This week we spent a couple of nights in Maidenhead, Berkshire, where we used to live. It’s always so nice to rediscover our favourite dog walks there – especially Ashley Hill, a nearby Forestry Commission wood. I first visited Ashley Hill on an infant school trip nearly sixty years ago, soon after it had been completely cleared-felled and replanted with saplings. Amazing to see it now:

We have been watching this red kite nest on Ashley Hill for a few years now:

While we were standing in the rain looking at the nest this week, there were two attentive red kites perched up very close and we presume that they will be nesting there this spring:

I didn’t manage to get a photo of the red kites this week but Dave took this amazing photo of a red kite on Ashley Hill a few years ago:

My sister had red kites nesting in her Berkshire garden last summer and I digiscoped the young bird that was soon to fledge:

The Berkshire College of Agriculture is next to Ashley Hill and they have planted eighteen hectares of dense swards of willow, which they burn in their biomass boilers as an eco way to provide 80% of their fuel needs.

The land planted with the willow does look like an unattractive and impenetrable monoculture, although we saw that the more mature sections were currently in flower and being visited by lots of bees. Being a good source of pollen and nectar in February is a great thing:

I always hope to get to Spade Oak Nature Reserve for a spot of birding with a friend when I am in the area. The weather was pretty miserable for our visit this time and the heronry there wasn’t as advanced as it had been at the same time last year. There were still a few birds flying about…

..but nothing like the wonderful sights we had seen last year:

Back in the meadows again, we have been wonderfully heron-free so far this year, as the annual frog-spawning jamboree gets underway. Frogs gathering in such concentrations is a big temptation for herons but thankfully the party has remained under their radar so far:

There always seen to be so many more males than females, but the females have been turning up:

Once it was obvious where the spawn was going to be laid this year, I put two cameras onto time lapse, both taking a photo every five minutes throughout the night:

We have been venturing out in the dark to photograph the frogs, and have also seen these mating backswimmers:

Backswimmers always swim upside down and I have never seen what they look like the other side up:

The ponds are really coming alive now with the marsh marigolds starting to flower:

There have been several dunnock singing from prominent positions along the hedgerows this week. I often overlook these birds but they have such a lovely song:

The UK Birds Of Conservation Concern List 5, issued in 2021, assigns each species a green, amber or red rating depending on how badly they are doing and dunnocks are unfortunately amber-listed. In the photo below there are four species of bird – two of them (stock dove and wood pigeon) are on the amber list along with the dunnock, whilst the other two species (yellowhammer and house sparrow) are actually red-listed for being of the utmost conservation concern.

It is now eight years since we planted two hundred bare-rooted, native trees in the meadows which have been steadily growing into a linear wood. Around fifteen of these trees are yews and they have not been doing anything spectacular in the years since planting but they have been slowly increasing in size. This week I noticed that one of the trees looks like it has been strung with lights like an out-of-season Christmas tree:

So, for the first time, we have been able to sex our yew trees and we were pleased to see that we have a nice mixture. There will hopefully be berries on the female trees this autumn which will all be additional food for hungry blackbirds.

Now that I’d got my eye in for the flowers of yew, I went to look at a large yew cultivar that we have in the garden. It has never had any berries on it and we presumed it must therefore be a male:

And, yes, it was absolutely heaving in male flowers. In all of the ten years we have been here, we’ve never noticed that before:

Another yew cultivar stands next to this male yew and she is covered in berries every autumn. How lucky for her that a male is so close by:

Charles Darwin was very interested in earthworms and he carried out a lot of experiments on them including how and why they always drag pine needles down into their burrows by the joined-up end. As well as the two yews cultivars, we also have two large Scots pine trees in the garden and Darwin would have had an absolute field day under them. Worms have created lots of spiky ‘hedgehog’ mounds on the ground, bristling with pine needles, that have all been dragged into their burrows by the joined-up end leaving the two points sticking up into the air:

I can’t help wondering if there are pine-needle-loving specialised populations of earthworms that live in the ground under these trees. I suspect that there are and will try to find out.

