In Search Of The Spring

Today I walked out in search of the spring. The snowdrop, the crocus and the aconite had bloomed and faded; it was now the turn of the primrose and the daffodil, the violet and the celandine; and the churchyard was carpeted with blue and white-petalled Chionodoxa, or glory-of-the-snow. Down the lane towards the river ash trees were coming into flower ...    

The male flowers of the ash tree. Ash trees can have all male flowers, all female flowers or a mixture of the two. What is more, male trees can change into female trees, and vice versa, from one year to the next. Apart from this arboreal gender bending, the ash is also supposed to have healing properties, and in Germanic and Scandinavian mythology it's known as Yggdrasil, meaning 'Tree of the World', 'Tree of Rebirth and Healing', 'Tree of Terror', 'Tree of the Gallows' or 'Odin's Horse' — take your pick.  

... and in the hedgerows the snow-white flowers of the blackthorn and the acid-green leaves of the hawthorn were tentatively emerging. Though most trees still revealed the tangled abstractions of winter ...

The bare bones of winter.

In the middle of an old gravel pit lake stood an island of tall trees — home to a colony of herons and cormorants. Since I was last here a local Wildlife Trust had put up a birdwatchers' hide, which you can see in the picture below. This morning the place was already quite noisy with birds, but in a few weeks the din will be enormous, as the cormorants and herons squabble over their territories and patch up tree-top nests with sticks, reeds and branches ...

Birdwatchers' hide overlooking a colony of herons and cormorants.

A closer view.

I left the lake ...

More of the same.

... and headed along the river. Gradually, as riverside supplies of sand and gravel are exhausted, the quarrying companies transform these unpromising areas into nature reserves, though this particular spot  still has some way to go ...

Entry barred — unless you are a cormorant.

Not a great deal of colour yet in the March countryside, but when I got home these primulas in the garden gladdened my heart ...

A tub of primulas.

The Confusing Sex Life Of Trees

Yesterday afternoon I took a short walk through Besthorpe Nature Reserve which is managed by the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust. Like so many of the Nature Reserves in the Trent Valley, it was a former sand and gravel extraction site. Though it's more or less on my doorstep, surprisingly I don't visit that often. It's a little bleak and neglected, rubbish-strewn in parts. Some of the paths through the Reserve are tangled with briars in the summer months and difficult to negotiate.

There are various different habitats: river, reeedbed, freshwater pools, sandy heath, hawthorn woodland, willow scrub, wildflower meadow. The sandy heath swarms with rabbits. I've seen evening-primrose and orchids here. On an large treed island in Mons Pool there's a rookery, a heronry and a colony of nesting cormorants. There was such a din there yesterday as nesting activity was in full swing. On the pool itself were a flock of greylag geese and more cormorants, some mallard and tufted duck, a great crested grebe and a solitary wigeon.

Noisy groups of fieldfares were still feeding in the fields, a hang-over from winter. No wonder - the temperature is very cold for April. Soon they'll be flying back north to Scandinavia. Over in the wood chiffchaffs were chiffchaffing furiously (still no willow warblers yet), interspersed with the musical, sweet song of the robin. I've heard grasshopper warblers here too in the past. Their song is always likened to the sound of a winding angler's reel. Other warbler migrants - sedge and reed warblers - will be arriving on the reedbed before long.

I caught sight of a great spotted woodpecker swooping from ash tree to ash tree along Trent Lane. I had a clear view as it froze half-way up one grey ash trunk, its head and bill pointing upwards. It was an adult male, glowing vivid red on the nape of its neck and on the patch beneath its tail. The common ash, to which it clung, is a very sexually confused kind of tree. Some ash trees are all male, some all female, some male with one or more female branches, some vice versa, some branches male one year and female the next. The flowers come out before the leaves, which unfold from sooty black buds. I think my photo shows the densely packed, purple, globular bunches of the emerging male flowers.