Dear Readers, I should hasten to point out that the photos in this piece were taken over the past few years, but what a treat it was this morning, to stand in my back bedroom and gradually realise that I could hear a familiar chirruping sound. The sparrows have been away for months, but this morning they’re clearly back.

How I love these little birds! Their disappearance was a real source of sadness for me – during most years they bring their fledglings to the garden to feed them (and presumably to teach them where the feeders are).

I know that they nest under the eaves of a friend of mine, and she hasn’t seen them lately either. I hope that they’re making their way in her direction.

All the websites and books suggest that house sparrows are intensely sedentary, rarely venturing more than  2 kilometres from home. So where have the sparrows been? And are these even the same sparrows? Apparently they form foraging flocks and head out to find food together. I suspect we’ll never know, and I imagine that many people have the experience of birds frequenting their gardens and then disappearing.

And for those who are still sparrow-less, here is a cheery group of sparrows from France, just getting ready to start their day…they are not the most tuneful of birds, but  what they lack in lyricism they make up for in energy.

Well, Readers, it’s clear that the horrible wet weather hasn’t stopped any of the usual suspects from visiting the garden. First up, there’s our usual dog fox. Here, he’s clearly been distracted by something going on upstairs, or in the kitchen.

And how do I know he’s male? As with dogs, only the males cock their legs. Thanks for doing this all over the water butt, lad.

Then there’s the usual parade of cats…

And holy moly, what’s the story with this one? I shall try to find out….

I suspect this fox is calling to a friend. I haven’t seen two at the same time for a while, which is a bit strange as this is breeding season….

But wait! What on earth is this person doing in the garden?

Gordon Bennett, it’s me! These trail cameras aren’t very flattering, are they.

Photo by By Martin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12503487

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, on February 5th 2026 it’s another blustery day, much beloved of Winnie the Pooh and also by the crows, who seem to love to throw themselves into the wind and let it carry them along. It’s much the same as in 2024, when I wrote the piece below. But for a moment I wanted to talk about the phenomenon of named winds, such as the Foehn wind of the Alps, or the Mistral in the south of France. Those of you with long memories might remember that I reviewed a book by Nick Hunt, called ‘Where The Wild Winds Are’, in which Hunt travels across Europe in search of the named winds, meeting with all kinds of adventures on the way. You can read my review here – I heartily recommend the book. Hunt has a real ear and eye for an unusual story.

One of the more unusual winds that he looks for is the Helm: this is the UK’s only named wind, which blows over Cross Fell in the Pennines. This is a very coquettish wind, requiring perfect conditions and even then sometimes refusing to show up. Hunt  visits Cross Fell several times. Does he find the Helm? You’ll have to read his book to find out :-).

Incidentally, author Sarah Hall has recently published a novel called Helm, which is a kind of imagined biography of the wind – has anyone read it? She also wrote a wonderful book called ‘The Wolf Border‘, about an imagined re-introduction of wolves to the UK. ‘Helm’ is definitely on my list.

Anyhoo, let’s pop back to 2024 to see what was going on with the wind then….

Dear Readers, it’s one of those days when the wind is whistling over the top of the chimney like someone blowing over the top of a milk bottle. Outside, the pond is full of ripples and waves, and I’m continually mistaking the turbulence for an early frog (wishful thinking if ever there was!)

On East Finchley High Road, Tony’s Continental has taken down its awning, which is always a sign that it’s going to be a gusty day. I just hope that the oranges don’t go skittering down the road. And they have a lovely new sign, but this is an old photograph.

Tony’s Continental – no awning today!

One of the effects of global warming has been an increase in extreme weather events, and for us in the UK, the way that rising temperatures have affected the Arctic is particularly relevant. In her piece in ‘Nature’s Calendar’, Rowan Jaines describes how climate modellers are predicting that the warming to the north of the UK is likely to drag the polar jet stream north, meaning that more storm systems will be drawn behind it, and that they are likely to stay for longer. At the moment it feels as if there is barely a gap between storms, with Storm Henk following Storm Gerrit within a few days, and then Storm Isha being followed up by Storm Jocelyn. The next storm is Kathleen, so let’s see when she arrives. In a normal year we would have six or seven named storms, but this year we’ve already had ten and it’s only early February.

