Something In The Air

I wandered lonely as a Cloud / That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd / A host of dancing Daffodils... WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

A few days of mild weather, and some sun, and spring has come to England, in a dance of golden daffodils, a blaze of yellow gorse and forsythia, and snow-white drifts of blackthorn blossom. It's a little too early for the terns and the nightingales, the sand martins and the swallows, but the chiffchaffs, willow warblers and reed warblers are here, all singing furiously. Bumblebees, ladybirds and other insects are out and about, and brimstone and tortoiseshell butterflies too.

At Besthorpe Nature Reserve by the river Trent in Nottinghamshire, the cormorants are busy carrying impossibly long sticks in their beaks with which to repair their nests. And at Whisby Nature Park near Lincoln, the yellow-green flowers of the great sallow, or goat willow, or pussy willow have emerged from their furry grey catkins...

On a short visit to each place this week I counted 28 different species of bird at Besthorpe and 30 at Whisby. Here's one of the Whisby hides overlooking a pool where you can see emperor dragonflies later in the year, and kingfishers if you're lucky...

From one of the hides overlooking Grebe Lake I spotted shelduck, tufted duck, greylag geese, Canada geese, and great-crested grebes doing their synchronized head-dance - which is a courtship ritual. There was much urgency and excitement in the air - not least among hundreds upon hundreds of black-headed gulls, which clamoured round the sky and fought noisily for space on the overcrowded gravel islands in the middle of the lake. Here are two that found a refuge from the cacophonous melee...

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.