first cuckoo and late spring blossom

Spring is spreading across the countryside rapidly now. The hedges are white with blackthorn blossom and  oilseed rape is turning the fields bright yellow. On Monday (April 18th) I heard the first cuckoo of the year. The bird was hidden somewhere in these woods which are just beginning to come into leaf.

I have noted the date of the first cuckoo over several years and in 2014 I posted that I heard the first cuckoo on 17th April.

The British Trust for Ornithology operates a cuckoo tracking program and the migration patterns of individual cuckoos can be followed here. One cuckoo, Chris, was tracked for five years and during that time spent 38% of his time on migration, 48% in the Congo and just 18% in the UK.



Although the cuckoo arrived in the UK about the same time in 2014 and 2016, spring did not arrive at the same time.

In 2014 I noted that the first cuckoo and the first apple blossom appeared about the same time. I took a picture of the apple blossom on our crab apple tree - picture below.

Crab Apple blossom - April 17th 2014

 By way of comparison I took a photograph of this years blossom buds.

Bramley Apple - April 19th 2016

The cold weather recently has slowed down the spring growth and all the blossom is later. Despite the warm weather over the past couple of days both the Bramley and crab apple are still tightly in bud. 

winter warmth

The weather is continuing unseasonably mild. I took the photograph of these daffodils on Christmas morning, blooming near the village Christmas tree!

Yesterday I found the first snowdrop in the garden

and there are new shoots on the Elder bush.

The hedges are full of honeysuckle shoots, it feels more like spring than December.

There was a slow-worm basking in the sunshine in the road. It was wide awake and slithered away as I got close to photograph it. Slow-worms usually hibernate between October and March.

Further along there were celandines 

and the first violet. During mild winters a few flowers appear early in the season but there are so many "signs of spring" here tis year. Flowers that I look for through January have already appeared.

In England this has been the warmest December since records began. With a mean temperature of 9.5ºC, it is 5º warmer than the average and 2ºC warmer than the previous record set in 1934.

This article in today's Guardian explains why warmer temperatures lead to increased rainfall with the devastating consequences seen in this country and abroad. Meteorologists tell us that individual events do not indicate climate change but it seems to me that the many changes occurring at the same time in different parts of the world point towards a shift in the world climate.

Storm "Frank" has reached the UK today bringing more misery to many parts of the country and with the possibility that it will cause major changes to temperatures over the North Atlantic.

Mixed up seasons

Following on from the last post about unseasonal weather, I spotted this plant combination.

Red geraniums (summer) and yellow winter flowering Jasmine (winter!) in bloom at the same time. Definitely a little mixing of the seasons here.

Indian Summer

So this is October, amazing hot and sunny weather, today the car thermometer registered higher than in summer.

Inevitably there has been discussion as to whether this is a manifestation of human impact on the environment, whether global warming is causing this unseasonably warm autumn. There have been autumns this hot before though, just not for a long time. There was a cluster of them around a hundred years ago and then they were just accepted as unusual but part of the natural variation.

Of all the statistics that I have seen quoted regarding this Indian Summer, the most comforting is that in the past a very hot September was rarely followed by a very cold winter. After the last two cold snowy winters a mild one would be very welcome.

At the moment though we are forecast a couple more days of hot sun so I won't be thinking of winter yet, just enjoying the fact that I am able practise yoga in the garden in October!

Puffin cam

I love these little birds with their stripy beaks, they look so sweet. Last year when we were in Shetland we were lucky to be able to get close enough to take photos and to watch them coming and going from the cliff side.

Puffins rear their young in burrows and this year at Sumburgh Head in Shetland the RSPB have put a camera inside one of these burrows. Over the last few days I have checked in to see how the puffin is getting on so I thought I'd share the link to the webcam in case anyone else is interested. 