Still, the UK has likely always had its fair share of windy weather, and I find myself fascinated with local vernacular names for breezy, gusty conditions. When I was in Scotland (Dundee to be precise) it was often described as ‘blowing a hoolie’, ‘Blirtie’ means a day of sudden blasts of wind or rain. ‘Fissle’ is the sound of the wind as it rustles through leaves. A ‘gouling day’ is a windy, stormy day. When the wind begins to ‘kittle’, it means that it’s starting to increase.

In Yorkshire, ‘brissling’ describes a brisk wind, while a ‘faffle’ is a light intermittent wind. ‘Peerching’ (surely from ‘piercing’) describes a bitterly cold, biting wind. A ‘waft’ is the slightest puff of wind, barely a breeze.

Once, every region would have had its own words for its own very specific geographical and meteorological features, and these were intrinsic to a feeling of belonging and connection. Robert MacFarlane writes about this extensively in his book ‘Landmarks‘. He describes the need for a ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’ which would preserve these place names, with all their specificity and detail, and argues that they make us look more closely, pay more attention. Take, for example, ‘fizmer’ – ‘the rustling noise produced in grass by petty agitations of the wind’ (East Anglia), or a phrase collected by author Nan Shepherd from the Cairngorms – ‘roarie-bummler’, meaning ‘fast-moving storm clouds’. What different conditions these two words/phrases describe, and what pictures they conjure up in the mind! And how much more precise they are than ‘breezy’ or ‘windy’.

There is something about windy weather that is both agitating and exciting – the cat is restless when the chimney is singing, even though she’s deaf, and the birds on the feeders seem to have a restlessness about them. The wind has its own voice, after all. Let’s close with Jaine’s thought-provoking conclusion to her piece for this micro-season.

“With this shift in the weather, our UK winters will begin to sing different or more intense songs from those we have been accustomed to. The howling winds of this microseason perhaps mark a shift in the auditory texture of winters to come. This opens up a space of unknowing. What if we heard the movement of high winds as anarchic Nature reclaiming, momentarily, the streets of the cities? As it tears through the urban fabric, setting off car alarms, throwing rubbish around and playing alleys like flutes, might we hear a song of rebellion? In this space of unknowing, what might our ears tell us that our eyes, in the dead of night, cannot perceive?” (Rowan Jaines pg 38)

Dear Readers, what a great poem this is – although I’ve read a lot of Ted Hughes, I hadn’t come across this one. It sums up that frightening yet exciting feeling of very windy weather. See what you think.

Wind by Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up –
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap:
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Dear Readers, I have long been a fan of Stock Doves – they go about almost unnoticed, and yet they are very attractive birds, with their ‘kind’ dark eyes and iridescent patch on the neck (no white on these guys, which is one way to tell that they aren’t Wood Pigeons). In Coldfall Wood they hang about in pairs, and are very shy, often flying away when I am within a ten metre radius. The population of the bird has fallen by about 50 percent in the UK over the past fifty years, but  recently it’s been making something of a comeback, which as we know is unusual for birds that are usually associated with farmland. And could it be that they’ll soon be back in some numbers? Have a look at this photograph of a roosting site in the Marais de la Vacherie regional nature reserve in Vendée, where no less than 12,800 Stock Doves were recorded back in 2024.

Stock Doves heading for their roost (Photo from https://www.ornithomedia.com/breves/un-mega-dortoir-automnal-record-de-pigeons-colombins-dans-la-reserve-naturelle-regionale-du-marais-de-la-vacherie-vendee/)

Previously, many European Stock Doves would head south when the weather got too cold, but a lot more are now staying put or migrating for shorter distances. Might some of them hop over the Channel to swell our Stock Dove numbers? I have no idea, but they would be most welcome. I had a Stock Dove in the garden back in 2023, and it hung out with the squirrel very nicely. Fingers crossed for a few more.

Pudding and Sunrise demolishing an egg box

Dear Readers, you might remember that I said goodbye to my foster cats Pudding and Sunrise last week. You might also remember that they were completely addicted to food when they arrived: we suspected that they hadn’t had a reliable source of food in their previous home, and so were constantly anxious about where their next meal was coming from. To keep them occupied, I hid a small amount of dry food in an egg box, in the hope that this would keep them busy for half an hour. Within ten minutes they’d ripped it to bits and eaten everything.

