“Phenology refers to the timings of cyclical or seasonal biological events, such as migrations, egg laying, flowering, and hibernation. Many species of plants and animals have life cycle events that are influenced by climatic factors.” So says sciencedirect.com
I’ve lived in this house for 23 years. It’s in the middle of a country estate, so we have a good variety of habitats to hand. There’s farmed land, both arable and pastoral. There’s woodland: some managed for timber; some managed for shooting; some left to its own devices. There’s gardens (yes, yes, I know that should have been ‘there are’, but it doesn’t sound suitably folksy). There’s dilapidated farm buildings with inviting eaves. There’s even an ornamental lake (oh, how I love to give people directions to the house over ‘the ornamental lake’). Ok, so we’re lacking in savannah and I’d love a bit of tropical rainforest, some craggy moorland or maybe even some coastline, but I’m doing pretty well, right?
Over those 23 years, I’ve observed the seasonal patterns. Migrations come and go; that’s what they’re meant to do, after all. The martins and swallows love those unimproved barns with their nesting holes; the geese migrate by local landmarks, such that the neighbouring farm, in the naming of territory, refers to their lakeside abode as Gooseshit Field – oh boy! does it get slippy round there. I’ve watched the ebb and flow as species rise and fall in dominance. There were a few years when it was all jays around here. The tall trees behind the hall are full of Robert Smith barnets, crying out to be called a rookery, but it’s jackdaws that dominate the corvids. One year in the Big Garden Birdwatch, about which I have evangelised here before, I recorded over 40 jackdaws landed in the garden at one time. They are big lads and lasses, so that’s quite an impressive sight.
My journeys to and from home are usually non-motorised, which gets me closer to the wildlife; shiftwork and nocturnal social habits do the same. I have cycled up the long avenue of the drive, following a buzzard swooping low just a few yards ahead of me. So many times after catching the last train home, my day has been lifted when I’ve surprised and followed a badger back down the drive.
Time moves on. Against her wishes, my farmer neighbour saw the badgers culled round here during lockdown. That saddened me, and I haven’t seen a live badger since. Then one morning soon after, I chased a hare up the lane – the first one I’d seen on the estate in 20 years. Was there a connection? It seemed possible. Badgers will snuffle out leverets, poorly protected in their scrapes. Removing a level in the natural hierarchy might make space for the species on the next rung. The old boys in the taproom of my local thought it possible, and these are all sons of the soil with the knowledge of the land. But now this year, I have followed a hare into my garden, and woken the next morning to find it still there. He seems to have taken up residence. The conversation in the taproom resumed, but the reasoning had changed. Buzzards are down in numbers, hit by bird flu. I hadn’t noticed, but now realise that it’s true. That will also have benefited the leverets. It also explains why the woods are teeming with grey squirrels, where there have been none before; the buzzards used to feast on them.
It’s all dilettante stuff, of course. Nothing is certain and certainly not peer-reviewed. But I love it. The possibilities, the ruminating, the exchange of local observations. Then there’s the serious stuff, like today’s report about declining species abundance in the UK. The natural world is shifting around us.
So, do you make your own observations? Have you been residentially stationary for long enough to notice how things have changed around you, wherever you are in the world?
And when you see a hare before it vanishes to security, do you burst into song, like I do?
Bootiful, shire/shear poetry, just what I needed! And the song is not half bad!
Magpies, grey (US) squirrels and wood pigeons dominate here… in PR2’s suburbia!
It has been 5 years since I last saw a frog in our garden and a few more years since a sparrowhawk devoured a pigeon on our lawn. The only regulars are wee Jenny wren and Cyril the grey, burying his acorns under our grass.
Seasonally we still have visits from the Pied Wagtails, the Chaffinches and the odd Jay.