The link takes you to the index page for all the Shetland webcams. Look for the puffin thumbnail, there are two cameras, camera 1 is inside the burrow and camera 2 shows the entrance. Over the last few days there has been a bird sitting in the burrow most of the time - usually looking very sleepy. Of course nothing can be seen if it is dark so non UK viewers would need to allow for the time difference.

Puffins lay a single egg and there is already one in this burrow. Both parents take turns to incubate the egg for 36 to 45 days and after that they both feed the young bird for a further 34 - 60 days. There should be something to see on the camera for a few weeks yet.

Puffins are on the "amber list" of UK Birds of Conservation Concern because the breeding populations are concentrated in a few sites and so are vulnerable to changes in the environment.

A few years ago the numbers of successfully fledged young puffins was worryingly low. It was thought that this might be due to global warming, a small rise in sea temperature causing the sand eels which are the young puffins main food source to move further north to cooler waters away from the puffin breeding sites. Last year however the breeding figures increased again with just under half of all occupied burrows producing a chick. 


I think puffin cam is such a good idea. It has certainly made me think about the vulnerability of these little birds plus they are so cute to see in the burrow. I hope this burrow is one of the successful ones and that there will be a healthy chick although that will be a few weeks away yet. 

No airplanes

The ash escaping from the Icelandic volcano is still affecting flights in the UK. This afternoon I took this photo of a clear blue sky with no airplanes or contrails. We live just over thirty miles from Heathrow so you wouldn't think that we would really notice the lack of flights over the past couple of days but we have.

A large number of planes fly over this area, my husband has flown over the village several times when returning from America, but they are not very low at this stage and so I don't give them much thought although depending on weather conditions we do see a lot of contrails. This is a photo I took one morning.

Today, when I was in the garden I thought it was quieter than usual but wondered if I was imagining it. Then my son came out and commented on how quiet it was. I think we must somehow filter out the background noise and it is only now it is not there that we notice the difference. We also see military helicopters on exercises, these fly low and are very noisy but they have been absent too.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, flights were suspended for three days and scientists recorded an increase in temperature due to the absence of airplane contrails in the atmosphere. The water vapour in the trails reflects some sunlight back out into space so that less reaches the earths surface so when there are no trails, more sunlight gets through and the temperature increases. I wonder if the same effect will be seen due to the current flight cancellations or will the volcanic ash in the atmosphere have the opposite effect reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth. I find it interesting to see how one event, the eruption of the volcano in Iceland, has such far reaching effects.

For the sake of the many thousands who have had their plans disrupted I hope this cloud of ash disperses and that they are soon able to travel safely. There will be no flights from London airports tomorrow so it will be another day of waiting around for passengers but for those of us on the ground, another quiet day with clear skies.

Earth hour and summer time

Another year, another Earth Hour, time seems to be flying past at the moment.  Oldest son was out and my husband wanted to watch television so it was just me and younger son who turned the lights out.  We retreated to a bedroom and each wrapped in a blanket, we ate chocolate by the light of my solar lamp and chatted.  Time with my teenagers seems so precious when I realise that within two years they might both be living away from home and it was a lovely quiet hour to chat without any of the usual electronic distractions.

With British Summer Time starting today it seemed extremely early when the alarm clock went off and I got up to take eldest son to work for an early shift - not as early as it felt for him though after his late night out!

I grabbed my camera as I left because the sun was just rising and the sky was a lovely mixture of pinks and purples.  By the time, I had taken him to work the sun was higher in the sky and the colours were fading but I managed to get a couple of early morning shots.

It was very peaceful, alone in the countryside around 7 am this morning - a good start to summer time.

February Sunshine

Like most of the southern half of the country we have had a wonderful weekend of blue skies and sunshine. Yesterday we went for a walk along the River Thames, all a bit muddy but great to get out into the fresh air. Today I have spent quite a bit of time sitting on my little bench with a book and a cup of tea, the sun was really quite warm though it did seem a bit odd to be reading in the garden in February.

