Pipits on a winning squeak
SADDLED with such a seasonal surname has always meant feeling somewhat benevolent towards the harshest and gloomiest time of the year. Those bracing for a winter of discontent should take heart that climate change is not only ameliorating the worst excesses of the bitter cold but also serving up new wildlife experiences.
As summer passes into autumn this week, with the equinox determining nights will soon last longer than days, we can take heart that the winters of the 21st century are nowhere near as punishing as those of five decades ago, when the countryside went frigid for weeks.
Remember the pre-central heating times when windows were covered in leafy patterns formed by ice and thermometers rarely peeked above freezing point for weeks? For many birds without migration strategies, blankets of snow and ice were a death sentence.
Species such as wrens, goldcrests and long-tailed tits suffered horrendous levels of mortality. Kingfisher numbers crashed by 90 per cent in the Great Winter of 1963. The Dartford Warbler was almost killed off as a nesting bird, with only a dozen pairs surviving.
It seems inconceivable that within a lifetime winters have become so relatively benign that many chiffchaffs and blackcaps – species that traditionally spent Christmas in the Mediterranean – are now enjoying seasonal staycations.
Over the past week I have been contemplating the provenance and destination of a ceaseless movement of meadow pipits over the Chiltern Hills. Where the flocks hail from remains open to speculation. Did they breed in Scandinavia this spring or are they from the Low Countries?
Will they spend winter in the UK or go to Iberia and North Africa?
From dawn to dusk there has been a flow of these nondescript travellers overhead, often at such high altitudes they were invisible to the eye but audible with their squeaky calls reminiscent of demented mice on extra mature cheddar.
Meadow pipits were once staples of a day’s birding, whatever season. Any stretch of grassland seemed to host the furtive ground-huggers in plumages, generously described as subtle rather than drab, with upper parts a shade of army khaki. Heavily streaked breasts and striated backs provide disruptive camouflage for tip-toeing on playing fields, newly germinated crops and rough pastures. Come spring, meadow pipits shake off the dowdy, diffident persona to become showy songsters, performing remarkable territorial displays.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was awestruck by the blithe spirit of the flighting skylark – “bird thou never wert” – but literature would have been all the richer if he had found time to immortalise the remarkable performance of the meadow pipit.
Stitching high-pitched calls into a continuous stream, males declare their intentions of finding a mate or defending territories with an aerial display as thrilling as the skylark.
Whereas larks ascend so high they become lost to sight, the meadow pipit remains in eyeshot at heights of 100ft before parachuting down with splayed wings only to repeat the act once it has caught its breath.
The numbers nesting in the UK have fallen by 40 per cent since the 1960s, with farming intensification suggested as the likeliest reason, yet it is estimated there are now up to 2.4 million pairs breeding.
‘Masters of the audible display’