On spindle trees, the pink casing of the fruits has dried up to look like brown paper, while the orange berries that were hidden inside are now exposed but are still clinging on. Weeping willows are changing colour and falling at last. The grass or the water beneath is covered with long narrow leaves, yellow on one side, silvery-grey on the other.
Sometimes in the fields one sees a little flock of small, streaky-brown birds that fly up in an odd way, as though they were mounting a flight of stairs. They make a thin, piping call as they go. These are meadow pipits, which are in fact only found on farmland – and on ploughed land, rather than in meadows – in the winter. They nest mainly on moors and marshes.
SMALL FLOCKS OF chaffinches are feeding under the trees, especially where there is beechmast lying. Sometimes the flocks consist solely of the drab, yellowish-brown females. This is because among Scandinavian chaffinches the female birds may leave for the winter and come to Britain, while the pink-chested males stay behind, or follow later. The Latin name for the chaffinch, coelebs, meaning ‘bachelor’, is derived from this practice.
When the chaffinches fly up from the ground they are easily recognised by thier double white wing-bars, but they usually disperse very quickly among the treetops and it is not easy to follow them up.
Nuthatches are busy high in the trees, and often make a series of rapid, clipped whistling notes – very like the sound a stone makes when bounced across the ice on a lake. These blue-backed birds bustle about on the branches, and will sometimes walk down a trunk head first. They hold on with their very strong claws. They wedge nuts in cracks in the bark, and break the shells by hammering them with their beak. They also eat insects, and at present can be seen peering into clusters of ash seeds in case there are any small creatures to be found there.
THE CATKINS ARE already swinging on some hazel bushes. They are next spring’s male flowers. They appear in the autumn as tight green clusters, like a bird’s foot, but loosen as the pollen swells in them and dangle merrily from the twigs, and are then called ‘lambs’ tails’. At present, many of them are a bright lime green, but they will soon be more of a lemon yellow. The female flowers, which are like tiny crimson stars, will appear on the twigs in February.
In woods, coppiced hazels are still sometimes found in spaces between the tall trees. These are bushes that have been cut down so that they grow up again in a circle of long shoots around the base. These flexible shoots are then used in thatching and to make fences. Coppices are good places for woodland flowers to grow in the spring, but the bushes need to be protected from roe deer that nibble the bark.
Pheasants stalk about in the coppices, grubbing up roots to eat under the fallen leaves, but they often fly up onto a high oak bough to roost at night, out of reach of foxes.
BARK HAS BEEN falling from the trunks of London plane trees (as they are called all the way from Central America to China). The bark flakes off from the middle and upper part of the trunk, leaving creamy patches showing beneath. These patchwork trunks are most noticeable in the autumn and early winter. London planes are very tolerant trees, thriving in most kinds of soil, resisting drought, smog and fog, and accepting both shady and sunny situations. This is why they have been planted so widely, especially in cities and towns. They are actually hybrid trees, a cross between the oriental plane, which grows beside streams in Greece and Turkey, and a much more robust species of plane tree that is native to eastern parts of North America. At present the plane twigs are crowded with bobble-shaped seed balls which will crumble in the spring.
A few wild flowers have survived into the new year. Here and there a large dandelion, often half-closed, can be found in the grass. Many lawns are still sprinkled with a few daisies, their petals closed up when the skies are grey. On bramble bushes, a solitary white flower may linger among the dark green leaves and the withered blackberries.
SNOW ON THE grass in parks and gardens sends blackbirds, song thrushes and robins under the hedges to look for food. The blackbirds are particularly noisy as they hop about on the dry leaves, and turn them over to look for insects lurking beneath them.
Larger birds such as carrion crows and magpies venture out onto pasture and playing fields if the snow is not too deep, and poke about in it. Birds that feed mainly in trees, such as blue tits and great tits, are affected only if the frost is severe enough to coat the twigs and branches with ice. This makes it much harder for them to get at the small insects and the moth eggs that they normally consume in large quantities. Bird tables and hanging peanut feeders become popular, and in the past year or two long-tailed tits have learnt the trick and started to visit them in hard weather.
All birds puff out their feathers in freezing weather, to insulate themselves with a layer of air and so keep warm. The poet Robert Graves observed that ‘puffed up feather and fearless approach’ indicated hunger in birds, but that in man these signs revealed ‘belly filled full’.
RABBIT TRACKS IN the snow can easily be identified. There are two oblong footprints side by side in the front, and two similar prints one behind the other in the rear. Oddly enough the two footprints in the front are made by the hind legs, and the two footprints at the back are made by the forelegs. This is because the running rabbit puts its two front feet down one after the other, then vigorously propels its two hind feet together in front of them. And so it goes on, launching forward with its front feet again, and usually travelling a good distance, then bringing its hind legs up and past them as before.
Hares leave a similar pattern in the snow, but their feet – and the hollows they leave in the snow – are distinctly larger. Hare tracks also sometimes show that they have made a huge jump to one side and gone off in another direction – probably to shake off foxes following their scent.
Fox prints in the snow are very like dog prints (but the pads under the dogs’ feet are closer together). The prints appear in pairs, since in snow the animals put their hind foot exactly in the print made by the forefoot.
THE SNOW HAS made the Lawson (or Lawson’s) cypresses stand out, particularly in parks and churchyards. They are tall, smooth, dark green spires, but there are usually enough ragged leafy edges for snow to settle on them. The leaves are scaly and slightly sticky, and have a resinous smell like parsley. The original trees come from the hillsides of Oregon and California, but they are now the commonest cypresses to be seen in Britain. They lend a gloomy dignity to gravesides. There are also many cultivated varieties, some of them a much brighter green, some golden-yellow. They can be used for hedges.