A silver lining

There aren’t many silver linings to this terrible crisis – and the associated lockdown – but getting close to nature on your home patch is one. We have come to call it ‘the circuit’: a three-mile route out and back from where we live, on the edge of the Somerset Levels.

Shaped like a letter Q, it begins with a walk down the lane, followed by four sides of a square, then back up the lane to our home.

Before the lockdown began, I had already tallied almost fifty species on what I was beginning to regard as my ‘home patch’; compared with just over sixty during the whole of last year.

Perry Lane

I like a challenge and so, as the lockdown commenced, I focused on methodically recording what I saw and heard, either during my early morning bike ride, or on a more leisurely afternoon walk with our fox-red labrador Rosie.

In the past few weeks, I have visited the new patch more-or-less on a daily basis, and been astonished at what I have discovered there. No fewer than seven species of warbler, including at least half-a-dozen singing lesser whitethroats – a skulking little bird that, as Graeme will testify, can be very hard to see. Reed warblers are equally elusive, but fortunately, their chuntering, repetitive song is very distinctive; as is that of the more excitable and much more visible sedge warbler.

Chiffchaffs, blackcaps, common whitethroat and a single singing Cetti’s – the first I have ever recorded here – make up the numbers. Other migrants include several splendid male wheatears in the grassy field at the far end; a calling cuckoo; a female marsh harrier; and some very late fieldfares heading north in early April.

Peaceful waters

The swallows are back, as are house martins. But no swifts yet – though we did see three over our garden a week or so ago, on April 22nd – the earliest ever here by over a week. Lots of raptors, too, enjoying the fine weather: displaying buzzards, a passing sparrowhawk, a regular kestrel and a single red kite on a sunny Sunday afternoon. And a flock of up to 35 ravens – a bird I didn’t even see for the first year we lived here, but which now seem commoner than crows, rooks and jackdaws.

But best of all, the sense that I am witnessing the onset of spring on a daily basis – never quite knowing what will turn up next!

Stephen Moss 29/04/2020

Blackford Moor