In the dying minutes of winter’s shortest days, something magical happens to the trees that cling to the steep slope on the eastern edge of Tunstall reservoir. Just before the setting sun dips behind Wolsingham Park Moor, the water surface becomes a mirror that bounces glancing sunbeams into the tree canopy. Seen from across the reservoir, trunks and branches are bathed in a golden glow, every twig etched with startling clarity against the gathering dusk within the wood.
This afternoon, as I walked among those trees, the lighting was pure theatre. My vision struggled to accommodate its extremes, of dazzling white trunks of silver birch, rough-textured grey bark of ancient oaks, vivid green mosses and deep black shadows.
A nuthatch appeared as a fleeting monochrome silhouette, hanging on the shadowy underside of a branch, dagger beak wheedling out something from a fissure. It vanished behind the trunk, then reappeared in bright sunlight, in full colour, unmistakable in its bandit-mask black eye-stripe, slate-blue back, and apricot chest feathers.
Just another nuthatch. But when I first came to live hereabouts, more than 40 years ago, these were rare birds in County Durham. Reading through my natural history notebooks from the 1970s I see that they merited a specific mention on the few occasions when I saw one. Now they are common.
Their relentless northerly advance is often attributed to milder winters, brought about by climate change, though it’s far from clear exactly what factors have changed in their favour. It would now be noteworthy to walk in deciduous woodlands in Weardale and not see – or, more often, hear – these birds; they have a piercing call, especially in late winter and early spring when courtship begins.
Personal nature notebooks, often ledgers of profit and loss, can be emotive documents, with the growing awareness of shifting baseline syndrome, where succeeding generations are denied the pleasure of seeing once-commonplace species that disappear during their parents’ lifetime. In the 1970s I recorded red squirrels here; I would now need to travel much further afield to see one. But in the case of the nuthatch, in this precious fragment of ancient woodland, the syndrome seems to have worked in reverse.
