| When Winter Turns
to Spring Wildlife in Kirkby Malzeard |
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| February is often the coldest and hardest month for wildife. Food is denied when water and earth are frozen solid. In spite of this, there are some species of birds which will be very active. Please read on to find out about:
OWLS. Tawny owls, within the boundaries of our own village have turned their thoughts to nesting in late February. Eggs will be laid during March. They have found deep holes, where they are not only secluded by surrounding woods, but can be kept warm by the trees around them. From the quiet roads around the village, after dark, you can locate as many as three or four territories, by the hooting calls of the males that drift across the countryside from different directions. They are often answers to the sharp calls of females. Many adult owls were busy, in autumn driving away their own young ones, born earlier in the year and already posing serious competition for precious nesting sites. Disputes are common in autumn. Listen of a still, clear night. This is the best time, because then you can sometimes even observe their noisy scuffles in the bright moonlight. Now, their activities and calling is more ordered and settled, since established pairs are getting near to mating. Tawny owls do sometimes hunt by day, especially if they are feeding young but usually they snooze contentedly in a hollow tree or luxuriant ivy. Warm sunshine will tempt them to roost on branches, close to a trunk. You may catch a glimpse if you look upwards or maybe a longer look since they have a habit of just staring back at you with their large, soft, dark eyes. Their camouflage is so good however that spotting them is far from easy. Of course, in your own barn or outhouse you may well have an owl of your own. Not necessarily a tawny, but perhaps a little owl, or even a superb barn owl. Please let me know if you have. BIRDSONG TUNES UP. Blackbirds will be resuming their lovely daytime recitals during March, but since mid-January their distant melodies will have been heard by those among you who wake early in the dark hour before dawn. It was a sheer delight to walk at Studley Royal during the half-term week, simply to hear the chaffinches, coming into full song. The flood of melody came from nearly every tall tree. I returned home to Kirkby Malzeard to hear the same scurry of cheerful notes in my own garden. Greenfinches wheeze and make a bubbling kind of trill. They too have been voicing their joy at the arrival of gradually warming sunshine as February fades into March. They carry their song as they fly from tree to tree like large dancing butterflies. School staff may fancy they are beset from yet another quarter as great tits pipe out, more clearly each day, their "teacher-teacher" calls. Some believe that each bird can only produce one or two sounds. Ornithologists claim to have recorded thirty seven great tit utterances. Can you recognise some of them? It is a good challenge but so far I have only reached a tally of eleven. The gentle chime of blue tits is another welcome sound that is returning to the country sine for another year. Spring, summer and autumn will be the better for this bird's subdued and soothing tones. What an uplifting thought it is, that before long we shall be listening to the breathtaking magnificence and the superb symphonic variations of the full dawn chorus. EARLY BIRDS. Warm spells will tempt a few birds to nest early. If they succeed the youngsters will have a huge advantage which will help them to survive next winter. If not, they can, and nearly always do try again. Robins and blackbirds often make early breeding attempts, giving themselves a better chance by nesting in old buildings, sheds and garages. Here they are able to dodge predators, like sparrowhawks, whose numbers re increasing quite noticeably. Cats, however, remain their biggest threat. They also often succumb to foxes. Mistle thrushes re singing now, loudly, for all to hear, though some wish they would not tune up quite so early. I heard the fine ringing notes of the first for me, of the millennium, from the tall trees that bound the churchyard at St. Andrews. True to form it was on the topmost twig. This was in mid January. They nest high in open boughs and are quite prepared to tough it out with any avian intruders. The stormcock, a fine and appropriate alternative name for the mistle thrush, will defend a berried bush, especially in hard weather, against other birds of the thrush family, blackbirds, song thrushes; and our winter visitors the redwings and fieldfares. The latter stay until spring. Last year I had an exceptional sight of a large mixed flock of winter thrushes, in the second week of May, along the Ripon road. When a mistle thrush flies high, its silvery underwings catch the light, making it identifiable at surprisingly long distances. BIRDS IN THE GARDEN. As the