I like to watch the local suburban wildlife in a fairly dilettante (great word btw) way, just the usual – finches, wagtails and jays are always a pleasure as I don’t see them every day. Buzzards are newcomers in central Essex and last year was the first time I saw them in walking distance from my house, 5 of them circling high above a field that has been left as public open space in a new housing development.
Buzzards and goldfinches are far more numerous than they once were, though I can’t remember the last time I saw a bullfinch or even a chaffinch. I did once see a fledgling, probably in its first trip away from the nest bob across the river Chelmer and land on a fence, where it was instantly ended by a sparrowhawk which just materialised. If it hadn’t been for the bars I saw on the hawk’s tail in the brief struggle I wouldn’t have know exactly what had happened.
Mammals are fewer, usually squirrels or foxes though my other half did see a badger waddling down the road on a late night drive home. I’ve never seen a live one. Very rarely I’ll see a hare around here, but the last time I saw one was on a flight coming in to land at Dublin airport. I looked it up later and it seems that the land was ideal for hares before the airport was built and they came back afterwards.
I was thinking about the changes only the other day, we’ve been in our house 22 years when we moved here we had swifts screaming between the houses can’t say when I last saw them doing that though it’s a good few years. I’m happy to say I’ve seen them flying overhead though.The derelict mill was repurposed as housing so they probably no longer nest nearby.
Saw a hummingbird hawk moth last month nearby I’ve not seen one for ten years.
Years ago staying near Dumfries and speaking to the owner of the B&B I noticed some jays which we don’t often see here. The owner shuddered and explained they were everywhere. It appears they’d filled the magpies niche and there were no mags about.
Watch the nightly flypast of the tawny owl as it heads to the nearby woods to hunt and our resident pipistrelle is still about.
The Creggan White Hare! What a very fine song that is. I discovered it on the Cambridge Folk Festival Playlist this summer.
And thanks for a very enjoyable and inspiring description of your hood. I will give some though about the passing of the seasons here in the Stockholm suburbs and the large nature reserve which is five minutes walk away.
Here is a treat for you all. The Instagram account of Kim Forchhammar, a Danish amateur photographer who lives in our neighbourhood. A poet of the lens whose photos bring great joy to many of his neighbours.
https://www.instagram.com/forchham/
Since lockdown we seem to have had an increase in the sighting of wild deer which is reasonably unexpected in our cobbled northern town, Whilst out on my bike I have more than one leap our in front of me and on one occasion this year cycling along a country lane noticed a pack of large dogs running in the field alongside me. When focused realised it was 8 deer and we rode alongside each other for about a mile. Magical.
It’s a bike thing. We are so quiet and, dare I say, more graceful than a walker. Creatures seem less disturbed by us until we get very close. When I lived in Australia, it was the bike rides that got me closest to the wildlife. I specifically remember a ride along the Grand Ridge Road in Gippsland, freewheeling past wallabies and wombats. And, yes, I got divebombed by magpies.
On another occasion, I rounded a corner in Kakadu to find a water buffalo very close in front of me. Fortunately, he was more interested in something off screen, as I lacked Crocodile Dundee skills of persuasion. I waited silent until this double decker of meat thumped off into the bush. Slightly scary, but utterly memorable.
Did I ever tell the story of when I got overtaken by a hare on my evening bike ride?
I was around eleven or twelve, I believe, and lived in a residential area surrounded by nature. Hares, foxes, badgers etc were very common, but deers hadn’t started to invade gardens yet back then (late 70s).
In the summer I rode my bike from morning til night with my friends, only going back home in the evening to have my dinner. This evening, as I was riding down the last stretch of road before the crossing where I turned to get to our house, I heard a soft sound coming from behind me, and as it got closer I could guess that it was caused by running paws. Soon the noise had caught up with my bike and I turned my head left to see a gigantic hare – almost the size of my bike – running just beside me, close enough to touch (which, of course, I didn’t).
