starlings
19 Jul 2022
Various people have asked me about the dense flock of 'black' birds that keeps whooshing around in a tightly-packed formation, settling occasionally on the wires like something out of Hitchcock's The Birds. They're starlings, a mixed flock of adults and juveniles (the brown ones). Quite good to see them in fact since starling numbers in Britain have declined sharply in recent years.
Jeremy
signs of autumn
09 Jul 2022
Swallows on the wires and sand martins tracking South. Also two common sandpipers on the pools – post-breeding migrants from Scotland or the North of England probably.
Jeremy Mynott
Female marsh harrier
08 Jul 2022
Female marsh harrier hunting near Pumping Station.
First grayling butterflies of the summer have emerged in my garden.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: a Local Success Story
I see that the Minsmere bird reserve is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. Congratulations! It’s a haven for all kinds of wildlife, of course – some 6,000 different species at the last count – but its long history has been especially associated with one particular bird, the avocet, surely one of our most charismatic national species. Avocets are quite unmistakable. They’re tall, graceful wading birds, a picture of elegance with that pied black-and-white plumage – both bold and delicate at the same time, like fine porcelain. They have unusual upturned bills, which they swish from side to side, sifting the saline pools for small crustaceans and invertebrates, and they have those lovely long legs in an extraordinary shade of pale blue. Even the name sounds attractive. It’s derived from the Italian and sounds so much more elegant, as you might expect from the Italians, than the old English names of scoop-bill, clinker, yelper and barker. Avocets are impossible to miss if you are near a colony, since they keep up a chorus of soft fluting calls should you approach too close. In fact, if they think their chicks are threatened they can become quite aggressive and the avocets turn into exocets, dive-bombing the intruder.
Even if you’ve never seen a real avocet you must have seen an image of one, since they have long been the official RSPB logo and appear everywhere on their badges, signs and products. This was a very shrewd commercial choice by the RSPB, since not only are the birds beautiful to look at but they are also the perfect symbol of a great conservation success story. Avocets disappeared from Britain as a breeding species in the nineteenth century, as a consequence of human persecution and wetland drainage, but they miraculously reappeared in 1947 just after the end of the war, ironically returning to a habitat of flooded farmland and marshland which had been deliberately created as part of our coastal defences. They found their own way back to the Suffolk coast at two places: Minsmere, which is now the premier RSPB reserve in the country, and Havergate Island in the Ore estuary, where they bred successfully under conditions of high security (the RSPB even had a secret code name for the place – Zebra Island’). Since then avocets have spread along the East Anglian coast in suitable habitats, but they still need our protection in the breeding season, especially from uncontrolled dogs on the local seawalls – we had a tragic incident at Shingle Street a few years back. Let’s help preserve our avocets as a happy symbol of national recovery and regeneration – the return of a native.
Jeremy Mynott
11 May 2022
Village Voices Nature Note: Despite Everything, Spring!
04 Mar 2022
I’m writing this on Friday 4 March. The forecast yesterday was for a mild night with a light southerly breeze and I felt something special might be about to happen, a little annual miracle that means more to me every passing year. So I went out at first light, senses flaring and on full alert. I only had to walk a short way before I heard it – a clear double refrain in the still morning air, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff. Yes, I shouted, and punched the air like a demented football fan. The chiffchaff had returned – on exactly the same day as last year and even to the very same bushes. Magic!
The chiffchaff is just a tiny olive-green warbler, weighing no more than a 2p piece, but it’s always the first migrant to make the long journey back. I listen out for it eagerly every March and think of it surfing the green wave of spring that travels steadily north across Europe, bringing with it a new season of light, warmth and growth. Twenty years ago they would arrive here about 15 March and fifty years ago 31 March – that’s global warming for you, but the thrill has been the same each time.
