This is Michael Walter's latest report:
Is it autumn or spring? This is not, perhaps, such a silly question as it sounds, and the mild start to November almost fooled me into thinking that I had slept through winter and that a new year was now awakening. Daily maximum temperatures have been consistently in double figures and on 6th November reached 18°C; such balmy conditions are not unknown at this time of year, and indeed on 7th November 2005 I recorded 19°, but night-time temperatures have also been holding up very well, so it simply doesn’t feel like winter. This creates various dilemmas for wildlife; should hedgehogs and bats go into hibernation, or remain active while there is still food available (bats were flying in the wood at the end of October)? Unless you are a farmer, the chances are that your activity is, to a large extent, disengaged from the time of year in a way that simply wasn’t the case as little as a century ago, but the life cycles of animals and plants are still intimately geared to the slowly revolving seasons. Birds take many of their cues from daylength. The pineal gland, a light-sensitive organ in their brain, detects lengthening days, and this triggers sex hormone production, bringing males and females into breeding condition, stimulating the males to sing and defend territories. However, in mid-October the days are the same length as in late February, when many species are preparing to nest, so if the autumn is mild, this seems to confuse some birds into believing that spring has indeed come. It was delightful to hear a blackbird singing before dawn on 6th November, but I was saddened to realise that this was no more than one demented bird’s aberration rather than a genuine proclamation that the worst of winter was now behind us.
Plant growth has continued during the mild weather, particularly of those species we choose to demonise as weeds, and there has been an incongruously summery look to one section of woodland edge where a stretch of bramble bushes is flowering quite profusely against a background of yellow birch and chestnut foliage, or even the red splashes of holly berries. Berry production was initiated months ago when the flowers were fertilised, so this process has continued without regard to the unseasonal conditions, but the earlier-flowering brambles have already shed their fruits and so have sufficient flexibility to resume the reproductive cycle, but with little likelihood of producing a second crop of fruit (though we are still eating a few raspberries from our garden).
Similarly, chestnut production is little influenced by autumn weather, and a few nuts from this year’s better than average crop have disappeared into our kitchen, but most seem to be taken by squirrels, mice and voles, with relatively few proving attractive to birds such as jays and great tits.
Along with the fine weather, we’ve been enjoying a particularly good display of autumn colours. This came as a bit of a surprise, as the yellows, browns and reds of the dying leaves are caused by waste products that cannot be utilised by the tree when sugars in the leaves are broken down and resorbed prior to leaf-fall. The warmer the summer, the greater the sugar production, leading to more of these by-products and so to a more intense palette of colours; except that this summer was a relatively mediocre one, so I can’t account for the glorious scenery that I have been enjoying for several weeks.
The photo below shows brambles still in flower: