Friday, March 29, 2024

No time to sleep

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Mary

Local wildlife-lover Mary Green makes her first entry in a new Village Nature Diary.

This is the first of what I hope will be a regular series of articles about wildlife in The Village area. I’m not a professional wildlife watcher, just a passionate amateur.

I live in Withybed Green, but my walks take me all over the local villages, woods and canal, where I have been looking at what grows, flowers, flies, runs and calls for many years.

I hope to share with you what I have seen in the last few weeks when I am writing, and what to look for in the month you get The Village.

Starting writing this in January was daunting. I look around and everything is locked down for winter: the trees black skeletons, berries gone, the grass brown and muddy, the birds quiet. But walking reminds me of how alive everything is at this time.

Everyone’s first flower of the year is the snowdrop, which is a native wild flower, though mostly introduced in this area. It is already out in gardens, but will soon be coming in woodland, especially on old estates.

The snowdrop is the flower of St Brigid, a saint based on an ancient Celtic Goddess whose feast day is 2 February, so you should be seeing them now.

However, there have been other flowers out already. Gorse is bold yellow on waste ground and roadsides. “When gorse is out of bloom, kissing’s out of fashion”.

One of my favourites is the white dead nettle. Never was a flower more inappropriately named, as it is one of the most alive plants I know. It flowers every month of the year. You might see other white or green early flowers: hogweed, daisy, chickweeds, spurges and the profuse dog’s mercury will all be out locally by now.

If you look at the trees, you can see spring there too. Hazel and alder have catkins, growing almost perceptibly; pussy willow will come next, and the sticky buds are swelling on the horse chestnuts. Red and yellow twigs begin to glow on dogwood and willow.

Exactly what stage plants reach by the time you read this depends on local weather. In 2006, I only saw three different flowers out by the end of January; last year I saw 21. This part of the Midlands can be cold in winter, with frosts holding everything back, though in mild years spring comes very early.

I compare notes with my sister in north Yorkshire: surprisingly it is often colder here. She already had celandines at Christmas; we are seeing the first ones about now.
The bright yellow celandine is the start of real spring. Some people confuse these with buttercups, but they are earlier, have many narrow petals, and open fully only in bright sunlight.

They grow everywhere, from churchyards to hedge banks, woods and canalsides. In similar places you will also find coltsfoot. This is a small dandelion-like flower with many medicinal uses, including cold-cures, appearing nakedly before its leaves do.

February is one of the times when weather prediction is built into our folklore, of course. February 2, as well as being St Brigid’s Day, is also Candlemas Day (or, in the USA, Groundhog Day).

On Candlemas Day, legend says, if the weather is bad, winter will soon be over, but if it is fine and fair, winter will come back with a vengeance. There is often a spell of cold and snowy weather about this time, after a milder spell, so there may be some truth in this.

Another name for this cold spell is the “blackthorn winter”, and this reminds us of the other spectacular flowering of early spring. Last year I saw blackthorn in flower in January, but this year it will probably be late February before the first ones come, and March before it is fully out.

Blackthorn is the dark, thorny bush with early starry pure white flowers, and of course later bears the fruit called sloes. It does, however, have a relative that flowers even earlier and is often confused with it.

This is the cherry plum, a taller and more graceful tree with slightly larger and more loosely arranged white flowers on bare twigs. It grows along roadsides, and probably the best place to see it round here is on the main road from Hopwood to Birmingham, around Grovely Farm.

It’s always there by the third week in February, and sometimes earlier – look for it now! True blackthorn comes a week or so later, usually, and forms dense blocks of white on its black twigs along lanes and roads.

However, blackthorn and cherry-plum, with the bullace or wild plum and the damson, all interbreed and form a fascinating continuum of flowers of different sizes and flowering times.

Meanwhile, the hawthorn leaves are coming out. They come remarkably early, usually by mid-February along some roadsides and in a little sheltered spot near Alvechurch church.

As I write this, the birds are quiet. The robin is such a noticeable bird in the winter because it keeps on singing, probably because it is heavily territorial. On the canal, the mallard ducks are already paired up and have started their courting behaviour, bobbing and weaving at each other.

One of our few winter visitors, the redwing, has been. It is a relative of the thrush but has a noticeable red flash under the wing. It comes in winter and settles in flocks wherever there are plentiful berries.

You may have noticed last autumn that the berries came early, but they were also stripped early, and there are far fewer left than there were last January. The exception is ivy, which is still flowering as I write, alongside ripe and ripening berries.

A big collared dove is making short work of the berries outside my window.

By the time you read this, the birds will have started the dawn chorus, which is traditionally in full flow by St Valentine’s Day on February 14. I hope you’re enjoying it!

Mary is a founder-member of the Withybed Green Poets group and each issue will include a seasonal poem written by her or another member of the group. 

February the fourteenth

A chaffinch wakes me
delivering notes like flowers

one of those gentle days
stolen from winter
a small adultery

I find a hawthorn hedge
all alive in green and hungry

the sun is liquid
birds everywhere feather my skin

I can feel my hair move
the familiar hill is a green dragon

a gift of leaves

one day and I am awash
what will I do when spring comes?