Outdoors
| Feb 2012 On December 14, two days after the ferocious gales had died down, a wren was lying dead at our back doorstep. A perfect wee creature, which I had never been able to study closely before: its upper beak delicately downcurved, its wings and tail barred dark-brown, mid-brown, and buff, like a miniature hen pheasant. It was intact.So what killed it? Was it dashed against the wall by gusts of more than 60 miles an hour? Had it reached the end of its natural life (probably not more than three years)? Wrens “suffer high mortality in long periods of freezing weather,“ according to Alan Richards’s invaluable British Birds. It had been less cold than usual. Wrens are the commonest British bird, at about 10 million pairs, which always amazes me because we see little of them as they scurry mouse-like in sheltered neuks of the garden. Although this wee beauty has now gone from us, her (or his) kind will survive and thrive, because it takes a lot to threaten a species. When sparrowhawks killed hundreds of great tits in Oxfordshire a few years ago, the birds began to raise more young and the population soon recovered. It’s only ourselves who devastate a species (peregrines, skylarks, lapwings) by using poisonous chemicals or encroaching on wild land. Even the harshest winter doesn’t permanently threaten the smaller birds, and the mild winter now upon us is letting us all down lightly. Mud and waterlogging are our problem just now, not frost and ice. In thirty-three years I’ve never known the paths so muddy, enough to suck the shoes off your feet. Sheets of water spread across the fields down on the Moss, puddles join across the roads to make shallow fords. The incessant rain and drizzle have sent me back to my weather records. It looks as though Burton gets about 1200 millimetres of rain per year on average. Our wettest year recently had been 1998: 1367 mm. In 2011 we had 1400 mm, so if you’ve been feeling a bit damp or rusty, it’s no illusion, we really have been soaked. Everyone has been noticing the uncanny mildness since autumn, with unseasonable shows of blossom on flowering shrubs and early surfacing of daffodil shoots. On January 8 our first snowdrop bud showed white in its (permanently sunless) flowerbed - sixteen days earlier than last year. So our weather carries on in the dreary vein that has become normal. Until early this century a barometer reading of 1040 millibars was typical of the finest weather-spells and 1030 was quite common. Since 2007 this has been rare. The weather experts on TV haven’t mentioned it. Presumably the jet stream has moved further south than usual and stayed there. (Why?) Most of us would probably choose a few balmy heatwaves in the summer and a few cracking frosts in the winter. Unfortunately nature won’t be asking us. |
