356 Days Wild: Week 15

The suncream well and truly made an appearance during Week 15 of my wildlife challenge! I’m so pleased that Spring has sprung!

There was a lot of wildlife to enjoy this week but a few of my highlights include:
🎵 Learning why starlings sometimes sound like ducks
🐱 Reading about mammals and how they get around
🌸 Painting some more snowdrops
🐦 Spotting 2 new birds for 2021 on a beautiful walk in the Cotswolds

Read on to find out more and, I should say, if you enjoy this post, I’d strongly encourage you to take part in ’30 Days Wild’ from The Wildlife Trusts. ’30 Days Wild’ inspired my weekly blog posts and I can’t emphasise enough how adding a bit of wildlife into my life every single day has helped me through both the good times and the bad this year. This annual wildlife challenge takes place in June and you can sign up now.

Monday 19th April 2021

Ok. Starlings. You love them or you hate them. I remember my grandma complaining when I was a kid every time the starlings ate all the bread that we left out for the birds. As an adult, it’s only since moving to Warwickshire that I’ve seen starlings in significant numbers – a marked example of their decline over the last few decades methinks.

Personally, I quite like starlings, but even if you’re not much of a fan, their songs are still pretty impressive. Lucy Lapwing’s most recent bird song lesson is all about the starling and the golden rule with them is that there’s a lot of variety – clicks, whistles, woops, chatter, tweets. The list goes on.

And they can mimic which might explain why one of the starlings near my house sounds like a buzzard and why another quacks like a duck… They can learn man-made noises too – in this clip, some starlings can be heard mimicking a car engine that had been heard by starlings generations before them…!

Tuesday 20th April 2021

I had a little flick through the Mammal Society’s Mammal Photographer of the Year competition winners this morning. I particularly liked the winning entry in the mobile phone category!

All of the photos are incredible and, while I was having a good look through, I realised that I haven’t seen a fox in ages. Growing up, I didn’t ever see foxes that much but I’d glimpse the occasional urban fox in Oxford when I lived there a few years ago. I always hope that I’ll see one when I go for a walk early in the morning or in the evening – maybe I’ll get lucky soon!

Wednesday 21st April 2021

I’m coming towards the end of my Incredible Journeys (D. Barrie) book now. The book focuses on different animals and their extraordinary navigational feats. The chapter I read today talked about navigation in mammals, including human beings. It turns out the hippocampus appears to be quite important, but scientists are still unsure about how mammals can travel to specific locations over large distances with only their innate, natural ability to get there. Elephants, for example, can find there way to specific waterholes from tens of kilometres away.

More local to home, I remember wondering about the navigational ability of my black cat (Jolene) a few months ago. She and my other cat (Claude) had been with us for a couple of months. They weren’t allowed outside at first and, when we did let them out, they were only allowed out into the back garden. Jolene had seen the front of the house when she joined me in opening the front door for deliveries – she’s a nosey thing! – but she’d never been let outside that way. The front and back of the house aren’t really connected – to get from the back garden, you have to go down a little path (taking you to a road on the cul de sac), turn right, go around a corner and then past a couple of houses. Somehow, without ever being shown the way and without ever exploring that side of the house, Jolene left our back garden one evening and managed to locate our front door. I’m still not sure how she did it…!

Thursday 22nd April 2021

I had a lovely early morning walk today. It was a beautiful, chilly walk – I can’t believe there’s still so much frost in the morning around here! Things still feel a bit difficult at times and I find I’m quite a bit more anxious than I used to be so I tried to focus on the sounds around me. I was intrigued by a couple of birds having a whale of a time in the hedgerow. Their calls sounded like they were having a right natter. I tried to get a good glimpse of them so I could work out what on earth they were but it was impossible to get a clear view through the brambles. I’m wondering now if they might have been dunnocks…

Towards the end of the walk, I heard a very loud song that I could identify straight away: a song thrush. Song thrushes are just so loud when they want to be! And this one was perched right at the top of a tree, making all sorts of noises as I walked past.

Friday 23rd April 2021

I read a lovely little story in BBC Wildlife Magazine today. It was an anecdote from a wildlife photographer. They’d had been at a Scottish loch, trying to get some shots when, out of nowhere, a rabbit came bouncing down the hill and decided to take a little dip in the loch. The article and the photo really tells the full story – I don’t think I can do it justice!

Saturday 24th April 2021

It was time to do a bit of painting today. All the way back in early March, an old school friend got in touch asking if I could do a couple of snowdrops pieces for her. With all of the disruption last month, it’s taken me a little while to do these so I turned my attention to the second piece this afternoon.

I put a podcast on in the background while I painted. It’s a podcast I started listening to last year during the first lockdown – called The Stubborn Light of Things. Although it’s from 2020, I think it’s still very relevant. In these two episodes, Melissa Harrison (nature writer) talks about the small joys of Spring, like the return of the swifts and swallows and the bees and butterflies feasting on dandelions. It was a lovely listen.

Sunday 25th April 2021

We had a beautiful walk in the Cotswolds this morning. The walk started off in a place called Cranham near Stroud and it took us through Buckholt Wood, Brockworth Wood, Cooper Hill and Painswick Beacon. We didn’t actually go over the top of Cooper Hill, but it’s famous for its cheese-rolling in May and I can totally see why this annual event usually ends with injuries! The hill is so steep!

The views were just breathtaking (photo credit: Stefan Lang). We could see across to Gloucester and Cheltenham and could just see the Malverns in the background too. Up close, we also spotted a few special birds. A couple of jays, a male mandarin duck and a pied flycatcher. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pied flycatcher before so that was a huge treat!

*For anyone new to my blog, let me explain a bit more about what these posts are about. Every week I share a summary of my daily ‘acts of wildness’. This wildlife challenge was inspired by ’30 Days Wild’ and ’12 Days Wild’ from The Wildlife Trusts. The ‘356’ isn’t a typo – typically, I only thought about doing this after 2021 had already started so I won’t be able to do a full year this time. Next year will be different though! Thank you and I hope you’ve enjoyed the post!