Spring is coming
As spring brings an abundance of new life, it’s time to talk about the birds and the bee-flies.
Seven species to spot in March
1 | DARK-EDGED BEE-FLY Unicorn in the garden
Some insects seem to get all the love – bees, butterflies and dragonflies especially. Flies, not so much. But in March, there is a fly that stands out for its attractiveness and fascinating lifestyle. What’s more, it is abundant and widespread through most of Britain, though no longer in Ireland for some reason. Meet the dark-edged (or large or greater) bee-fly.
Flies excel at many things, including pollination and parasitism. This one is superb at both. You will often hear it first – a loud hum as it hangs motionless on whirring wings, just above head height. The next thing you’ll notice is its extraordinary proboscis. It is as if you are looking at a furry little ginger unicorn, though the long tongue is in fact a precision tool for extracting nectar from deepthroated flowers such as primroses, lungwort and ground-ivy, frequently while hovering.
Bee-flies resemble bees for a reason. The mimicry enables the female to sneak up to ground-nesting bees, particularly mining bees, so she can deftly flick her eggs towards the burrows. When the maggots hatch, they crawl inside to devour the hapless bee larvae.
Look out for bee-flies – there are several species – on sunny days in gardens and other flowery places until May. They even have their own Twitter hashtag: #BeeFlyWatch.
FIND OUT MORE
Visit our website to learn more about bee-flies: discoverwildlife.com/bee-flies
2 | MAGPIE Early birds
Britain and Ireland’s avifauna is among the most closely observed on Earth, thanks to long-running studies and updates from thousands of citizen scientists. Data in the BTO’s annual BirdTrends report show that 40 species of bird nest earlier than in the mid-1960s, with magpies advancing their laying date on average by 20 days. Other birds breeding substantially earlier include greenfinches, robins, great tits and swallows. Though this might help some species, in other cases it could lead to ‘seasonal mismatch’, where young no longer hatch when food is most plentiful.
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Our corvid guide: discoverwildlife.com/corvid-guide
3 | SNIPE Good vibrations
“In the spring, tugged by the sun, these swamp-loving hunkered birds transform themselves into little horses and ride the sky.” Tim Dee’s lyrical description of male snipe performing their aerial courtship, in 2013’s Four Fields, captures its inherent strangeness. As the birds dive headlong, their splayed outer tail feathers vibrate in the rushing air to create a wonderful reedy sound called drumming. You feel it in your chest, as Dee says, like the “heart’s foghorn”. Experience it on marshy nature reserves managed for wading birds, or on healthy moors and bogs in upland areas.
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Watch a snipe identification video: bto.org/about-birds/bird-id
4 | BUTTERBUR It’s a wrap
Roadside ditches and riverbanks are strewn with pink butterbur flowers this month. All male, they have the look of dwarf conifers, according to Richard Mabey in his epic Flora Britannica. Less charitably, they also recall loo brushes.
We tend to forget that our ancestors used plants not just in cooking and medicine, but also for cleaning, dyeing, stuffing, packaging, smoking and much else. In the days before fridges, butterbur leaves, which are huge and lotus-like and appear later in the spring, served as a cool wrapper for butter and other fresh foods.
FIND OUT MORE
Masses of information on British plants: wildflowerfinder.org.uk
5 | CHIFFCHAFF Spring cheer
The year’s first singing chiffchaff is a moment wildlife-lovers yearn for. Repeated over and over, the seesaw ditty is rudimentary yet uplifting, and before long you will be hearing it everywhere. Jeremy Mynott, coauthor of The Consolation of Nature, points out that the two-syllable song is better reflected by the warbler’s old names: chipchop, chit-chat, siff-saff.
Odds are, birds you hear will be migrants freshly arrived from their Mediterranean winter range, though the BTO estimates up to 15,000 chiffchaffs now overwinter in Britain, mainly in the south.
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Learn birdsong: xeno-canto.org
6 | OPPOSITE-LEAVED GOLDEN SAXIFRAGE Miniature worlds
Sometimes it pays to get down and explore at ground level. This mat-forming woodland plant is easy to miss, being just 5–10cm high, and its common name is rather a mouthful. But a closer look reveals its subtle beauty. The glossy, rounded leaves recall those of succulents, while the yellowish-green flowerheads are like tiny versions of the euphorbias popular with florists and gardeners. Though the individual plants may be insignificant, they can grow in such dense profusion that, in early spring, they brighten up great swathes of the woodland floor.
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More about British woodlands: woodlandtrust.org.uk
7 | RAZOR SHELL Shifting sands
The astonishing riches of our sandy and muddy shores, teeming with everything from marine worms to molluscs, are firmly out of reach for most of us. However, rough seas may reveal some of this buried treasure. The razor shell, or razor clam, is one of the more eye-catching burrowing residents to litter beaches after storms. It spends its life in a vertical tunnel, feeding on detritus when the tide comes in. The animal may survive over a decade, steadily adding pretty growth rings to its paired shells, which relate to tidal cycles rather than calendar years.
FIND OUT MORE
British marine life: www.marlin.ac.uk