Ingham’s W RLD
ALAGOON flanked by huge sand dunes just north of the tropics last week gave me proof that our winter ordeal is coming to an end. As we wrap up ahead of a battering by the Beast from the East, nature is looking further ahead. Spring is coming and our summer visitors know it. On Gran Canaria long-haul migrants were already turning up in small numbers as they prepared to invade Europe.
Wading through the shallows of the lagoon were greenshank, little ringed and ringed plover, almost certainly stopping off after wintering on the sandy shores of West Africa.
The little ringed plovers went through their courtship routine: the males piping and strutting and chasing off rivals.
There was also a whimbrel missing a right foot. This curvedbill relative of the curlew limped over the sand but seemed fit and well as he fattened up for a return to his Arctic breeding grounds.
By the last day a few swifts had turned up, though they may have been year-round local residents.
Further south the symbol of spring has already quit the winter jungle.
All eight cuckoos fitted with satellite tags by the British Trust for Ornithology have begun their journey north from the Congo and Angola.
The trailblazer is a male cuckoo named Selborne who has reached Guinea in West Africa where he is devouring caterpillars ahead of a trek across the Sahara.
Ringed in June 2016 in the New Forest, he has already clocked up 3,500 miles from his place in the winter sun in Angola. He’s only got another 3,000 miles to go before his distinctive calls chime across Hampshire and alarm victims such as dunnocks.
The spring migration is also visible off the cost of Morocco. Paul Stancliffe of the BTO says a pal on a survey ship eight miles off Agadir has seen white wagtails, swallows and Sandwich terns heading north. And house martins are already turning up in Greece,
As the summer visitors edge closer, our winter visitors are preparing to head north too.
The first of our Bewick’s swans to return to Arctic Russia took off on Tuesday, two months after arriving at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust’s Welney reserve in Norfolk. Leho flew east at dawn, crossing the North Sea in just 150 minutes. He caught his breath in the Netherlands before flying to Germany where he is refuelling before the rest of his 1,500-mile odyssey back to the tundra.
This will continue over the coming weeks: millions of birds battling relentlessly north in the knowledge that warmer weather is on the way. NEANDERTHALS were art lovers, say archaeologists. Paintings in three Spanish caves have been dated to 64,000 years ago when Neanderthals ruled the roost. The caves have red and black paintings of animals and stencils of hands. Southampton University’s Chris Standish tells Science that Neanderthals were “much more sophisticated than is popularly believed”. REAL war horses from the First World War are to be commemorated by the Brooke charity’s Every Horse Remembered campaign. Eight million equines died on all sides in awful conditions. Brooke, whose wonderful work I’ve seen in Egypt, is selling a £3 pin badge to raise cash to help horses around the world. GREEN TIP: Spider and snake plants, English ivy and aloe absorb indoor air pollution. FISH can create their own headlights, reports the Royal Society’s Open Science. One tiny fish uses its eyes to redirect sunlight from the sea’s surface into darker areas. Better still, it adjusts the colour of the light in response to the background, say German researchers. Its prey must freeze like a rabbit in headlights. BOMBARDIER beetles escape predators by firing 100C jets of beetlejuice at them. In tests in Japan toads which swallowed the beetles soon vomited them up after the bugs audibly exploded in their bellies. The beetles then sauntered off as if nothing had happened, says a Royal Society journal. And you thought vindaloos were hot.