Seven species to spot
What to look for in September
1 | JAY Screamer of the woods
A few birds look somehow too exotic to be truly British. They stop you in your tracks, making passers-by who aren’t already birdwatchers ask: ‘What on Earth is that?’ Thrilling encounters like this may even spark a lifelong interest in wildlife. A jay is such a bird.
Though widespread in the British Isles and currently doing well, jays are by far our shyest species of crow, spending much of their time moving quietly among foliage. So, they tend to escape our notice. But all this changes between September and November, when these colourful corvids find their extrovert side. Data from BirdTrack, the interactive recording system run by the British Trust for Ornithology, show that sightings of jays climb rapidly during September, then peak in October, when the species is spotted roughly twice as often.
As late summer turns to autumn, the birds start amassing hoards of acorns and other nuts and seeds to see them through the winter. Not only do they spend longer on the ground foraging, they also make frequent flights to and fro, to bury their treasure, flashing their bright white rumps, and becoming more vocal. The volleys of raucous shrieks earned them the old name ‘screamer of the woods’.
GET INVOLVED Share your sightings, and see the national picture, with the BirdTrack website and app: bto.org/birdtrack
2 | SWEET CHESTNUT That old chestnut
It’s not just straight roads and underfloor heating – the Romans are also said to have brought an array of new species to Britannia, including the rabbit, brown hare, carrot, stinging nettle, plum, walnut and sweet chestnut – for making chestnut flour to bake bread. Sweet chestnut trees (related to beech, not horse chestnuts) don’t bear the autumnal spiny-cased fruit until well into their second decade. But there’s now, as with many introduced trees, renewed doubt about their precise British origins – a new study suggests they didn’t actually arrive until medieval times.
GET INVOLVED Visit your nearest ancient woods: woodlandtrust.org.uk
3 | HAZEL DORMOUSE The big sleep
‘Survival of the fattest’ is the modus operandi of many mammals that hibernate, including our native dormice. Weeks of intensive feeding on fruits and seeds leave these small rodents visibly podgy. The fat reserves will see them through a lengthy torpor, usually October to April, during which their body weight falls by a third. To see one, book a place on a ‘nestbox check’ – the one pictured was found during a Wildlife Trust survey. Since dormice are nocturnal and shy, they’re nigh on impossible to spot otherwise.
FIND OUT MORE British mammals: mammal.org.uk
4 | HOBBY Africa calling
September is your last chance until next spring to see this Africa-bound bird of prey. Many other raptors are partial migrants (some individuals move while others stay put) but, due to its diet, the hobby is exclusively migratory. Our most dashing falcon, it specialises in catching dragonflies, swallows, martins and swifts, none of which can be found in the UK in winter. Top trivia: the hobby was one of the favourite raptors of inventor Peter Adolph, who in the 1940s borrowed its scientific name subbuteo for his tabletop football game.
TOP TIP Watch a video on how to tell hobbies from kestrels: bto.org/about-birds/bird-id
5 | MONEY SPIDER Silky spectacle
‘Spiders claim September like no other month,’ says nature writer Mark Cocker in A Claxton Diary. He’s right: spider populations have hit their annual peak, before the frosts set in, and their webs stand out due to the low light and spangling of dewy droplets on damp mornings. In grassy or heathy places, you should find the gauzy webs of money spiders – tiny arachnids that live at such vast densities that their gossamer constructions resemble a silken sea.
FIND OUT MORE Identifying webs: bit.ly/idwebs
6 | BLACK-TAILED GODWIT Back from the brink
Something like 45,000 black-tailed godwits are arriving from the Arctic to winter on our muddy shores, while over 10,000 more pass through en route to West Africa. Until the 1800s, these long-billed waders nested here in sufficient numbers to be harvested as a foodie delicacy. Then they died out as breeders, but recolonised East Anglian fens in the 1950s. Project Godwit is giving this small population a boost: precious eggs are transferred from wild nests to incubators, then the chicks are released when older and less vulnerable. Look out for the project’s tagged birds.
GET INVOLVED Report tagged and colour-ringed birds: projectgodwit.org.uk
7 | FAIRY RING CHAMPIGNON Full circle
Appearing in the grass almost overnight, with seemingly impossible symmetry, fairy rings have been associated with superstition and magic since time immemorial. Confusingly, several abundant species of fungi create these circles, and most are pretty nondescript, with creamy, beige or pale brown caps. Seen together like this, they remind us that fungi are sustained by huge underground networks of superfine threads called hyphae. A ring forms when hyphae spread outwards evenly in all directions.
GET INVOLVED Find fungi forays at ukfungusday.co.uk