I went down to Mudford in the Yeo valley to meet a friend who really knows his natural surroundings, especially insects and plants. His regular route of four miles or so takes him beside the Yeo to the secluded village of Trent and back across the fields, but this time we stayed inside, under the thatch and out of the wind and rain, talking of things that had struck him in these past, exceptionally cold weeks.
A sign of life on Christmas Day, defying the ice outside, had been a moth on the window. This was, he said, the unimaginatively named winter moth, which has its own equivalent of an anti-freeze system and can thus be on the wing when others are hibernating. He had also seen fieldfares foraging in his garden. Conditions have brought small groups into village gardens from the open fields, where they normally feed in large companies, to seek earthworms and beetles and perhaps a promising food source in rotting apples.
Local birdwatchers had been particularly interested in sightings of the strikingly marked waxwing. A group of eight had made a temporary home in trees at the edge of a Yeovil park, and others have been reported across the county. Waxwings often come in large numbers from Scandinavia to the east of England in winter, looking for berries, but this year they have moved farther west across southern England as they have exhausted limited supplies on their way. So this is a rare Somerset waxwing winter.
Local riverside walks have shown daisies growing, along with winter heliotrope often found near streams. A lone cormorant has been fishing by the weir, well inland from breeding grounds near the sea (cormorants are a familiar sight at Lyme Regis, 40 miles away). And on one early morning, when the sun was just up, two otters were seen gambolling in the snow.
