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Midwinter spring is the new season

Nature under observation as climate change confuses wildlife

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Friday January 9, 2004
The Guardian

The first snowdrops were already flowering in mid December in Hampshire and frog spawn was seen in Penzance, Cornwall, on December 19 and in Surrey 10 days later.
Spring 2004 is arriving in what should still be winter and the natural world is confused by the contradictions of climate change.

Yesterday, in an attempt to keep track of the dramatic changes being caused by global warming, the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Woodland Trust urged as many people as possible to watch for the first signs of spring in the UK.

The request, however, coincided with a blast of wintry weather. Yesterday the Environment Agency issued 37 flood watches and 15 serious flood warnings, nine of them in Wales and six in the south-west.

Nick Collinson, conservation policy adviser to the Woodland Trust, said of the weather and climate changes,

"They are becoming very dramatic and we need to keep track of them to understand what is going on and if possible use the information to help the natural world cope."

He said that in the past 30 years spring in Britain had arrived earlier in the year, on average three weeks earlier. Problems can then arise if the plants grow earlier and birds nest earlier but the insects they feed on breed later; altering the normal balance of nature.

Similarly, a one-degree rise in temperature gives oak a four-day advantage over ash. That might mean woodland oaks squeezing out ash.

The trust's management of ancient woodland would need to accommodate and study these changes to keep a proper balance of tree species, Mr Collinson said.

The science of phenology - the study of plant and animal response to seasonal change - has records dating back to 1736, but the work of observers has never been more important.

There are 13,500 people in Britain recording such events as the arrival of the first bumble bee and other harbingers of spring, such as hazel catkins, nesting rooks and the first song thrush calls.

The idea now is to build up records throughout the country, plotting the reaction of each species to climate change and helping in the calculation of the speed at which spring "advances" north.

"We want to find out the last record as much as the first, and all those in-between, so we can see how things are changing.

"The first battle is to understand what is happening. The more records the better."

One difficulty is that no season is typical, and the contrast between two years can be huge. A 2C difference in average spring temperature between 2001 and 2003, for example, resulted in flowers opening a week earlier, some up to three weeks earlier.

Nature watchers are asked to record various events, some as mundane as when the lawn is first cut.

They are not asked to look for everything, "just one accurate record will help".

Yesterday Roger Tooth, the Guardian's picture editor, photographed unseasonal almond blossom in north London - and also found a live bumble bee.

The bee went down in the records as the earliest in Britain this year, active two months before last year's date of March 10.

To take part in the survey contact: http://www.the-ba.net/nsw

The hot 2003 summer made last year the sunniest ever for England and Scotland, it emerged yesterday. There were 1,776.7 hours of sunshine in England, beating the previous sunniest in 1995 which had 1,729.7 hours.