A week later we woke up to a lot of frost and a temperature of -4°C. It was bright
sunshine most of the day, so we wrapped up and went for a walk at my favourite Belhus
Woods Country Park. We walked round the young Hunts Hill lake (ex gravel pit), my
husband with binoculars watching the birds on the water, of which there were plenty.
Some were familiar to us, but there was a group of maybe 40 or 50 ducks that we did not
know at all. We watched the group walk out of the water onto a shallowly-sloping area
of low vegetation. Chestnut heads were conspicuous, and pale grey/fawn bodies,
somewhat rounded ie tails not too obvious. I find birds' calls very hard to describe, as
clearly do the writers of bird books, but it sounded to us rather like the first part of a
peewit's call, a sort of flute-like call. When we got home my husband looked them up
and he thought they might have been Pochards. Does this sound likely?
We also noted that afternoon that frost lay in shady places all day, and there was lots of
ice on the lakes, even where there was direct sunshine. The weather forecast said warmer
air would move in from the west, making snow where the cold block met the warmer air,
so snow would fall over night and into the next morning in the London area and to the
east. Sure enough, the sky was clear as we went to bed, and still nothing by about 4am,
but when we got up soon after 7am the world was all white and snow was still falling.
There was 6cm depth, much more than we had seen two weeks before.
February 15th was an exciting day in our garden. I was doing some autumn (!!) tidying
up, and suddenly saw a small but beautiful, brightly coloured beetle with a metallic
sheen on our Rosemary bush. Within a few minutes I had found 9 more. I had to check
on the EFC website, as I am not an entomologist, and the fellow I took in woke up
indoors in the warm and started walking slowly over my hand. Fortunately, he matched
the pictures, and was therefore a Rosemary Beetle. Actually I should say unfortunately,
as it is clear that we have a substantial population of them and they may well damage or
even kill the Rosemary. They are supposed to like Thyme and Lavender too, but our
beetles did not.
At the beginning of March the met office told us that February had indeed been February
fill-dyke this year, especially in SE England, where we had double the usual February
rainfall. And in spite of the snow, it was the mildest February for some years. In addition,
the three winter months of December, January and February made the warmest winter
since records began.
On 8"' March I was able to cut the lawn at last. It was a beautiful sunny day with little
wind, so it felt really summery, though the air temperature never got above 13°C. While
raking up the cuttings I noticed some small pale things, beige colour, slightly fan or shell
shaped, in a corner of damp moss on our lawn. When I looked more closely, they were
clearly fungi. A piece I took soon gave up its identity through the microscope, and was
Arrhenia spathulata (sorry, no English name) which I had never seen before. The moss
it was growing on was Calliergonella cuspidata, a common one of damp unimproved
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 53, May 2007
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