An April Stroll

My nature notes column -

Spring has struggled to assert itself this year, but I did manage an early evening walk along the canal towpath a week or two back, when the weather was managing to be like it’s supposed to be. The new growth of Spring was well behind where it’s been the last few years, but there were celandines, primroses and, here and there, a few coltsfoots brightly in flower. An exotic flash of bright purple turned out to be red dead-nettle, a weed I suppose, but when it first opens in Spring, quite delightful.

Moorhens crossed the canal ahead of me, blue and great tits flitted through the trees and a skein of Canada geese passed overhead. The chiffchaffs I wrote about last month were shouting loudly from the tree tops. I passed a rookery: rooks are well into nesting by now, and these were busy and noisy. Twenty or thirty of their smaller cousins the jackdaws swept over. Last year I’d have been watching the first swallows, but there were none around on this walk. On its huge nest under some willows, a female mute swan (pen) was incubating. She didn’t move a muscle as I walked past.

As a diversion from the towpath I ventured across to Llyn Coed y Dinas nature reserve, and walked the little pathway there is there. The noise from the nesting black-headed gulls was almost deafening, rising to fever pitch when a lesser black-backed gull flew lazily over - regarded, rightly, as a threat by the smaller gulls. I watched a coot for a while, foraging along the edge of the pool, then made my way back to the canal.

On this particular stretch I expect to hear sedge warblers in the early Spring, issuing their scratchy collection of notes from within the high hedges there: nothing this year, though. A group of mallard crashed in - four males and one female. This was not going to be a pretty sight: a boisterous group of males like this will all compete to mate with the single female, who is almost always forced under the water, with some records of her actually drowning. It looked very much as this was going to happen here, as the female disappeared under a scrum of three brightly plumaged males (while the remaining male looked on). I couldn’t resist clapping my hands to alert them to my presence. That stopped the melee. It became clear that this wasn’t in fact four males homing in on one lonely female, so much as three males trying to muscle in on a mated pair, as the duck and one drake stayed close together, while the other three dispersed.

Here and there the hawthorn was beginning to burst its buds. I couldn’t resist taking and eating one or two of the new leaves. They have a not unpleasant, slightly nutty taste, especially when new and young, and I used to pluck and eat a leaf or two on my way to school, I recall. The leaves were sometimes called “bread and cheese”, but if that’s supposed to be descriptive of the taste, it’s a bit fanciful! As the towpath took me back into Welshpool, a song thrush was singing loudly, repeating all its best notes, as they do. A slow and uncertain Spring, but we’re there, at last.