Butter wouldn’t melt….

Well, they settled down a bit and spent time playing and snoozing as well as rushing out to the kitchen every time I stood up. On  Thursday they went to their forever home, and I tearfully wandered out to the kitchen after they’d gone, dabbing my eyes with a bit of kitchen roll, when I noticed this….

I’d heard peculiar noises coming from the kitchen, but hadn’t gone out to investigate. At least the eggs are still intact. Clever kitties! They’d previously broken into a loaf of bread, so I assume they just wanted an egg butty.

Russel Wills with a mole fortress

Dear Readers, most of us are familiar with the little raised ‘molehills’ that you can see when walking in the country – the soil on the top is apparently perfect for seedlings, and moles do a great job of aerating the soil and recycling nutrients. They can dig 4.5m of soil every day, and in addition to munching on earthworms they also eat leatherjackets and chafer grubs. Their velvety coats help them to slip through the soil in a network of tunnels that can be the size of two tennis courts.

Normal molehills (Photo By I, PRA, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2304758)

Occasionally, though, moles build something even more impressive: a mole fortress, a small hillock which can be up to 1.6 metres across.  Scientists aren’t exactly sure why they do this, but fortresses  often occur in areas which flood, or where the soil is particularly thin. At the top there’s a worm store – moles can eat up to six big fat earthworms today, and the largest worm store ever found weighed two kilograms, which is a lot of worms. Furthermore, they bite the tips off of any surplus worms so that they can paralyse them and keep them nice and fresh. Beneath the worm store they make a cosy nest, well above the water table, where they can wait out any flooding. Three mole fortresses have just been discovered in the RHS Garden Bridgewater, near Manchester, and Dr Robert Atkinson, a mole expert, is delighted. He explains that the amount of energy required to build a fortress is the equivalent of a forty-year-old woman walking for fourteen hours, a somewhat curious metric. Is it therefore the equivalent of two twenty-year-old women walking for seven hours? Or even a sixty-six year-old woman (ahem) walking for 18.86 hours? I think we should be told. But, pedantry aside, that is a lot of calories for a small velvety insectivore to burn, and apparently only the ‘fittest moles’ are capable of building a fortress.

Hopefully a very fit mole (Photo By I,Stanislaw Szydlo, CC BY-SA 3.0,as if https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6433426)

Moles are very common mammals in the UK, but because they live underground they are very rarely seen. But if you meet a female mole, you should be respectful – according to the RHS, female moles have a ‘rare masculinised biology’ and produce high levels of testosterone, which means that they are aggressively territorial. Personally, I feel as if a little better hormone balance between the human sexes might help things along – if women had a smidge more testosterone, and men a whole lot more oestrogen maybe things would balance out more nicely. Or not. But at any rate, I have acquired a new-found respect for the mole, small and inconspicuous as they are. And here is a poem by Michael Bazzett, which I rather like. See what you think.

Pudding on the left, Sunrise on the right…

Dear Readers, being a cat fosterer is always bittersweet – it’s lovely to see cats blossom in a home environment, but it’s sad to say goodbye to them. These two cats hadn’t had a great start in life: Pudding spent her first two days hiding behind the books on the bookshelf with just her ears showing, her fur bare on her stomach and back legs where she’d been overgrooming from stress. But just look at her now!

Instead of being constantly on the lookout for food, she and her sister spent time lazing about on the furniture, chasing one another and demolishing my knitting…

When the people who adopted them came to collect them today, both cats ran up to them to say hello, and then chased one another around the house as usual, like normal playful cats. They’re three years old, but I do wonder what kind of kittenhood they had – it sometimes feels as if they’re making up for lost time. And I know that they’ll do really well when they have a garden to play in, though the birds will have to watch out. One reason why I foster, and why if I did adopt it would need to be an indoor cat, is because I spend a lot of time trying to attract birds and other animals to the garden, and it seems unkind to have a pet that might massacre them.

It seems very quiet as I sit on the sofa writing this: a few hours ago I’d have had a cat ‘helping’ me to type. I always have a little cry when the cats go. But honestly, the satisfaction of seeing animals rehabilitated and going off to loving homes, with people who will adore them, is more than compensation. Charities are always looking for people who can foster cats or dogs, and I really recommend it. Every animal is different, you learn so much, and for me, a house isn’t a home without an animal or two (not counting the spiders and the clothes moths, obviously). If you’ve been thinking about it, do give it a go – you might love it!

