Derwent May - The Times A Year in Nature Notes

While the buds have opened on some horse chestnut trees, others are still quite wintry-looking. The most advanced trees are showing little parachutes of unfolding green leaves. Once all the leaves are out, the trees will have a majestic dome of foliage, which the flower spikes will quickly cover with white blossom.

SUMMER VISITORS ARE now beginning to flood into Britain. More chiffchaffs are singing in the treetops, and coming down to the sallow bushes for the insects that fly around the catkins. Wheatears have been seen on the South Downs, feeding among the sheep on the cropped grass, and these lively blue-grey and white birds will soon be heading further north for the moors. Sand martins are wheeling over lakes and rivers, and a few house martins and swallows, which belong to the same family of small fork-tailed birds, have been seen in similar places. They are rebuilding their strength with insect food after their journey. The sand martins will soon head for the quarries where they nest in holes, the swallows will go back to farmyard barns, and the house martins to the buildings where they make their mud nests under the eaves. Ospreys, which are large, white fish-eating hawks, are on their way to the Scottish lochs.

LADYBIRDS ARE SITTING on leaves, warming up. After they come out of hibernation, they cannot fly until they have sat for some time in the sun’s rays. Most of these early ladybirds are seven-spot ladybirds. They take off in a rather awkward way, with the wing-cases first lifted into a V behind their head and the wings then popping up from beneath them. The smaller two-spot ladybirds will soon appear; there are also ten-spot, eleven-spot, and yellow-and-black fourteen-spot ladybirds. They will have many broods, and they and their larvae will feed on aphids all the summer long.

Some red dead-nettles survived the winter; now a new crop of them is springing up everywhere. They have rich purple to pink flowers, which nestle at the top of the stem in a little rosette of purple leaves, so that the whole crown is coloured. Countless thousands of them can spread across a field of old stubble that has not been ploughed in.

The bold yellow blossoms of the dandelion are starting to line the roadsides, wherever there is an open patch. On hazel bushes, some of the male catkins have already shed their pollen and are turning brown.

NEST-BUILDING IS UNDER way. Female song thrushes are constructing deep nests of twigs and grass in hedges and evergreen shrubs, and will line them with a thick, hard layer of bare mud. (Blackbirds’ nests can be distinguished from song thrushes’ nests by the further lining of dry grass that the blackbirds add.) The female song thrush will lay about four or five sky-blue eggs with a few black spots on them, and will do most of the incubating. The male will sing in a treetop for most of the day while she is sitting there, but he will come down and help to feed the young.

Hedge sparrows are starting to nest in similar places, and they too will have bright blue eggs, but smaller and unspotted. The female will sit on the eggs, but she has complicated relationships. As well as her chief mate, she may have subsidiary males to help her feed the chicks. Pairs of long-tailed tits can be seen close to each other on a bough, both of them tearing off green-grey lichen with which to camouflage their domed nest. Some robins have also started to build, while others are prospecting holes in walls, hedge banks and even fallen flowerpots and old kettles.

THE SHARP-POINTED HORNBEAM buds are a streaky pink and green as they start to swell and open. If the warm weather continues, the leaves will soon be out. The natural hornbeam trees are broad-spreading and rather drooping. There is also a common cultivated variety, called fastigiata , with tightly bunched, upward-pointing branches that give the young trees the shape of a flame.

White dead-nettle flowers are opening along the lanes. There were some plants still in flower in early January, but these flowers come from the new spring buds. The leaves look like nettle leaves, but do not sting. However, young, pale green stinging nettle leaves are also coming up, and these can sting just as painfully as the older leaves.

Lesser celandines are now flowering in profusion, with beds of gleaming yellow flowers sometimes stretching for yards alongside ditches. There are also thick beds of cuckoo pint leaves, some with purple spots.

THE HAWTHORN HEDGES are getting greener every day. On many of them small flower buds are also appearing now. They are like tiny, white-tipped drumsticks, and generally grow in groups of three. On some more advanced patches of hedge, in sunny spots, a few of the white flowers have even opened. The other name for hawthorn is may, since that is the month in which the flowers traditionally open. In fact, they are often out in abundance in April – and in a warm, early spring they are not May flowers but March flowers. Under the hedges, the March flora are mostly yellow, with lesser celandines, dandelions, coltsfoot and primroses flourishing everywhere.

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