At my allotment yesterday, I was talking to my neighbour on the next plot and she reckoned that this year the season is about two weeks advanced from usual. She has rented her plot for over fourty years so she should know! Today while sitting in the garden I watched a pair of robins flying in and out of a climber on the back of my house with beaks full of nest-building materials. When I was little I remember being told that the birds started nest building on Valentines Day. These robins have been nestbuilding for at least a week, possibly another indication that spring is arriving a couple of weeks early.

I took this photo of the first shoots of my early rhubarb just because I love the bright colour of the first buds and leaves as they push through the soil.

moan, moan,moan

I am fast turning into a grumpy old woman in 2008. After my last post complaining about the temperature at work I am now annoyed by the recycling facilities (or lack of ) in our area.

Yesterday we chopped our Christmas tree up into manageable pieces and my husband took it to be recycled - site closed - the nearest place is 14 miles away. He didn't make the trip but came home. I'm not sure that driving 28 miles to recycle a Christmas tree would make good ecological sense anyway. Which do you think would be worse in terms of greenhouse gases, a Christmas tree anaerobically decomposing in landfill and producing methane or the carbon dioxide produced by driving 28 miles so that the tree can be shredded and composted?

Our local authority doesn't collect cardboard and we had a few weeks worth to be recycled. Today we were near to a supermarket with recycling facilities so we decided to drop it off. This is what the cardboard recycling area looked like.

The whole area was very messy, all the containers were full so the option was to leave stuff near to the relevant container or bring it home again.

It does seem a shame that when we are being encouraged to recycle that the facilities provided do not meet the need. I wonder how much stuff ends up in landfill just because the effort to find somewhere to take it to be recycled is just too great.

I promise to make my next post more positive and I will not grumble about anything!!

Changes

We celebrated our wedding anniversary this week - 19 years. Each year I make an anniversary card for my husband. As I can't draw I use photographs or magazine cuttings to make a card that depicts something we have done during the year. Usually its somewhere we have been on holiday but this time I thought we should remember this last year as "the year we got the chickens". Here are two of the photographs I used to make the card.

I would never have imagined, nineteen years ago, that someday I'd be keeping chickens!



Nineteen years isn't a particularly long time but we were talking with the boys about things that are available now that we didn't even think about 19 years ago - mobile phones, DVDs, iPods, X box, Internet, ordering shopping online, booking holidays online, cheap air travel, zillions of TV channels, blogging.

Very few people, nineteen years ago would have worried about peak oil and global warming. I didn't start thinking about fossil fuel use until around eight years ago which was the last time we flew abroad for a holiday. We went to Bali for our honeymoon and I didn't give any thought to the damage that the flight might be doing to the planet.

I wonder what changes we will see in the next nineteen years. How much will the climate have changed? Will there still be fuel available for most people to have cars? Will we still be importing food from far away or will we all have to eat local? On balance I think its just as well we can't see into the future (probably too scary!) but I am sure that there are changes ahead that we haven't even begun to think about yet.

Five Minutes of Electrical Rest for the Planet

My husband heard about this at work today.

An organisation called The Alliance for the Planet called for everybody to create 5 minutes of electrical rest for the planet at the same time throughout the world. The purpose was to show political leaders that global warming is an issue that needs to come first and foremost in political debate. February 1st was chosen as the day when a new UN report on global climate change was brought out in Paris. The times were 1.55-2.00pm in New York, 6.55-7.00pm in UK etc.

6.55pm happens to be just about the time we finish eating so we made sure that everything in the house was switched off (actually we realised afterwards that we forgot the fridge/freezer) and sat at the table by candlelight for five minutes. I have no idea how many people took part or whether anyone will take any notice but it was a peaceful five minutes.

Climate Change Game

I found this Climate Change Prediction game today. You can pretend to be president and implement the policies of your choice! The challenge is to do the right thing for the environment while remaining popular so that you are not voted out of office.