Sunday's wind and sun up Meath way seemed to move flocks of birds around with abandon. Several large squadrons of fieldfares or redwings - couldn't see from the car - one slew of peewits, rooks in ragged small groups. And then when a cottage with the nine feeding devices hanging from riverside trees was reached, you could hardly see the nuts for the swarms of birds around them - blue tits, the predominant cole tits and groups of chaffinches which preferred to feast off the scraps which fell onto the grass. But then the brutal greenfinches, pushing everything out of their way. Subjectively - and no one need agree - this was the coldest wind, cutting and persistent. Anyway, to global warming (hah), or climate change again. A friend in the same county remarked that now he had lambs born well before Christmas, where it used to be January and February. In fact, he says, its almost lamb all the year round, maybe exaggerating just a bit. Julian Pettifer in an article "Edging Towards Meltdown" in the BBC Wildlife magazine gives some of the details from a conference of Climate Change and Wildlife held last September at Norwich, with such information that Lake Windermere in N. England, which used to be frozen for about 10 days every winter has seen no ice for 10 years. There have been earlier earth warmings after an ice age, it should be said. Family diaries, apparently inconsequential, have proved most useful. The Marsham family in Norfolk have logged the years since 1736, dating such apparently insignificant items as the first snowdrop, when swallows appeared, when the first nightingale sang. And "the four earliest leafing dates for oaks ever recorded occurred in the past decade." (Oak and ash usually being the last to leaf up.)
Polar bears are having a bad time in the Arctic, for seaice breaks up earlier and gives the bears which hunt seals a short season. They are losing condition and cub mortality is on the rise. Robert Marsham, writes Pettifer, would be astonished to know that his jottings would be so significant and to learn that this winter in England, daffodils and snowdrops were in flower before Christmas. "It never happened in his day." A letter from the English Met Office is quoted: "Ignoring climate change will surely be the most costly of all possible choices for us and our children." A live, running story.