The Times A Year in Nature Notes. Derwent May

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      On lakesides and river banks, the large, soft leaves of common comfrey are growing fast: they look like green cows’ tongues. The bell-like flowers that will follow in April are very varied: they may be pink, purple or white, and there is a form called Russian comfrey with flowers that start pink and turn blue.

      

10th March

      THE FIRST PRIMROSES are opening in woods and along grassy railway embankments. They are often found in oak woods or ash groves, where the leaves come out later than they do on other trees, and the primroses have sunlight for longer. The pale yellow flowers have five notched lobes, and are a darker yellow at the centre. They seem to grow on separate stalks, but if one looks more closely at the base one finds that they are arranged in rosettes of four or five blossoms. The crinkly, pale green leaves also spread out in a rosette near the ground. The scent of the flowers is fragrant but faint. The name of the flower comes from the Latin prima rosa, or first rose.

      

11th March

      TWO KINDS OF bunting are singing in farmland hedges. Yellowhammers, or yellow buntings, now have the primrose-yellow heads of their summer plumage and are singing intermittently about a ‘little bit of bread and no cheese’, as their song has long been thought to say. More prosaically, the song is a buzz followed by a long wheezy note – the ‘cheese’, which actually is often missing (literally no cheese.) Corn buntings are sturdier, duller birds, and when they fly from bush to bush they let their legs hang down. They have a far-carrying song, a sort of jangling trill like a bunch of keys being rattled.

      Cranes are rare in England, but are sometimes seen at this time of the year, anywhere from Gloucestershire to the Scottish Highlands. Unmistakable birds, they are taller than a heron, with long legs and a long neck. They are mostly grey; their heads are black, white and red, and the tail is a bustle of drooping feathers. When they fly, they stretch their necks forward, unlike a heron, and trail their legs behind. These passing birds are probably migrants already heading for northern Europe. One or two pairs nest each year in Norfolk.

      

12th March

      A GREEN TINT is appearing on trees and hedges. Hawthorns are sprouting more widely. On horse chestnut trees, the first of the big sticky buds are opening, and the leaves when they emerge look at first like green paws. On weeping willow trees there is a faint wash of green on the drooping boughs.

      There are flower buds on the crab apple trees: while they are still closed they look like little pink cherries but they will open into white flowers. Sallow bushes are turning into golden lamps on the riverbanks, as the button-like silvery catkins that line the twigs swell everywhere into bushy flowers covered with yellow pollen.

      At dawn, blackbirds, song thrushes and robins are now singing all together but as soon as it is light enough they come down to the ground and start searching for food. This is not yet the full dawn chorus, as there are some individuals of these species that have not started singing yet, and there are also more wrens, chaffinches and greenfinches to join in, besides the summer visitors to come in April.

      

13th March

      THE FIRST BUMBLEBEES are sweeping along the lanes, humming loudly as they go. They gather for the golden pollen on the sallow trees. Many of these early bumblebees are members of a small species with an orange-red tail; larger ones will follow. They are all females who were fertilised last autumn – the males died afterwards – and they have hibernated in warm crevices or behind moss. Now they will start looking for underground holes where they can build up a store of wax and pollen and lay the eggs from which a new generation will spring.

      Skylarks are singing over the fields. Sometimes they move forward slowly into the wind, but when their flight speed is the same as that of the wind confronting them they hang motionless in the sky. They are like flags, flying above a territory that they have staked out on the land below. If other skylarks come into that space, they drop down and there is a skirmish, with the rivals flitting to and fro just above the ground. Later they will build nests of grass under a tussock, or in a hollow beneath beet leaves. They are good runners as well as good fliers.

      

14th March

      THE BLUE FLOWERS of common field speedwell, or Persian speedwell, are making bright borders alongside the young corn and oilseed rape. The plants are tall and sturdy, with broad leaves, while the flowers have three blue lobes with dark veins, and a whitish lower lobe. The speedwell family is a large one, and two other species will soon be following at the field edges. One is ivy-leaved speedwell, a sprawling, weedy-looking plant with small lilac flowers and leaves shaped as the name indicates. The other is the most handsome of the speedwells: the germander speedwell, or bird’s-eye, which has gleaming blue flowers with bright white centres.

      Great tits are now singing for much of the day. Besides their best-known song, the loud, repeated ‘teacher, teacher’, they have a number of others, including a triple-note variant of that song, and a strange combination, also steadily repeated, of a thin note and a faint click.

      

15th March

      MAD MARCH HARES are out in the fields. They rise up on their back legs and box with each other. These pairs of pugilists were long thought to be bucks fighting each other, but now it is believed that they are generally a female hare fighting off the attentions of a male.

      At any event, this is the mating season for hares, and the females, or does, will soon give birth to three or four leverets. Unlike young rabbits, these are born above ground without the protection of a hole. They lie in hollows in the grass or green corn all day, and their mother comes back to suckle them at night. Many of them are caught by foxes.

      Badgers already have small cubs in their setts, which can be whole underground palaces of tunnels and sleeping chambers. The parents have dozed away much of the winter, but now they are coming out to dig for earthworms, and to snap up any other food they can find, from nuts and fungi to frogs and young rabbits. The cubs stay below in their bed of dry grass, waiting for their mother’s milk. They will venture forth in April, and then will soon start fending for themselves.

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