February 2013

With the lengthening of days, signs of the coming spring are beginning to appear.  Expanded hazel catkins can be seen, and the young cow parsley is showing its verdant green new leaves.  Song thrushes are singing on territory, and the young viridian blue/green daffodil shoots are beginning to push through the soil.  It will not be long before we see the first snowdrops in flower.

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and it is usually dangerous to generalise, especially about what can be seen in January and February.  I went for a picnic on the South Downs (dunes) at Beachy Head on Friday 11th January, and it felt quite warm in the bright sunshine.  I was delighted to see a hover fly land on my binoculars; it proceeded to explore this novel surface in the warm sun.  There were also dung flies on a cow pat, and it felt like spring.  Meadow pipits flew up from the closely grazed turf with “see see see” calls, clearly glad to find some insect prey in the depths of winter.  We watched as a pair of ravens, whose diagnostic “kronk kronk” call had given themselves away, were being mobbed by a pair of peregrine falcons.  There was a constant stream of lesser black-backed and herring gulls gliding along the front of the cliffs, but there was a more unusual bird gliding back and forth just below, and sometimes just above the edge of the cliff.  This was a fulmar petrel.  These primitive, enigmatic birds resemble gulls, but are not even in the same or close taxonomic order as gulls, but are more closely related to albatrosses and shearwaters.  These birds are often referred to as tube-noses, which describes the strange tube like structure along the upper mandible which is indeed the nose.  However, this nose tube is also used to excrete excess salt as these birds spend months at sea away from fresh water, so have to drink the sea, and they get rid of the excess salt through their specially adapted nose.

The cliffs had been collapsing at regular intervals along their length, and there were fresh piles of chalk rubble on the shingle below the clean white cliff-face.  These falls are probably exacerbated by the recent heavy rainfall.  2012 turns out to be the second wettest year since records began, second only to 2000.  Remarkable, considering it started with a drought that persisted at least until March.