May is Out...

...or at least there are flowers on one particular Hawthorn, a red flowered tree in Kings Road, Plymouth, which always seems to be a few weeks in advance of the rest. People are casting clouts all over the place - the sun is shining, true, but the wind's still cold and the temperature in no way justifies the shorts and suntops I am seeing all over the place. The nearest I will get to 'summer' clothes for a while is the replacement of the woolly hat by a cotton one and a slightly thinner fleece!

The last few days have been wonderfully springlike. Every day there is more and more evidence of the changing season - that Hawthorn is a case in point, but it is happening everywhere. This year, as so often before, I promised myself that I would faithfully record the 'firsts' of spring, but as usual much of it has got away from me and caught me by surprise. There are bluebells now on the sunnier hedgebanks, although not yet in the woods. The hedges are white with blackthorn blossom, gardens pink with flowering cherries. The smallest wild cherry in the coombe, not much taller than I am, is already in bloom, as is the despised cherry laurel. Primroses, celandines, violets, campion, are all competing with the ramsons for ground space among the trees. Cuckoo-pint has come up overnight, seemingly.

One 'first' this afternoon - the first lizard I have seen in the wild in England. A male common lizard walked across the path in front of me in Seaton Valley and I was able to follow its movements for quite a while through the undergrowth. It can only recently have come out of hibernation.

It's almost midnight, and there has just been some consideable commotion outside in the coombe. First a jackdaw started chattering and scolding, then a female tawny owl screeched back. The jackdaw and the owl argued for a minute or two (I guess the owl woke the jackdaw up, rather than the other way round). Now the male and female owls are calling to each other up and down the coombe.

I don't know where the sparrows are nesting this year - not in the escallonia, or at least not yet, and not in the eaves and soffits of the empty house in Frobisher Drive because it isn't empty any more and it's all been repaired. They still seem to be going round in groups at the moment, although most of the other birds I see are courting or fighting. Blackbirds are being particularly aggressive at the moment. I keep seeing one blackbird which is brown but with a bright orange beak - is it male or female? No clue in any of my books...

Sparrows

My flat is almost at the top of a hill, and immediately outside is a coombe - a narrow steepsided wooded valley, with a stream, which leads down directly to the river Tamar by way of a mud creek. Because the coombe passes through so many different levels it is home to a very wide variety of birds, from wrens and goldcrests to black backed gulls. I once counted the birds I saw as I walked down one side, along the shore a little way and back up the other side, and there were over 30 species just on one walk. At the back, however, it is a very different story. Almost the only birds that ever visit my tiny back yard are sparrows. There's a very active colony in some dense shrubs outside my patch, and as I put out food for them they often visit in number. One day last week, in fact, I counted 34 on the ground at once, and there were others on the fence and in the silver birch trees on the other side.

Yesterday I saw the first fledgling on the fence begging for food. Today, in the midday break between heavy rainstorms, it seemed that every adult had a chick on each shoulder - the little flock has trebled in size overnight! I love watching the interaction between social birds like these, and looking at this flock and the many others I see in this area it is hard to believe that they are in very serious decline in this country. In the cities, anyway, they have all but disappeared, although in this small rural town they are thriving.