Do two swallows make a summer?

Greater Celandine

Hurrah, Hurrah. The swallows are back. I saw my first two arrivals perched on the telephone wires yesterday, sighted on the same day as last year. How do they do it? Despite the volcanic ash and stiff northerly winds that have reduced us poor creatures to our natural status as humble ground dwellers, the swallows came swooping in, back from their winter sojourn bang on time. Wonderful creatures, they give me a lift every year, these spirits of the air.
Less pleasing is the pervasive, irresistible march of the celandine through the garden borders. The tiny bulbules are scattered at every attempt to eradicate it, spreading the pernicious weed even further.
Celandine derives from the Greek khelidon, a swallow, and it does bloom at the same time as their arrival but, each year, there seem to be fewer and fewer swallows and more and more celandine. Odd how some visitors are greeted with genuine delight and others with a moan of despair. The swallows don’t outstay their welcome and don’t take over the entire place like their starry, yellow namesakes. There is a lesson in there somewhere.

Invasive species aren’t all bad if they are in their proper place. Apparently, one can tell the age of a woodland by the extent of the spread of an Indicator Species such as Dog’s Mercury that increases its ground cover at a fixed rate. The same is true of Bluebells, Wood Anemone, Wood Sorrel and Ransomes.
Dog's Mercury, carpetting an ancient woodland floor

I will be checking out our local woods soon. Some of them must date back to the days when the monks of the Priory were granted rights to all the woods in the shire by William I , William the Lion. A fine of £10 (Scots) for anyone taking wood or wild animals or usurping the rights to warrens would have been an enormous deterrent when the average annual income was measured in shillings and pence.

Not much chance of anyone usurping the "rights of warren" these days, We seem to prefer battery chicken to free range coney. NCC has hurt her paw and is not for walks at present but as soon as she's better we can go and explore some of these ancient woods. She certainly shows a great deal of interest in rabbits.

Heights, hares and herons

NCC on the road

The daffodils have survived the blast. The northerlies that brought winter back with sleet and rain left them battered but unbowed which is more than can be said for the Sky dish which tells us that “no signal is being received”. Hidden as it is up amongst the highest chimneys, it will need the vertigo-defying skills of our local T.V. man to repair it.
The first time it caused problems, the engineer from the parent company took one look, sucked his teeth and said that it was a job for the “exceptional heights” men. When they arrived, I was a bit disappointed to find they were a pair of cheery Glaswegians of quite average stature. Our local friendly T.V man takes it all in his stride although even he will have to wait until the wind drops a bit.

The latest stranger to the bird feeders has been a long tailed tit. I have seen them around the village before but not often and never in the garden. An extremely attractive bird in white,black and a hint of pink .

Long tailed tit

NCC has had her excursions curtailed by the appalling weather so, today, we made long circuit by way of some local conifer plantations and she set off madly in pursuit of a roe deer which was a dot on the horizon before she had got into full stride. BFC lived and died in the belief that he could catch deer and was equally as inept, trailing in their wake by half a mile.

My abiding interest in wildlife has caused me, on occasions, to be a less than attentive driver, my attention being caught by birds flying overhead or some thing glimpsed in a hedgerow. This has brought remonstrations from LotH as a passenger, often with what I would regard as an undue note of urgency in her tone. Last week, while driving down the A1, I saw a heron fly into a wood. Woods are not the normal habitat for herons so I returned, passenger-less, to have a nose around the spot. There it was, not more than thirty yards from the constant roar of the A1, a full blown heronry with at least half a dozen birds, though counting them in the canopy of the trees was difficult and played havoc with the old cervico- vertebral joints, they being much less flexible these days.

A pair of sentinel herons

Crossing the road during a lull in the stream of vehicles,. I came across a pair of brown hares, a jack and a jill, cementing their courtship in the next field, unconcerned about the traffic noise beyond the hedge.
We drive past in our mobile living rooms with the climate control and the C.D. player on, totally oblivious to the other world that goes on yards away: a world that regards us as, at best, an inconvenience, at worst, a threat. A world that we came from and were once part of but, with which we now have so little contact. What a pity when we are all urged to think about “the environment” that we spend so little time in this other world. Maybe if we did we would take better care of it all.