Well, after 7 Vole Patrol postings, and some very cold, wet and early mornings, I felt like enjoying a nature walk in the sunshine, away from Woodmice. But as I left town I found myself in fog, not too thick to be sure, but fog nonetheless.
I was rewarded, however, with the lovely sight of the willows along the lake seeming to float, isolated in the smooth sea of soft gray.
As the mist slowly lifted, a pair of Goosanders and a pair of Goldeneye (the male displaying, the female in tow a yard behind) could be seen through the mirk.
I couldn’t get away from the mammals, either. I was pleased to see not just the usual Muntjac prints along the path, but Roe Deer too. A little way further, and there was a Wood Mouse hopping in a relaxed way across the path, before diving down its hole.
Among the birds calling were Green Woodpecker (finely), Great Tit, Song Thrush, Cetti’s Warbler. A Heron and a Parakeet flew overhead. Wood Pigeons and Carrion Crows watched warily.
The damp air had another good effect: the lichens looked wonderful, and even the bristly Ramalina were soft.
It was nice to see the lichens flourishing so close to London (and Heathrow): these little fungus/alga plants are very sensitive to pollution, and when I was a boy they were almost impossible to find anywhere near a city, so conservation stories can be happy.
After the bitter cold of the New Year, down to a surprising -12C in London, suddenly spring (as it were) is back in the air, and the Daffodils are resuming their progress towards full bloom in gardens and on roadsides.
The warmth and sunshine tempted me out to Wraysbury. With the heavy rain and perhaps also the rapid changes of temperature, a large Poplar had fallen across the river, forming a minor weir.
On the path, a Muntjac deer had left its tiny prints in the soft mud. Unlike a lot of other mammals, at least this one is readily identifiable from its print, the two small sharp slots of its slim feet not mistakable for anything else.
The lake, which had been full of birds as big as Swans last time I visited, was almost empty: a few Coots, some Great Crested Grebes, a Black-Headed Gull, a few roosting Cormorants, a few Tufted: and happily two of the area’s specialities, three pairs of Goosander, and nine Goldeneye (including three males).
A Kestrel hovered and dropped slowly after a small mammal in the long grass. A Redwing flickered away around a corner. A Song Thrush sang sweetly from a thicket. One or perhaps two Bullfinches gave their distinctive “Deu” call from the middle of a bush. Half-a-dozen Fieldfares chattered and skittered about from the top of one bare thornbush to another. A few Wood pigeons and Crows looked out warily.
Bornholm is in some ways as Britain was half a century ago or more: there are still swathes of cornflowers and poppies, though many of the fields are plainly weed-free except for narrow margins. The sky over arable fields and set-aside is loud with the song of skylarks; the hedges are full of the cheerful little-bit-of-bread-and-no-CHEESE song of yellowhammers. Swallows race in numbers low over the corn; the towns are busy with house sparrows, swifts and house martins, the many handsome old houses and churches offering plentiful nesting places to suit all parties. The woods held good numbers of blackcap, with willow warblers in the more open areas, a chiffchaff or two, plenty of whitethroats in scattered bushes, a garden warbler or two.
Some things are simply modern, despite the unspoiled rural look of the island: butterflies seem to be few – red admirals, speckled woods, peacocks, small tortoiseshells, meadow browns, and what I think was a fritillary over a marsh-fringed lake – it was quite big and fairly pale, roughly like a dark green: perhaps it was a marsh fritillary, but I couldn’t stay to find out. It was somewhat windy all week, so perhaps there are many more species on windless days, but I rather doubt it (and wind does seem rather usual on the island).
Of course in many ways it is quite different. The presence of eider ducks and goosanders in numbers on the (brackish) Baltic Sea, along with the occasional mute swan and mallard (and a less surprising shelduck), is strikingly unfamiliar. The crows, as in Scotland, are a reminder that this is the North: handsome grey-mantled hooded crows instead of their all-black carrion crow cousins; and there are rooks in numbers all over, including in the villages, boldly scavenging.
After a chilly grey start, the clouds dispersed and it turned into a brilliant winter’s day, the sky crisp blue, the air clear. I grabbed the telescope and went down to Wraysbury to see if the winter ducks had finally arrived.
The first thing I saw was a sign of the violence of the recent storms; a Poplar, always a fast-growing and short-lived tree, had snapped off and fallen over the path. But a way had already been cut beneath it.
The next sight was a sad one: for the first time I can remember, the River Colne was obviously polluted, with lumps of foam drifting rapidly by, or caught on branches in the normally clean water. The river supports Kingfishers, wagtails and assorted waterfowl, so I hope the cause is a brief one-off event.
On the lake were four or five Goldeneye, the males waving their heads up and down to signal to the females – or to warn off rival males – the bold white patches on the sides of their heads visible without binoculars.
A little further on was a small party of Goosander, a male and two redhead females, their long serrated hooked bills and distinctive long bodies instantly recognisable, a sign of winter in this part of the world as they come down from their chillier breeding grounds.