I am still working my way through the manual for my new bridge camera. One of the settings allows me to take a photo mainly in black and white, other than selecting just one colour to be shown – either red, yellow, green or blue. Here I have chosen red and I love this striking image of stinking iris berries:

I have lots of ideas for how this camera setting could be used – selecting yellow and taking a photo of the primroses in the wood for instance. But there is not much colour out there at all this morning as heavy rain has fallen through the night and continues to come down now. Once the sun returns, and the onset of spring can restart, I am looking forward to emerging and putting the new camera through its paces.

There is something about a snowdrop valiantly pushing its way up through the frozen winter ground as a herald of spring that has earned it a lot of ardent admirers. Snowdrops (from the genus Galanthus) are not native to the British Isles but there are now many hundreds of different varieties grown here. There are often only very subtle differences between them, and it may be difficult for many to understand why galanthomania and snowdrop collecting has become such a big thing. Bidding wars have led to rare varieties selling for eye watering amounts of money – in 2022 a single bulb of ‘Golden Tears’ sold on Ebay for nearly £2,000, reminiscent of the tulip mania that so enthralled 17th century Europe.

In a small way, snowdrops do set my own pulse racing and last weekend we visited a garden in the North Downs that was bravely opening during the first weekend in February for the National Garden Scheme Snowdrop Festival.

Around 3,500 privately-owned gardens across England, Wales and Northern Ireland open under the National Garden Scheme every year. A small charge is made to enter and there are often also light refreshments and plant sales, with all proceeds going to charity. So, as well as the public getting the opportunity to be inspired by a beautiful private garden, £67 million has been raised for charity since the scheme began in 1927

The garden has around one hundred and forty different varieties of snowdrop, many of which were labelled up. Fieldgate Prelude and Don Armstrong seemed like very vigorous varieties:

The snowdrop flower has three long and three shorter tepals hanging below a cone-like ovary:

I was very taken with the varieties that had yellow rather than green ovaries and I think that Spindlestone Surprise was my favourite one in the garden:

Unfortunately there were no pots of Spindlestone Surprise on offer at the plant sales table, but I did buy two pots of Madeleine which is still a very beautiful snowdrop, although her ovaries are not quite as yellow:

I was surprised to see honey bees visiting the snowdrops although I’m afraid that I didn’t feel comfortable getting myself down onto the ground to try to photograph them – other visitors would have had to step over me. Since honey bees attempt to survive the winter, they are one of the few flying insects that are able to emerge on mild days to take advantage of what pollen is on offer.

But since pollinators are scarce in February, snowdrops do not rely on them and mainly reproduce by bulb division. However, should they get pollinated, seeds will then form in the ovary. Once flowering is over, the stems collapse and the seeds come to rest on the ground. The seeds have a protein and oil-rich protuberance on them called an elastiome which attracts ants to them. These ants carry the seeds underground in order to feed the elastiome to their larvae, but the seeds remain untouched and have now effectively been planted by the ants. I love to learn things like this.

There was also topiary to admire in the garden:

One of the joys of visiting a garden is coming away with ideas for your own garden back home. We loved this small kingfisher sculpture..

…and this swift weathervane:

I always find the taps on waterbutts frustratingly inadequate and slow-running and would love to just be able to plunge a watering can into tanks like these:

Back in the meadows, I’m always pleased to find and be able to identify new invertebrate species and this week a two-toothed door snail, Clausilia bidentata, was attached to the bottom of a trail camera sitting on a rotting log:

Yellowhammer numbers are going up. There are five here waiting for the magpies to finish, but I have seen a maximum of eight in one photo this week:

The crows here have started nest building:

I have also seen magpies flying around with sticks but haven’t yet worked out where this year’s nest is.

Over in the wood, I notice that this female sparrowhawk is ringed:

I remembered a sparrowhawk being ringed in the wood back in 2019 and looked out the photo:

Nine blue tits and a great tit here at this pond:

Unfortunately squirrels have now started carrying sticks and leaves into the owl box

They are definitely setting up home in there, but the tawny owls have not completely given up:

My final photo for today is the contents of a very exciting package that arrived this morning:

I might not have been able to purchase this snowdrop variety last weekend, but I did manage to buy a single, underwhelming little bulb on the internet when I got home. Admittedly it has a long way to go before it looks like the charming group of Spindlestone Surprises we saw last weekend, nodding their yellow-ovaried heads in the February sunshine, but I will put it into the ground now and see what next February brings.