This year is different in another way, though. It’s just as exciting to hear this herald of spring again, but it’s terribly poignant. The news from Ukraine is almost unbearable and other, human, migrants are streaming across Europe in despair. It will soon be the spring equinox, the moment in the year when night equals day and the forces of darkness and light are in equilibrium. That’s a perfect metaphor for this conjunction of destruction in the human world and rebirth and renewal in nature. I had the same feeling in March 2020 when the Covid pandemic first took a grip, right at the start of one of the best springs in living memory. The spring was unstoppable then and so it will be again this year, just as the tides will rise and fall every day, regardless of human disasters. And we can find hope, beauty and consolation in these natural rhythms, of which we are an integral part, if we respond to them fully. That’s not evading the bad news but counteracting it.
You can listen to the chiffchaff’s onomatopoeic song, if you just google chiffchaff song. Some old country names represent this as chip-chop, chit-chat, siff-siaff (Welsh) or tiuf-teuf (Irish); while the Dutch call it tjift-tjaf and the Germans zilp-zalp. Whatever the language, by the time you read this the chiffchaffs will have arrived all over Europe, with the promise of spring in their songs.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: A Local Exotic
01 Jul 2021
A neighbour reported an unusual bird on their lawn the other day. They wondered if it could be some exotic visitor from overseas. It was quite large, they said – the size of jackdaw but slimmer and very brilliantly coloured, flashing a bright yellow rump in a V-shape up the soft green back. And it sported a most striking head pattern with a black mask enclosing a white eye, topped off with a scarlet crown. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in a tropical jungle, but here it was hopping about on the grass in front of their house. When disturbed, it flew off in a bounding flight and appeared to clamp itself, as if magnetised, on to the trunk of a nearby willow.
Well, that was a very good description of what is certainly a charismatic bird, but not in this case an exotic one – it’s a common British resident, the green woodpecker. We naturally associate all our native woodpeckers with trees, as their name suggests, and they do indeed use their powerful dagger bills to excavate nest holes in tree-trunks, probe the bark for grubs and drum on hollow branches to advertise their presence both to rivals and potential mates. But the green woodpecker has also developed this further habit of using its formidable drilling equipment to dig into ant colonies in our lawns and lick up the inhabitants with their specially adapted tongues.
The artist Leonardo da Vinci, who observed everything with insatiable curiosity, was fascinated by woodpecker tongues – why were they so long, he asked, and how were they housed in the woodpecker’s head when they were retracted? The answer was later revealed by dissection and is illustrated in this little diagram of a skeleton: the tongue is literally wrapped around the brain and its elastic movements are controlled by specially adapted bony cartilages.
In spring, the male green woodpecker has a very distinctive territorial call, a descending peal of (usually seven) loud ‘laughing’ notes that gave the bird its old country name ‘yaffle’. Another folk name was ‘rain bird’. It was widely believed that the yaffle’s call presaged rain, which would bring out the insects on which the bird feeds. An easy prediction to make in Britain, perhaps, when it is always about to rain anyway, but quite false. Possibly it derived from an even older, more primitive belief in the woodpecker as the ‘thunder bird’, who summons up the rain with his resounding drum-roll and wears the red badge of lightning on his crest.
Anyway, no need to invoke foreign exotica with such wonders close to home.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: The Sign of Summer
01 Jun 2021
I’ve been keeping a log-book. Literally. I’ve been very restricted in my walking recently by a hip-problem (now fixed, I hope), but I found a mossy old log by the river I could just get to and rest on, completely out of sight. I’ve been sitting quietly on that, making notes on what comes by. It’s a quite different kind of nature-watching from the one I’m used to – striding out freely and actively exploring the world. But it turns out to have its own compensations when you adjust to it, which you have to do mentally as well as physically. Your world has shrunk to a radius of a few yards, but it’s still teeming with life. And instead of pursuing nature you just have to be still and let it come to you. Which it does, surprisingly quickly.