At the exact moment when I turned my head to look at it, the hare turned its head to look at me! We had a lovely unspoken (duh) moment when our eyes met, the hare seemed to me to sort of give me a nod as a polite “Good evening!” before easily speeding up enough to overtake my bike.
And the way he did it was so enchanting, having swerved around me and my bike he then swerved steadily in towards the curb, following next to it all the way to the crossing, where he took the soft, invisible curve as well as any licensed driver, of course keeping on the correct side of the streets at all times.
Next to our house was a set of stairs that led into a nature park up on a hill – one of a few they didn’t bother blowing up when they built up the area – and rather than jumping up through the grass next to it the hare took the stairs in a couple of jumps and disappeared into the park.
I, having followed it on my bike to see where it was going (and also because it was where I lived), was left with the most joyous feeling, laughing in wonder about the way that hare knew to follow the roads in a way that no traffic cop would have reason to fine it for!
Probably my most treasured memory of experiences with wildlife and nature.
That’s a really wonderful story,@Locust. There’s just one small detail that troubles me: “a gigantic hare – almost the size of my bike”
Either your bike was rather tiny or the hare had been genetically enhanced. I need to go for a stroll in your part of town some time!
Yesterday, on our Saturday afternoon walk through Nacka Reservat from Sickla to Björkhagen, we encountered this beautiful fellow.
He wouldn’t let us get too near, but seemed to be interested in us in a nonchalant sort of way.
Well, @Kaisfatdad, I was a kid at the time, and I had a smaller bike than I actually needed – it took a couple more years until my mom bought me a new, big bike…we didn’t have a lot of money to spend and my old bike worked fine.
But adult hares can become really huge, honestly! The ones you tend to see most often are the young hares, and they’re not that impressive. But this guy was a veteran. However, when I say that he was “almost the size of my bike”, I mostly mean height-wise. His body didn’t stretch from the front wheel to the back wheel! That would have been more scary than lovely, probably! 🙂
What a wonderful story! That has made the whole thread worthwhile.
Hear hear!
Locust, you are the AW’s very own Scheherazade!
I’ve just got my stereo hearing back (blocked lugs) so I’ll have a listen to the hare from Creggan but have a hare from Whitby.
Inner city dweller here, although surrounded by big nature parks in all directions.
I’m fairly certain that the goshawk population has increased in later years, because there are very few pigeons around, and they used to be everywhere. Keeping them away from my balcony used to be a part-time job!
The wild rabbits, who used to be equally abundant, all died a couple of years ago in some disease I assume, and they haven’t returned. But lots of hares, see them almost every night. Sometimes also foxes, near my place of work, but not as often as before.
It seems to me that the blackbirds are fewer than before – I used to hear them singing from the rooftops through the nights in summer, but in the past couple of years it’s become a rare treat. Don’t see them as often either.
Very few bees, bumblebees and wasps. Met my first wasp of the year on Tuesday!
(Huge increase in the dog population since covid!)
It’s moose hunting season here in Sweden; one had to be shot yesterday because he got onto the metro train tracks in a Stockholm suburb, and wouldn’t leave!
One of the regular contributors to the RSPB magazine is David Lindo, styling himself ‘The Urban Birder’. It’s always an eye-opener for just how much wildlife there is under people’s noses even in the city. Even so, hares in the city; that does surprise me, given their habitual shyness.
Dang! I’m off on another song!
Stockholm hares are not so shy. On my walks home from the Metro, later in the evening, I quite often see one having a munch of grass. And as long as I don’t approach him, he just gets on with his meal.
At home my nature watching is mostly seeing the multitudes of bees and more occasional butterflies that frequent the giant lavender bushes under our window. Our last bee of the year was in late November last year.
At work, it’s a secure campus where rabbits and hares thrive. I can look out my office window and see 9 or 10 large hares grazing peacefully. “The kangaroos are back Ted”, is the usual acknowledgement.
I used to have a different office on the site where I catalogued over 30 species of birds looking out of my fire escape including the rare sight in Ireland of breeding flycatchers.
