I wonder, though, whether this year’s was more typical of those we used to have. We’ve had a fair few dry springs in recent times, and some warm ones. The birdlife seemed to take this year’s offering in its stride for the most part.

There was the steady arrival of the summer migrants: one week in the second half of the month it was, as usual, dank and dismal and there were no Chiffchaffs singing; the next week it was still dank and dismal and they were all over the place. Soon after, we had other warblers, Blackcaps and Whitethroats, adding to the chorus of the year-round residents.

Newdigate Choral Society

Along with its mixed woodland, lakes and ponds, its grassland, Newdigate has a decent amount of that sometimes-derided habitat: scrub.

Scrub is the more-or-less dense thickets of blackthorn and hawthorn, hazel, bramble, dog rose and many other things, much the same species as dominate in the hedgerows which our countryside used to have rather more of. It can look quite splendid – the blackthorn first, in April, and then the hawthorn in May put on a good show this year.

People do not always like scrub, but many small mammals do, as well as leaf-litter invertebrates, leaf-eating insect larvae and a range of lichens.  Most of all, it is a haven for songbirds and so scrub is where the music comes from: Goldfinches, Great Tits and Blue Tits, Blackbirds, Song Thrushes, Chaffinches, Robins, Dunnocks and others besides find a thorny perch from which to sing.

Since February, Newdigate’s volume had been rising and in late April and early May, it reached its crescendo.

Unfortunately, to hear the most our birdlife is capable of in spring, there is only one time to visit: the hour before dawn. I am no late-riser, but anything before 5am is, to my mind, the middle of the night. You can’t expect to persuade others to give up a decent part of a decent night’s sleep to meet you at Newdigate Nature Reserve car park at 5am.

Fortunately, an old friend of mine, a retired sound engineer, is of a generous character and did just that. It was an hour before sunrise on 19 April that we arrived, still quite dark with just the first thin wash of dawn light colouring the eastern sky, but the birds were singing already.

The chorus gathered for the next quarter of an hour, peaked between 5:15 and 5:45 and was noticeably ebbing by six.  Two recordings were made and a link to one of them was circulated in the Trust’s May E-Newsletter. If you’ve not already heard it, listen below.

There’s a Wren trying to grab all the glory in the foreground, some entertaining if less musical backing vocals from the waterfowl and some even less musical interventions from a range of corvids: birds join the dawn chorus even if they can’t actually sing, it seems. But behind it all throughout you can hear the surround-sound songbird chorus.

Far too dense to pick-out individual birds, it was as though someone was singing from every tree, from every clump of scrub, from every branch and briar. It was very much worth the loss of a couple of hours’ sleep.

Green is the scene

In the woods before the end of March, we had Wood Anemones, Dog Violets, the odd clump of Daffodils, Cuckooflowers and plenty of Lesser Celandines all flowering amid the gentle garlic scent of Ramsons.

Hawthorn showed its first spray of green by then too, along with Honeysuckle and Dog Rose, but things really got going in April. Having witnessed 50+ of them, I still find the transformation in the English countryside between early April and mid-May astonishing.

The first flowering Bluebell I saw here was at the start of April; by mid-month, they were thick among a dense woodland carpet of Violets and Celandines still in flower, Garlic Mustard, Ramsons, Greater Stitchwort, some early woodland Buttercups (the Goldilocks, I think) and Ground Ivy. Hart’s Tongue fern unfurled its new vibrantly green fronds.

The Blackthorn was fully out in flower by mid-April, later than it can be but putting on a good show: there’s a bank of it near the two ponds with uncommonly pinkish flowers. A couple of small trees, one by the North Pond, one near the north-east corner of the North Lake, I tentatively identified as Wild Pear. They looked fantastic wreathed in thick white blossom for a couple of weeks in April.

By May, there was plenty of Bugle flowering in the grassland and there was Yellow Archangel in the woods (also, unfortunately, the first leaves of Himalayan Balsam), but we were past the peak of the woodland floor flower display as the mature trees came into leaf above. At first a fresh acid green, the oak leaves looked good enough to eat before their green matured and darkened into June.

From June, the flowering action shifted to the grassland and lake banks with Common Vetch, Birdsfoot Trefoil, Common Spotted Orchid and the yellow, rose-like flowers of Creeping Cinquefoil.

Butterflies in mind

At the start of April, we set-up a new butterfly survey transect as part of Butterfly Conservation’s UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme.

Taking in woodland edges and rides, scrubland and grassland on the north and west of the Reserve, it is a fixed route to be walked once a week or more between April and September.

It didn’t start-off with much activity in April: there are a set of weather-related constraints on when it can be walked and April was almost always too cold, too wet or too windy. There were perhaps two days when all the boxes were ticked and, needless to say, I was away for both of them. I got going on 3 May andit had been walked eight more times by me and others by the 20th June. 

We’ve had various Whites (Large, Small, Green-veined, Orange-tipped and Brimstones), Red Admirals, Speckled Woods, Small Heaths and Common Blues. A little less common are the Dingy Skipper (of which we have seen a number) and just one Grizzled Skipper – a rarity in Surrey.

We had hoped to see more of that, but at least there was one. I was rather pleased with a lone Green Hairstreak one day in late May and moving into late June, the Meadow Browns and Large and Small Skippers began to appear.

Royal blue

I will sign-off for this quarter with my favourite observation of the last few months. 

I was doing the British Trust for Ornithology’s Wetland Bird Survey on the designated day in May and peering dimly through the binoculars at a trio of Tufted Ducks some distance off by the water’s edge on the North Lake when I caught sight of a smudge of orange on a branch above them.

Somehow, though I don’t see them often, I knew immediately what it was. Deeper, darker than a Robin’s red breast, I knew it was a Kingfisher and then it turned on the branch to show that iridescent blue which is unmistakable. I hustled around to get a better look.

It flew across the water to a Hawthorn in full bloom on the island and sat there preening for a minute or two, sumptuous blue against a blanket of white flower (I really must get a decent camera for this sort of thing).

In all the glittering spectacle of the King’s coronation that month, I doubt there was anything more opulent, more thoroughly lavish, than that bird’s royal blue. It made my day.

Stephen Woodcock
20 June 2023

Thanks to Pete Lilley, Newdigate Nature Reserve veteran, for walking the butterfly transect when I was away at the end of May and at other times. Pete records his observations of butterflies and many other things at Newdigate online.