After a few minutes, I hear a rustling very close by. A beetle? A mouse? No, it’s a wren, working its way busily through the undergrowth, picking up tiny insects invisible to my eye with deft little pecks and pounces. I don’t move a muscle, trying to look like an extension of the log. The wren’s nearly at my feet when it senses an unusual presence and flicks a little way off to continue its rummaging, but not before I get my best-ever view of its subtly variegated dead-leaf colours and the stiff little cocked tail.
Now a moorhen paddles slowly by in the river and a male blackcap sings from a branch – so close that its pure fluting song is almost too piercing. After an hour of immobility, I’m almost a woodland feature. A seven-spot ladybird lands on my hand, some wood ants investigate my boots, and the wren makes another pass, more boldly this time. And now a butterfly settles right next to me in a patch of sunlight – a male orange-tip. What a beauty! This is the first I’ve seen this year and it really does capture the spirit of spring with those sunshine orange flashes on its wings. Soon there will be lots of them on the wing searching out their favourite plants, garlic mustard and lady’s smock, both them just coming into flower with perfect timing. The orange-tip’s Latin name is Anthocharis, flower grace, and the French call it L’aurore, the dawn, a nice suggestion of a new beginning.
Some people walk by just the other side of the river, another interesting species that doesn’t notice me, or much else. There’s a move to re-wild our landscapes, but I emerge from my immersion in nature feeling that we could all do with some rewilding ourselves. We’re part of nature too.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: The Rooks Return
01 Mar 2021
‘The Rooks have returned’ is a famous painting by the 19th century Russian landscape artist, Aleksey Savrasov, who was much influenced by Suffolk’s own John Constable. The picture celebrates the return of rooks to their traditional nesting site in his village. Russian winters are so hard that rooks are summer migrants there, so for him this was a joyful sign of spring. Rooks are resident with us all year round, of course, but they are early breeders and are already busy rebuilding their rookeries, like the one near Dumboy Cottage. You can see them flying in with new twigs to repair nests shredded by winter storms, and also sometimes cheekily pinching some choice sticks from their neighbours’ constructions – hence our term ‘to rook’, meaning to fleece someone. But they are essentially sociable birds, foraging and roosting together, and nesting in these densely packed colonies. The clamour from a rookery in the breeding season can be loud and raucous, to be sure, but the combined choral effect of all these indi- vidual conversations and altercations is powerfully evocative, even soothing.
As soon as a BBC drama features an English churchyard scene you know they’ll soon be dubbing in a sound-track of rooks cawing in the tree-tops, a subliminal reassurance of an enduring rural scene. Enduring except for the trees, that is. Rooks used to prefer mature elms, but they’ve gone; second choice was ash, becoming endangered; so now most often here, sycamore, beech and oak.
Rooks and crows are often mistaken for each other, but the old country saying largely holds good, ‘A crow in a crowd is a rook and a rook on its own is a crow’. Shakespeare didn’t help this confusion with his line in Macbeth, ‘The crow makes wing to the rooky wood’. Scarecrows are misnomers, too, since it’s rooks they are meant to drive off the crops. In fact, this is doubly inappropriate since rooks feed mainly on grubs and insects, so serve to protect the crops, and that despite their scientific name of frugilegus ‘crop-picker’. Rooks and crows look quite different, anyway. Rooks have that whitish patch of bare skin round the base of the bill – visible from quite a distance; and their plumage seems one size too large for them, especially on the thighs, which look as if they are covered by baggy, feathered shorts. They walk differently, too. Crows stalk about rather menacingly, while rooks waddle.