ripe berries on hawthorns, roses, hollies and spindles are eaten and become scarce more birds will come to bird tables. So keep feeding them! When wild food fails in Scandinavia, waxwings come in search of our provender, like the bramblings. Waxwings like the cotoneasters and pyracanthas, with their bright fruits in our gardens. High Batts Nature Reserve hosted a sizeable flock during January. Although they have dispersed, these birds can still be seen for several weeks if you have the luck to be in the right pace at the right time. They may be in parks or town gardens, but usually on red berries. MIRACLE FRUIT. This has been a bumper year for ivy berries. You will have watched them setting, ripening and slowly fattening; turning from green to purplish-black. Maybe, this year, not quite so many birds will return to the gardens, since they will have plentiful supplies of this miracle winter fruit. How does it ripen to sweetness at the bitterest season of the year? WANDERING BIRDS. Scarcity has always brought finch flocks together to communally search the fields for winter food. Near Low Intake, three weeks ago, I found myself suddenly surrounded by a flock of some 150 chaffinches. There were one or two bramblings amongst them and a couple of long-tailed tits and a goldcrest. I guess the last three mentioned may have been encompassed by the flock. Yesterday in the very same spot it was a flock of 50 bramblings and several chaffinches that were "in residence" for a while. TAKING ADVANTAGE OF LEAFLESS TREES. With little leaf cover, if any, on trees and hedges it is easier to watch wrens and dunnocks slipping in and out of tangles of vegetation. If they feel really threatened there is often a good robust holly to dive into and hide. Occasionally they fly low across the road, form hedge to hedge. A tiny, tawny, warm-coloured streak will probably be a wren. A cold grey blur will almost certainly be a dunnock. SYSTEMATIC FEEDING. Bullfinches have begun their assaults on forming buds. They nip them off with clinical efficiency. I had a prunus tree at my last home, which sported only a skirt of bloom each year. The bare top showed exactly how far the bullfinches had managed to get before the flowers opened. In the second week of February I watched 17 bullfinches feeding close together beneath an alder tree, in the valley that runs down form the waterfall at Stope End. A record for my notes! Alders and silver birches are also systematically cleared of remaining seeds by redpolls and siskins. Many villagers have seen siskins on their food hangers, since just before Christmas: numbers are increasing. On cold and windy days great-spotted woodpeckers venture into gardens. They are drumming in the woods demonstrating an even more amazing kind of efficiency…but more of that later as spring advances. Return to top of page MAMMALS. Vixens are choosing likely places to rear their young. As they continue the process they will lie low, showing little sign of activity until May. It is the male fox that you are most likely to see until then, as he attentively keeps his mate supplied with food that he has caught for her. Later he will be equally attentive to the new-born cubs. This is also the time of year when we can easily detect the passage of foxes, with our noses. On frosty days their rank scent lingers. Just beyond Creets Bridge I have recently observed brown hares in courting groups. The does are in oestrus in February and round about the early days of March they will hide away to rear their leverets on their own. Return to top of page PLANT LIFE AND FUNGI. White carpets of snowdrops, glimpsed through bare trees are already beginning to fade, though we enjoy the kind of local landscape to show them at their very best. Yellow lambs' tails stir on the hazels in a faint breeze or resist, by some miracle, the strongest of blasts.…and this year we have had our share of high winds! Alder catkins throw a pinkish-purplish cast across lines of distant trees, usually marking a water-course or damp ground. We have a few fungi too. Polypores are swelling on birches, extending the advances they made last year. I have a recent photograph of a snapped off trunk in the Kex Wood plantation which has so many of these bracket fungi that it looks like a piece of silver, pink and green modern sculpture. Some mature old polyphores can withstand a man's weight….but don't risk it…and sawyers tell me that their saws find them astonishingly hard to cut. Look out too for the brilliant orange of Flammulina! Our forbears greeted these signs with joy, as harbringers of spring, just as they did the emerging plants of dog's mercury (some already flowering locally) and the tiny leaf spikes of bluebells. Kindly written for the Kirkby Malzeard Website by The Silver-crested Shank. (Many of you who are local to the village will know who this person is usually known as!) 1st March 2000. 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