This article first appeared in the November 2025 Edition of Birdwatching Magazine
I last visited Bird Fair pre-Covid, and was struck then that, in late July, the harvest was well under way in the heart of England. As a boy, I remember, in the long summer school holiday, making tunnels through the lush green hay fields. In the last week before school started, we would watch the combine spewing wheat into a truck while defecating bailed straw. As the centre of the field had one small square of ripe wheat left, the hares would dash from the last cover. Us country kids built straw igloos and forts until the farmer chased us off. As a teenager, those weeks might be spent earning a few quid in the strawberry fields.
Now Wimbledon gets the tail end of the strawberry harvest and, around my way, the fields are over-ripe pale yellow or baked brown. In the first week of July, I watched 500 or more gulls on a field being ploughed ready for winter wheat. I’m guessing by August the pumpkins will be ripening for Halloween!
My local swifts look ready to leave already, their fly past grown by their progeny. There is a bonus to this worrying trend. Some of my local bird families are now visiting. This year I’ve had my first every Great Spotted Woodpecker pair. They came daily for weeks, filling up on suet and apple. Then it was just dad coming, presumably while the missus did the bulk of brooding. A month later dad turned up with one of his boys and introduced him to our feeders. For three weeks he or his siblings stuffed their faces at our food bar. Then, for a week, no woodpeckers. After the break, dad was back by himself… I guess he had chased the kids away to find their own territories.
Still, more families appeared. Blue tits and great tits feeding their pale-feathered fledged chicks.
This week the Jays arrived… two youngsters sat in the tree, mum and day and another full-grown chick sat along the fence and another fledgeling sat on the roof below my study window two feet away and cocked his ears as I chatted quietly to welcome him in. I guess it will be a week or three until they are off to pastures new. Hopefully, close enough to share our feeders with their parents. We’ve made a pack to gather acorns in the woods this Autumn and deposit them on our compost bin. Hopefully, the jays will store some in our plant pots and forget about a few so they germinate and spring up and allow us to tend them until they are ready to be planted at a local reserve.
The mad lavender was early too. It’s had its final warning now that it is so big that it drapes over half of the pond, hiding our view of this year’s froglets. Once the bee magnate’s flowers are over it will be shorn back to a nub to give the rosemary a chance.
Buff-tailed bumblebees, honeybees, a lone flower bee, and Marmalade hoverflies still abound, but the variety is impoverished. Half the flowers have been so early that the garden looks like a late summer mess; the bulk bloomed in the spring in unseasonal heat. Nature adapting is a long-term thing; it cannot happen in just a few years. Already, migrants are finding their normal niches taken by residents, they can’t know in the tropics that the season came early in the north. Famine or feast, flood or drought is becoming the order of the day. Is this the state of things to come?
