A fascinating fact about magpies
Have the blackbirds started singing yet?
Young males will begin to sing this early in order to establish and defend the territory they hope hold for the rest of their lives. Older and more experienced birds will wait until February or March.
Redwing
Every year redwings are among the park’s winter visitors; we are their winter migration’s destination.
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While we’re on the subject of foxes…
Continue readingFox
Did you hear the foxes last night? January is the middle of their mating season when they are a lot noisier than at other times of year.
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Winter badgers
Badgers don’t hibernate, even in January, but they sleep a lot. The dominant female is pregnant, awaiting the birth of two or three cubs in February, and the rest of the clan are living off their fat reserves. They will leave the sett to visit the latrines but in particularly bad weather will dig latrines in distant and otherwise unused tunnels inside the sett.
Like the rest of us, they are waiting for the spring.
On the twelfth day of Christmas
The park’s twelve drummers drumming are great spotted woodpeckers. They begin drumming at the end of winter as part of a courtship ritual in which the male marks out his territory and advertises his presence. He drums his beak against hollow wood 10 to 20 times in just 2 seconds, and the females replies briefly as she enters his territory.
Here is a video:
Video recorded in March 2019 by George Ewart
On the eleventh day…
…eleven pipers piping
Honey bees make a sound that apiarists call piping.
Continue reading “On the eleventh day…”Seven swans a-swimming.
On the seventh day of Christmas my true love sent to me seven swans a-swimming.
Mute swans (Cygnus olor) come to the park to graze, not to swim or raise chicks. They break their long journey to some faraway lake or river, to rest and eat in the park’s green fields. We are a swan service station.
Six geese a-laying…
…or not.
There are no geese anywhere on our species lists but we can offer you six species of corvid instead.
[1] Crow [2] Jay [3] Rook [4] Jackdaw [5] Magpie [6] Raven
Goldfinches of course.
On the fifth day of Christmas my true love sent to me five goldfinches. . .
Pictures taken in the reserve by DKG.
Four calling birds
Not calling birds, according to the experts, but colly birds. Colly is an old word for soot or coal dust and a colly bird is a blackbird. We have tuneful blackbirds by the dozen in the park.
Audio by Beatrix Saadi-Varchmin (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) xeno-canto.org
On the third day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:
…unfortunately, we have no French hens. In fact we don’t even know what French hens are and, try as we might, we can’t find out. The top two theories suggest that they were either fashionable domestic poultry in 1780, when the song was first published, or an allegorical representation of the Holy Trinity.
Continue reading “On the third day of Christmas”On the second day of Christmas
my true love sent to me…
…two turtle doves. We have collared doves and woodpigeons by the dozen but no turtle doves. Sorry.
Continue reading “On the second day of Christmas”On the first day of Christmas
my true love sent to me
a partridge in a pear tree. The park’s partridges are Perdix perdix, the grey partridge, not the pretty little North American plumed partridge, Perdix plumifera, sitting in our Christmas card’s pear tree. Neither does the park actually have any pear trees: cherries, plums, sloes, apples and pedants aplenty but no pears at all. Nevertheless…
Christmas greetings from the Friends of Southwick Country Park.
Christmas robins
A Christmas Eve gallery of the park’s robins, photographed by DKG.
Reindeer
There were reindeer here in Britain in large numbers around the time of the last ice age, 35,000 to 50,000 years ago. There were wild herds of reindeer in Scotland right up until the 13th century when, like so many of our large native herbivores, they were hunted to extinction.
Continue readingCorrection
More about oak 5552
Ian Bushell writes:
Unfortunately, in late August oak 5552 suffered from Summer Branch Drop when at least two limbs fractured and fell.
Continue reading “Correction”Did you know…
by Suzanne Humphries
Did you know that grey squirrels eat hawthorn berries? No, neither did I.
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Winter bees
There are at least two wild honey bee nests in the reserve, high up in hollow old trees. Here is a short video that shows how the bees are adapting their colony and their behaviour to the demands of winter.
Knot grass moth
Another lucky dip into remote corners of our species lists wins us the knot grass moth (Acronicta rumicis), a night flyer of open grassland and woodland edges.
Continue reading “Knot grass moth”Red list
In its latest review, the RSPB has added four more names to its red list of Britain’s endangered bird species.
Continue reading “Red list”Wood mouse
The wood mouse is Britain’s commonest and most widespread species of rodent. There must be hundreds, if not thousands, in our nature reserve but they are rarely seen. Here are some of their personal details.
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Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve 