MARCH NATURE NOTES

Hanging on to the coat tails of winter, 12 tufted duck were still bobbing on Tonford Lake on the 28th, and on the same day a single meadow pipit was present, while a week earlier eight redwings had flown out of trees on the embankment, where a group of 14 had been present two weeks before. Single snipe were also still present on the 28th but, despite the sight of small numbers of mallard dabbling in some of the fields’ flooded shallows at the month’s end, the overall sensation was of spring intermittently making itself felt. A blackcap that may have been wintering around the Mediterranean a few weeks earlier, was singing nearby on the 13th, and on Hambrook a week later, joining several chiffchaffs, while a starling on the embankment on the 7th had me wondering if perhaps it was considering occupying an old woodpecker hole in the poplars, but I haven’t encountered it again.

Two vocal kingfishers on the river early in the month were certainly a sign that spring was in the air, as these would either have been rival males vying for a stretch of river to call their own, or else a female indulging in hard-to-get behaviour as the frustrated male chased her up and down the watercourse.

With no sightings this month of great crested grebes on Tonford Lake or of stonechats in Tonford Field, it seems reasonable to assume that once again the grebes have abandoned any idea they may have had of nesting there, and that the stonechats have moved away to some scrubby coastal stretch of the county to set up territory.

Asian hornets are much in the news these days, having first been recorded in England in 2016. There is always a risk that alien species will upset the native ecosystem, but with this voracious insect there is the potential for it to wipe out whole colonies of commercially important honey bees. All the hornets have to do is position themselves at a hive entrance and pounce on the honey bees as they approach. Already this year an Asian hornet has been captured at Ash in Kent, and a disproportionate number of the killed adults and destroyed nests have been in the county (in 2023 39 of the 56 records nationally came from Kent) so there is a very real risk of them becoming established in the county. Despite its fearsome reputation, it is actually a little smaller than the European hornet, which has also thrived in Britain in recent years, and from which it can be distinguished by its largely brown abdomen with one broad orange band. Much effort is now being put into tracking down as many as possible of these invaders, and the British Bee Keepers Association recently installed a trap on Hambrook Marshes. It contains a pheromone chemical that is attractive to the hornets and draws them into the trap, which needs to be inspected regularly to ensure the insects don’t escape.