“Not seeing the wood for the trees” is an adage that applies very well to the British countryside in summer. The problem is that the luxuriant foliage at that time screens off many of the things that we’d like to see. The issue is resolved once the branches are bare, making winter a good time to visit.
Stranger still is the fact that, despite the lack of visibility, a winter’s night can be best of all. Because it is only then that some of the most charismatic wildlife emerges. Tawny owls are a perfect example. They are often most active in this season, with birds hunting as early in the evening as 5 or even 4pm.
Take a powerful torch and, with luck, you can catch a glimpse of their stocky soft-winged silhouettes ghosting through the canopy. The lack of leaves also enables their wonderfully mellow hooting songs to carry better, and the birds are often most vocal at this time, partly because they breed as early as March and sing more intensely.
A night-time visit offers good opportunities to track down another reclusive predator of British woods. Like owls, foxes mate in late winter/early spring and the vixen produces a spooky advertising cry that sounds midway between a bark and a scream. It is not uncommon for the call of one vixen to trigger responses from her neighbours, sometimes with Reeves’s muntjac deer adding to the wood’s wider chorus. These nocturnal sounds create an eerie atmosphere, but they offer a great means of tracking otherwise shy animals.
Unfortunately, muntjac deer leave some less welcome signs in the landscape. The species originates in Asia but escaped into our countryside from private wildlife collections. Today, it is among the most common large mammals in many English woods. There they have acquired a taste for eating new tree growth, nibbling saplings down to the stump. Look out for the signs of this grazing, which is widely blamed for reducing the woodland’s capacity to regenerate. Conservation groups often don’t welcome them, especially because muntjacs also eat many prized woodland plants, such as primroses, bluebells, violets and orchids.
The rabbit is another widespread woodlander that leaves abundant evidence of its winter diet. In times of hardship, when snow lies thick on the ground, hares and rabbits resort to eating tree bark. Look for the conspicuous teeth marks, which can be seen on anything from the trunks of mature trees, right down to inch-thick sucker growths arising from blackthorn thickets. If the snow has been deep it gives the rabbits access to parts that are way above their own body length. They have even been observed climbing off deep snowdrifts into the canopy of holly trees so that they can get at the green leaves.
There is another evergreen that acts as a major hub of wildlife activity in late-winter woods, because it gives life when everything else seems dead. Ivy is often scorned by gardeners for its smothering habits, and falsely blamed for sucking nutrients from the trees to which it attaches. What tends to be overlooked is that ivy plants flower in autumn and bear their berries in rich dark drupes just as the woods are stripped of other food sources – as a result ivy is a magnet for many birds.
Its fruits are eaten by a whole host of species, including blackbirds, mistle thrushes, fieldfares, redwings and robins. Yet the real lover of ivy is the wood pigeon. These handsome blue-grey birds, with their smart white half collars, are frequently shot at by hunters, and are usually nervous residents of British woods. Often the best clue to their presence is the loud clattering of their wings as they flee the canopy.
But ivy is an infallible draw for wood pigeons, and these otherwise rather clumsy creatures perform acrobatic feats to reach the most inaccessible berries. The birds open their wings and sometimes hang upside down to feed, their patterns and colours contrasting beautifully with the emerald foliage of ivy.
Ivy is not only good to eat, it is also great for shelter. Ivy thickets are one of the best places to look for roosting tawny owls. The plant also plays a part in another key drama in the earliest days of the new year.
Blue tits and great tits eat ivy berries, and both species are among our earliest birds to sing. Ivy fruit thus fuels the first sounds of the new season. Great tits will start their two-note chiming ditty – tee-chew, tee-chew, tee-chew – even at Christmas, and they get louder and more persistent as winter wears out. Blue tit song is like a spinning penny settling on a hard surface. Both of these common residents may have only short simple songs, but they give a wonderful hint of brightness to the first sunny mornings of spring.
Yorkshire Tea and trees
Yorkshire Tea is planting a million trees over five years – with a bit of help from the Woodland Trust, UK schoolchildren and Kenyan tea farmers. Learn more at yorkshiretea.co.uk/yorkshire-tree
