In Like a Lion

March 2019

Winter ended on a high note with the warmest February week that I can remember.  The grass grew, the blossom bloomed and the bees hummed.  We saw five different kinds of butterfly that week, mostly the ones that hibernate such as brimstones, red admirals and peacocks, but I was surprised to see my first comma of the year and we even had a report of holly blue butterflies from the village. Ladybirds emerged too, but my top sighting was of a strange small bird flying in erratic circles over our farmyard. It turned out to be a medium sized bat. Other unusual sightings, such as swallows seen in Kent, were even reported on the national news while the tills rang out at garden centres and street cafes across southern England.

Of course it couldn’t last. Although temperatures remained moderate enough, March came in as it often does, with gale-force winds.  Who knows what will happen to those swallows, the bats or the butterflies?

At Paxton Pits we had a brilliant week for visitors, particularly over the half term holiday when we were caught out by children wanting to buy ice-creams…..in February! Then came the wind and after that the rain. March came in like a lion, as they say. Even so spring carried on marching ahead of itself. A little lonely chiffchaff sang its high pitched, onomatopoeic, two syllable song from by the trail entrance.  These little warblers always arrive in March, but this was a very early record. Those swallows would have flown all the way from South Africa to us but chiffchaffs mostly winter in Spain and around the Mediterranean Sea, so they have not got so far to come, but it is still a gamble for an insectivorous bird to set up home so early in the year.

The first chiffchaffs announced their arrival in Cambridgeshire at the same time as several small parties of sand martins. These little brown swallows are thought to winter in the Sahel, just south of the Sahara, but like their cousins the house martins, they probably wander much further south. When I worked in Tanzania I was shown clouds of swallows, swifts and martins feeding ahead of a huge dramatic thunderstorm around Arusha. 

Frogs emerged during that warm week but, once committed they can’t seem to shake that urge and spawn appeared around March 2nd.  Newts hung on for a few days until the rain came and then the great-crested newts were in our pond again on the 5th.

Smooth newt.

Talking of newts, the County Council started work on a new footpath between the village and the Reserve only to find a mass of great crested newts living in a British Telecom junction box that was buried below a telegraph pole. A bulky Irishman in day-glow Hi-Viz and a hard-hat came in to report that work would have to stop until the newt people came down from Peterborough to advise.  As no newts were found anywhere except at the box, it was reburied and work resumed on the 6th.

As we move on through the spring it becomes increasingly useful to have your sightings of the earliest arrivals, and everything you see on or near the Reserve.  For the second consecutive year our team of wildlife watchers and counters have produced a detailed and bulky report that contains all the sightings that we have records of for 2018.  This is really useful to us for steering our management of habitats on the reserve and the records are added to a county database that in turn contributes to a national one.  That means we can tell if the phenomena that we encounter are just local or part of a bigger pattern.