I am posting slightly later than intended, but this is Michael Walter's latest letter on the Reserve:
A generally cold March and first week of April meant a slow start to the breeding season for birds; our resident species were reluctant to sing, and spring migrants were late arriving - my first willow warbler on 12th was the third latest date in 34 years. Annual monitoring results so far suggest that numbers of song and mistle thrushes, tree creeper, bullfinch and marsh tit are extremely low, though the lovely warm spell we are now enjoying may encourage some of the quieter species to get down to the serious business of nesting,, while proclaiming their intentions with vigorous song. Intriguingly, visitors recently saw two hawfinches flying over the north end of the reserve. Although massively overlooked on account of its lengthy spells of silence, and habit of feeding in the treetops, the hawfinch has always been a genuinely scarce bird in most of England. At Blean Woods its heyday, since recording began in 1982, was the 1980s, with up to eleven territories located in the original reserve, which was just a third of the size to which it has since grown. Problems set in during the 1990s - numbers declined, breeding became more sporadic, and in only one year this century is it thought that a pair nested. As with so many of the declines of reserve birds, the loss of hawfinch simply mirrors what is happening at a national level, presumably determined by events beyond our control. In other words, so long as we don’t know why these birds are disappearing, there is probably nothing we can do to prevent the continuing losses.
A recent, dramatic improvement in the weather has opened the migration floodgates, enabling nightingales, blackcaps and other species, whose northward movement had stalled in Europe, to burst into this country in recent days. Something rather similar seems to have happened to the butterflies. Instead of emerging in dribs and drabs on moderately fine days spread over several weeks in spring, this year they have erupted in the wood with the onset of warm sunshine, and I have enjoyed record counts of peacocks, commas, and even small tortoiseshells, a species that had all but disappeared from the countryside a few years ago.
The earlier cool, dry weather seemed to suit our wood anemones, which have put on a wonderful show; in one particular area the ground really is carpeted with the delicate flowers, the hornbeam coppice stems almost seeming to float on a bed of white clouds. Primroses, too, are having their best season for a long time, with some very fine clusters of plants, but lady’s smock, which requires damp soil, is perhaps the scarcest I have ever seen it.