Since I was a child I’ve always looked out for the first swallows and martins of the year. They nest in a yard in the building I work in now. They were early this year – mid April and seemed to leave earluer than usual around 2 weeks ago. When I was a boy I’m sure we never saw them before the start of May.
The biggest change in Ireland in my time as a birdwatcher has been seeing buzzards colonising the Republic having been localised to Ulster until my first sightings in 2006. Perhaps it was in the small print of the Good Friday Agreement. Alas, lovely as it is to see them, it has now become a rarer thing to see kestrels hovering by a motorway whereas the buzzards are visible every mile or two. I love kestrels. We’ve had sparrowhawks and plenty of buzzards at work. The kestrels are rarer now and every now and then we are graced by the presence of a red kite or two. I’ve yet to see one troubling the rabbits or hares.
Ah, the arrival of the first swallows. I’ve got a song for that too!
I suspect the kites rely upon something else having done the troubling before they wade in.
Update. I’ve seen a hardy swallow still swooping around County Kildare today. He obviously missed the meeting.
It’s mainly the birds which I notice in Bonn. Geese migrate to the big park by the southern Rhine bridge in the winter and their arrival or departure is a v-shaped spectacle. Swifts bomb in and out of the trees along the road outside our house in the summer, morning and evening. Crows nest nightly in trees by the north bridge over the Rhine and it can be amazing seeing them settle in for the night, or have an early morning debate before heading off for the day’s tasks. There’s a patch of heathland near my daughter’s kindergarten where some years ago I witnessed a pitched aerial battle over territory between crows and magpies. Pleasingly I think the crows won.
Parakeets settled in the Rhineland many years ago, and a troop of them flying resplendent in green plumage, squawking away over our heads on the rooftop garden is a delightful sight. Woodpeckers make quite a row in the square opposite our house. We frequently see birds of prey hovering over fields and woodland near Bonn (it takes very little time to get to the countryside from here). There are ducks and swans on the Rhine.
There are fewer other animals. The woods west of here host boar and deer. Though many are tame and fenced, there were others which are wild and hunted.
For an urban setting, Bonn does quite well.
Phenology: one r away from a head rub.
Where I am lots of squirrels, groundhogs, gophers, raccoons, occasional deer, fox and coyote. There was even a bear spotting about 200 yards from my house earlier this year (it was trapped and returned to the wild).
Sadly the local turtle population seems to have been destroyed by urban development
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/blandings-turtles-ottawa-kanata-development-status-extinct-1.6980313
My job encourages my amateur surveys. Traversing the same railway lines through all the months enables plenty of compare-and-contrast, noticing when a particular strand of trees will start to turn (and when they start to shed their lovely leaves onto the railhead, the buggers). WhatsApp messages get exchanged with my mucker – ‘Heron at Lostock Junction’.
Here’s a suburban hare from the southern suburbs of Stockholm. It was taken in Dalen which these days is best known for its gangs. Although you’d scarcely be aware of that walking through it in the daytime.
Sadly, I didn’t take it myself. It was posted on Facebook by a lady in our local neighbourhood group and I liked it so much I just had to share it.
They are shy creatures but are a lot less shy after dark
We have lived in our house in Exmouth for over 30 years. In recent times we have made the gardens much more wildlife friendly and am happy to say that we have loads of bees and butterflies as well as other insect life these days. We added a pond a few years ago and that has become populated with dragonflies and the like, although frogs seem to have given us a swerve. We have a few resident hedgehogs which were never here before – we have three hog houses and have even caught small ones on our wildlife cameras tnis year.
The big change has been in bird visitors. We used to get countless species, but the tits have disappeared completely along with so many other small birds. We get jackdaws and woodpigeons, and we do have a resident sparrow group and robins, and occasionally see collared doves, but that’s about it. Grey squirrels plunder the bird food.