often clustered close together to make the process more efficient. One species of woodlouse rolls up, when exposed, into a shiny ball that looks as if it is armour-plated, and drops to the ground to escape. At one time, these little rolled-up crustaceans used to be prescribed as medicine by quack doctors, because of their resemblance to a pill.
Centipedes may also be found lying under the bark in winter, keeping very still, but they too come to life when exposed to light and air, and fall to the ground writhing violently as they go. This startles and confuses a bird that might want to eat them.
The bark may also conceal millipedes – which do not have a full thousand legs, but have two pairs of legs on each segment of their body, as opposed to the centipedes, which only have one pair on each segment. On warm nights, centipedes go hunting for other tiny animals, while millipedes and woodlice eat dead plant matter, such as soft, rotting leaves.
SNOWDROPS ARE IN flower under the trees at the edge of damp lawns, and their leaves are coming up everywhere in woods. The pure white bells nod daintily on the green stalks; if you lift their heads and look inside, you see green, crescent-shaped blotches. They have a strong, sweet scent. The flat, grey-green leaves continue to grow after the flowers have opened. In some woods, especially in warm places such as the Inner Hebrides, they will soon be covering the whole woodland floor like a fall of snow. On valley sides, they can look like flowing white streams. They are members of the daffodil family.
A new voice in the woods in late January is that of the stock dove, whose song is a soft, rumbling ‘woo, woot’ that is easily overlooked. The bird too is elusive, since it is much shyer than the wood pigeon. It is a blue-grey dove, with a green sheen on its neck, and without the conspicuous white wing-bars and white neck-mark of the wood pigeon. Instead, it has a noticeable dark edge to its wings. Stock doves suffered badly from eating chemical seed dressings in the 1950s, but their numbers have since recovered.
There has been a considerable influx of waxwings from Scandinavia. These striking pink birds, with a crest like a quiff and red and yellow marks on their wings, feed on the decaying berries in hawthorn hedges, and on cotoneaster berries in places like supermarket car parks and roundabouts. At present they are steadily moving inland from the east coast.
HAZEL CATKINS ARE beginning to turn yellow as the pollen forms in them. But even on the same bushes as these loose-swinging catkins, others are still small and hard. Last year’s lime tree seeds, like miniature drumsticks attached to a wing, and last year’s hornbeam seeds, like Chinese lanterns, can also still be seen here and there on the branches. On ash trees, there are still dense clusters of seeds, or keys, very dark and damp-looking.
Black-headed gulls are beginning to acquire their chocolate-brown summer hoods. In winter, when many of them come inland, they have only a small mark behind the eye, but already more of the head is getting darker. Sometimes this process begins with another dark mark next to the first, like a pair of inverted commas. Juvenile black-headed gulls can be picked out by the brown bar on their wings and their black tail-band. Some of them stay on playing fields when the adults have gone to their nesting colonies.
THERE IS MORE life stirring in the woods. Grey squirrel males are chasing the females, with two or three of them sometimes joining in the pursuit: they go round and round the trunks and along the branches, with much excited chatter and daring leaps from tree to tree. Green woodpeckers are beginning to make their mating and territorial call: this is a soft, mellow laugh, easily distinguishable from the harsh, clattering laugh they make when they are alarmed.
The small, bright green leaves of wood sorrel are coming through on damp woodland banks. They have long stems and three heart-shaped leaflets with folds down the middle. These leaves are very sensitive and mobile: they close up when they are exposed to bright light, when it rains, and when night falls. The flimsy white flowers, with pink or purple veins, will not open until April.
ON ROCKY BEACHES all round the coast, turnstones are turning over the pebbles with their beaks to see what crabs or other sea creatures they can find beneath them.
Sometimes it is the clicking of the pebbles that draws attention to them, because they have mottled brown backs that camouflage them well against a background of dark shingle and seaweed. They also frequent sandy shores where there is a chance of finding mussels. They are winter visitors from the north, some of them from as far afield as Greenland and Canada. Before they leave for their nesting grounds in spring, their backs will turn a rather beautiful tortoiseshell and orange.
Another winter visitor from the Arctic is the purple sandpiper, which is sometimes seen in the company of turnstones. It has purplish-brown plumage, and is often very tame. It pokes about among the seaweed but does not flip stones over like the turnstones.
GREENFINCHES ARE FLYING about noisily in the treetops, and one or two have started to make their spring call. This long, wheezing note is usually heard a few weeks before they begin their chortling song. The male greenfinches are also acquiring brighter plumage, with a vivid green rump and golden-yellow patches on their wings and tail. This happens as the dull tips of their winter feathers slowly wear away. The females remain duller, browner birds, but they too have the yellow patches.
On some beech hedges and hornbeam hedges, dead brown leaves are still dense on the twigs, and the wind rustles in them. But the new buds, which the leaves have been sheltering from the cold, are showing through – in both these species, long spiky buds.
ON MANY HOLLY bushes, there are little yellow blotches on the upper surface of the older leaves. Sometimes a whole tree can be affected. Inside the blotches there lives the tiny grub of the holly leaf miner, tunnelling away. Its parent is a small fly that laid an egg there.
It is hard to get rid of these insects. Insecticidal sprays run off the shiny holly leaves. Blue tits are better at the job, and can often be seen pecking at the leaves to extract the creature inside. However, leaf miners do not seriously affect the basic health of the tree they colonise.
Blue tits are also beginning to sing their spring song – but it is not very noticeable. It is not much more than a run of their usual thin call-notes followed by a short trill. On a fine morning, they can already be seen looking into nest-boxes and other holes where they might decide to breed in the summer.
Great tits are now singing regularly. They have a variety of double or triple song phrases, vigorously repeated, but the one most frequently heard is a repeated double note that is like the steady, rhythmical wheezing made by a squeaky bicycle