The collective term for rooks is a ‘parliament’. I used to think that too staid a word for their noisy, obstreperous gatherings. But the way things have gone recently in the world’s parliaments, I now think it may be unfair to rooks.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: Speedy Whistlers
01 Feb 2021
Our arable fields can look very bare in winter, almost devoid of life. But look more closely, and listen. We have visitors from the north, flocks of them, sometimes noisy. Golden plovers, who arrived here in the autumn from the northern uplands where they breed. In summer plumage these are gorgeous birds, sporting gold-spangled upperparts and peat-black bellies, divided by a sinuous white stripe running down their sides. Nonetheless, they are surprisingly well camouflaged against the variegated colours of the moorland heather and you may only become aware of them from hearing a plaintive, fugitive whistle, almost lost in the wild and windy spaces. The two parts of the golden plover’s scientific name are in fact somewhat oxymoronic in combination: Pluvialis apricaria ‘rain-bird, basking in the sun’, but given the changeable upland climate it was an easy solution to connect the birds with both sun and showers, I suppose.
In winter they migrate south to our fields and marshes, where they congregate
in large flocks, though they can still be hard to locate on the ground since they have now exchanged their contrasting summer colours for drab browns and greys that again give them perfect camouflage, only this time against the dun shades of the earth and mud on which they are feeding. If you carefully scan the fields from Shingle Street to East Lane, however, you will eventually make out the hunched profiles of some golden plovers on the ground. And when you have picked up a few, look again and you may find there are not just five, but fifty, or even a hundred or more, which gradually emerge from the background. They have a distinctive way of feeding – walking briskly head down for a few yards; a quick stab for worms or grubs; pausing, more upright and alert; then marching off again at different angle.
Every now and again, for no reason apparent to us, the flock may take off in a sudden dread, and now you hear those individual whistles combined into one very distinctive but still muted chorus. These flocks swirl around in dense formations before the birds settle again back again on the ground in their invisibility cloaks. They are powerful flyers and, bizarrely, played a part in the creation of a publishing phenomenon. A spirited argument had broken out in an Irish shooting party in 1951 about which British game bird was the fastest flyer – red grouse or golden plover? So Sir Hugh Beaver, who was one of the shooters but also happened to be head of the Guinness brewery, commissioned a volume to settle this and other such inconsequential facts – The Guinness Book of Records, which is now an annual best-seller.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: Seasonal Cycles
01 Oct 2020
Just as the first arriving swallows in mid-April marked the beginning of spring, so the flock I now see gathering on the telephone wires portend our autumn. There must have been some fifty of them there this morning, all chittering and chattering furiously, as if psyching themselves up for their long journey to come. Every now and then, for no apparent reason, they suddenly all take off together in what birders call a ‘dread’ (a habit that swallows share with terns); they freak out in a cloud of fluttering wings, circle around together for a few seconds, and then settle back again, but restlessly, as if waiting for their flight number to come up on the celestial departure board. Strange to reflect that these same swallows will soon be swooping over elephants and ostriches in South Africa. We think of them leaving home to spend the winter there, but it will be spring in South Africa when they arrive, so who is to say where their true home is? It’s a continuous cycle of arrivals and departures.
We’ve just been through the seasonal spring cycle ourselves, one with its own strange paradoxes. There were the contrasts between the record-breaking sunny weather and the looming climate crisis, and between relief in the wonderful new silences and the horror at the headlong progress of the pandemic. The national lockdown rightly imposed serious restrictions, but many people found it liberating to take up new interests or revive old ones. They lost themselves and found themselves in activities like gardening, music, art, physical exercise, reading, crafts and games. Nature too provided great solace as people saw and heard things close to their own homes they had never properly appreciated before. As soon as lockdown was announced on 23 March, I agreed with two naturalist friends living in different parts of the country, Michael McCarthy (London) and Peter Marren (Wiltshire), that we would each keep detailed diaries of our experiences of this extraordinary Covid spring and then combine them to share with others our sense of the delight and inspiration the natural world can offer in a dark time of stress and anxiety. We made a book of it, which will be published in mid-October. The Consolation of Nature is the story of what we discovered by literally walking out of our front doors.
These seasonal cycles are just that, cycles in which the end of one season is the beginning of the next, which in turn brings us back to the beginning again, but not quite the same as we were before. Hopefully knowing more, caring more and more deeply grounded in the only world we have.
Jeremy Mynott
