouse Washes. They will soon be returning in family flocks to the Siberian tundra. They were named in honour of the great