WDC Blog - From the Front Line

The long and very cold winter here in the northern hemisphere has finally given way to Spring. The snowdrops and crocuses have already bloomed and gone and, at least here in the southern part of Britain, even the daffodils are looking past their best. Other flowers, however, are now appearing and many trees are in luxuriant blossom. Even if they are not bearing flowers, there is a flush of green creeping over the twigs and branches of the other deciduous trees, as buds burst and leaves shyly appear. Where I live, the willows are amongst the first trees to show leaves and their skinny drooping branches are rapidly turning a distinctive lime green and will soon have formed those wonderful umbrellas of green shade that characterize many summer river banks.

If you watch your garden birds carefully as winter retreats, you see a quickening in their actions. Their plumage becomes that little bit more colourful and their song a little louder. You may even see their courtship. The blue tits in my garden are currently building a nest. Regularly visiting the nest box I pinned up a few weeks ago with beak-fulls of carefully selected grass and moss. They rarely leave each other’s side now, shooting around the garden like small twin brown and blue avian comets.

Some other birds are even further advanced in their nesting (the colonies of rook nests have been visible in leaf-less trees for some weeks already) and one of the wonders of the world-wide web is that we can now see so much of what is happening in remarkably close detail. For example, we can watch the osprey nest at Loch Garten, in Scotland, and as I write, a pair of ospreys are already in residence but have yet to lay eggs. Click here to link to them. Then there are the New Forest Goshawks which can be seen along with other New Forest wildlife here The peregrine falcons on the spire of Derby Cathedral are also well worth a look. Their website is here (but I note currently temporarily suspended). 

There are also a number of ‘live-streaming’ US websites that are monitoring the nesting activities of the US national symbol, the magnificent bald eagles (I’ll let you find these for yourself).  You may need certain programmes running on your computer to view these sites usually your computers tells you this and it is well worth spending a little time to set your system up to enjoy these previously little-seen Spring wildlife spectaculars. (I have never previously seen a wild Goshawk, never mind watching one nesting and rearing its young, as I hope to in the coming weeks and, amazingly, as long as I can connect to the internet, I shall be able to do this wherever I might be.)

Another good place to enjoy the Spring, and indeed ospreys, is the WDCS wildlife centre in Spey Bay in Scotland. This is an area of spectacular wildlife and the Spey river mouth meets the sea within a few hundred metres of the centre. Here the ospreys come to feed making spectacular dives into the tannic waters of the river to catch trout and salmon, and, of course, the famous dolphins also visit. To find out more about the centre click here.

The seasons are driven by the world climate and as we enter Spring, this time of regeneration and regrowth, I  wonder what kind of weather patterns we shall see this year around the world. Will it be another year of abnormal weather patterns? For example will we see more heavy rains in the UK as we have these last two summers? Because our climate is changing, Mike McCarthy, the environment editor of the Independent newspaper has recently speculated that we might have just seen our last very cold winter in this part of the world. It doesn’t seem an unreasonable speculation (click here to read) and without a Winter can there be a Spring?

For our latest thoughts on what climate change will mean in the seas for the whales and dolphins please see this recently published paper (click here and pan down almost to the bottom - looking for review by Simmonds and Elliot). Like the birds in the garden and the birds on the web, the great majority of the marine animals show seasonal behavioral changes, not just the vast migrations of the great whales (many of which move to polar feeding grounds to catch the Spring blooms of life there; a key-time to recharge their energy stores for the rest of the year) but there are also seasonal movements of the smaller species. Many appear more often closer to shore in the warmer months and are probably following their prey and feeding, for example, in fish spawning grounds.

So, hooray for Spring and hooray for all the seasons and let’s enjoy them and also let’s all work hard and do our part to keep them and ensure that generations yet to come will still see the nesting blue-tits, the ospreys, the goshawks and their like and also of course enjoy the good weather and flat seas of Spring and Summer that help to reveal our precious marine mammals.

Save the Seasons! Save the Climate and, of course, Save the Whales – because all these things are linked together.