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, a frosty morning presents a great opportunity to have a look for lichens: they are everywhere but, like mosses, they are often overlooked, because they are not as colourful or as showy as flowering plants. Hah! They are complicated, multi-faceted organisms, as we shall see below. They can give an indication of how clean the air is – look at this headstone from Milborne St Andrew, the sheer variety of lichens tells you something about both which species can survive, and how old the stone is.

Headstone in St Andrews’s churchyard, Milborne St Andrew

Plus, unlikely as it seems, lichen is the food for the caterpillar of the Marbled Beauty moth, as I described here

Marbled Beauty caterpillar

Marbled Beauty (Cryphia domestica)

Sometimes we just need to slow down a bit to admire what’s under our noses. And if not now, when? We haven’t got forever, you know.

And now, let’s see what I had to say about lichens back in 2024.

In her piece in Nature’s Calendar, Kiera Chapman tells us that there are 2,300 species of lichen in the UK. They vary enormously, from flat crusts like the ones above to organisms that look more like coral. They live in habitats as varied as deserts and rainforests, and can vary in size from less than a millimetre to two metres.

What is a lichen, though? It’s not a single organism but an association between at least two organisms – the mycobiont, which is a fungus, and the photobiont, which gathers energy from light via photosynthesis and can be an alga or a bacteria. The relationship between the two has been debated for a century and a half. The whole idea of mutualism between two species (where both benefit from the association) was pooh-poohed at first, with the hypothesis being that the fungus ‘captured’ the alga/bacterium and held it captive, like an ogre sequestering Rapunzel in a tower. In fact, there is still some discussion about how to classify the relationship: it may appear that the fungus is parasitizing the other organism, but some photobionts can’t now exist without the fungus. It’s clearly a complex relationship that varies in emphasis from species to species.

Ash trunks with lichen (probably black apothecia)

Chapman discusses two different artworks that are based on lichen. First up is a monumental work by Klaus Daven on the Vouglans Dam in the Jura region of France. It was created by a process known as ‘reverse graffiti’, whereby a pressure washer blasted off most of the lichen and algae in order to create an image of a forest. It was sponsored by the electricity company and a company that makes power washers. For Chapman, and for me, it feels slightly uncomfortable – destroying one set of lifeforms to make images of others seems the opposite of environmentally friendly, however impressive the final results are.

The Vouglans Dan with Dauven’s image of the Jura forest (Thilo Parg, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

The second work is by German artist Hubert Fenzl, who uses sustainably harvested Claydonia lichen to make artworks that will live indoors for years. His ‘Rainforest’, shown below, uses the lichen to form a birds-eye view of a forest, surrounded by a menacing red area that seems to surround and encroach upon it. As Chapman points out, the combination of a human artistic vision and this natural material asks questions about our care of the forests. There is also none of the grandiosity of the dam project. I know which I prefer.

Rainforest by Hubert Fenzl (From https://www.hubert-fenzl.de/informationen/gestaltungsmaterial-cladonia-stellaris-flechte/)

I was also very heartened to learn from my RHS magazine this week that biology studen Lottie Cavanagh-Sweeney has been commissioned by the British Lichen Society to make a Lichen Trail at the RHS garden at Rosemoor in Devon. Magnifying glasses are provided to examine some of the smaller lichens, and you can download the trail to a smartphone. One of the featured lichens is the rare Tree Lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria) which Fay Newbery, a plant pathologist, describes as ‘green when wet, brown and crinkly when dry.’

Just look at this gorgeous organism!

Tree Lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria) Photo By Bernd Haynold – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3320107

The elephant in the room, however, as with so many other things, is climate change. An article in New Scientist in 2022 suggested that it had taken a million years for the algae that form the photosynthetic part of the lichen partnership to evolve to cope with 1° Centigrade of warming. They are also not fond of air pollution – the variety of lichens on the headstone at the top of the page indicates that it’s in a rural area with relatively clean air. Still, let’s not become too downhearted just yet – lichens have been here a long time, and who knows how resilient they might prove to be? In the meantime, let’s keep our eyes open for these overlooked organisms.