Then, just as I was moving on, the bold whiteness of a male Smew caught my eye. With him was a redhead female, both ducks far smaller and shorter than the rather big Goosanders. A few grebes and tufted ducks vied unsuccessfully for my attention.
Some of the poplars, half-fallen, offered normally out-of-reach branches for close inspection. Along with the usual Common Orange Lichen and the grey leafy lichens (Parmelia sulcata and such) were a few bristly tufts of Ramalina, easily told for being rather stiff, slightly forked, and the same grey-green on both sides. You’ll probably have seen the genus on rocks just above the high-tide mark by the sea, or on big old stone-age megaliths. It’s a lichen that demands clean air, so it’s rather a nice surprise to see it so close to Heathrow Airport. Perhaps the prevailing Westerly winds keep most of the atmospheric pollution away. There is no doubt, though, that London’s air quality is far better than it was a generation ago: hardly anyone burns sulphurous coal any longer, and while there are hotspots of nitrogen oxides (Heathrow for one, Oxford Street for another) and diesel particulates, these aren’t as harmful to lichens as sulphur dioxide was.
Around the corner into the area of wet grassland and scrub, I was delighted to be surprised by two Red Kites circling silently overhead against the brilliant blue, their long wings and forked tails a welcome sight that would have been familiar to Shakespeare but was missing until their recent reintroduction to lowland Britain. There was plenty of professional angst about whether the new Chiltern population should be encouraged to interbreed with the remnant Welsh population: but in the event, the birds easily dispersed the couple of hundred miles involved, and soon the gene pools mixed all by themselves.
Up on the smooth green hill that was the old rubbish mountain and is now home to a dozen ponies and horses, the distant chack-chack of Fieldfares drifted to my ears. At least fifty of them were standing, watchful but constantly feeding, on the bare grass, flying up and chattering at the least warning. A solitary Mistle Thrush stood big and grey with its boldly spotted breast among them; a flock of a hundred Starlings moved flightily between trees and grass. A Wood Pigeon panicked and all the Fieldfares flew into the trees, still chacking. I splashed through the ankle-deep mud and puddles on the somewhat flooded path to the road.
It was a delight to be able to take some time in the almost miraculously preserved Lake District, the landscape seemingly unchanged from a century ago. The real changes are in the main carefully hidden away: cunningly concealed caravan parks, sensitively expanded hotels and guest houses, visitor attractions built of grey slate and tucked behind walls or trees. One change cannot be hidden: the narrow lanes carry twice, no, four times the traffic of thirty years ago, and it travels at murderous speed. Some of the young men in their shiny red cars race along the few straights and around blind bends, trusting and assuming (without thought) that the other driver knows the road as well as them, has the same speed of reaction, and will have space to pass. Given that the other driver may well be a foreigner in a slow, bulky camper van, or old and frail, or talking on the phone, or tired, drunk or just not quite as perfect as the young bloke in his speed-wagon, this may not be justified. Pedestrians and cyclists, too, take their lives in their hands. The park authority ceaselessly balances the conflicting pressures: facilities for the millions of visitors, landscape, wildlife, jobs, houses, schools and shops for the residents, car parking (as pricey as any city in the most popular spots). They have done an admirable job.
The marvellously clean landscape of rock, grassland and glacial lakes appears so fresh on a fine day that it hardly seems feasible: it is sharper than a diorama illustrating geomorphology, and much more beautiful.
Sometimes the common flowers surprise us with their beauty. These foxgloves stood proud and tall in their hummocky landscape.
The lime-green of the geographic or map lichen forms delightful maps of imaginary continents on the grey slate.
The artist Maurits Escher admired the apparently simple form of mosses and ground-living lichens like the gorgeously coloured Cladonia floerkana: but he quickly realized how complex they were when he started to draw them.
I was happily surprised to see these Common Sandpipers flying about and calling loudly: I really hadn’t expected to see them away from both forests and sizeable bodies of water: clearly, they don’t need much.
The Goosander is almost a rarity, breeding in not many thousands in Britain; but it is not shy, as this family seen from the bridge over the Rother in Grasmere demonstrates. The ducklings showed off their striking spotted pattern.
On Yewbarrow in Wasdale, we enjoyed the views of lake and mountain, and glimpsed a Golden-Ringed Dragonfly: not really mistakable for anything else, the size of an Emperor Dragonfly and strikingly black-and-yellow with incomplete rings.
Back at our guest house, Marsh Tits visited the bird feeders, almost as relaxed as the resident Blue Tits. On the Cumbrian Way, walking down to the pub at Skelwith Bridge, we saw this extraordinarily ghostly tree, leafless and covered all over with silk, lightly decorated with caterpillar frass. The poor tree had been totally defoliated by the tent caterpillars. Since I doubt the Gypsy moth has reached the Lake District yet, this might be a Processionary moth, perhaps.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature