February a harsh month weather wise but Spring is edging closer

February is an odd month, writes Dick Warner

It’s often the cruellest month of the winter with bitter and prolonged frost and always the chance of snow. It’s a particularly hard month for wild birds and small mammals because the autumn abundance of seeds and berries has dwindled, making it difficult to find enough to provide the calories needed for survival in the cold.

However, there are tantalising signs of spring. The fact that the days are getting longer is now obvious at dawn and dusk and it is celebrated by the first tentative trills of bird song. The ones that have survived so far are starting to think that it might be prudent to stake out a breeding territory and set up the avian equivalent of a dating website.

In the plant world there are also signs of the first green shoots — a term that has recently been plucked from the hedgerows by the economists and used to describe the early signs of an end to a wintry recession.

The elders are preparing to break bud and they will be followed, shortly afterwards, by wild honeysuckle leaves. In Ireland today these are largely hedgerow plants but they evolved in the primeval wild wood where they learned to steal an advantage over the tall trees by breaking dormancy earlier and gaining access to precious February sunlight.

The same tactic is used by smaller plants in the hedge bottom. So far nothing is actually in flower but buds are forming in the centre of the rosettes of primrose leaves and, if you look closely, you can see similar activity in dog violets and lesser celandines.

There is activity too at the very top end of our countryside food chain. For a couple of weeks now I’ve heard the screaming of a vixen on windless nights. Cubs conceived now will be born at the end of April. This is a time of year when young rabbits are starting to appear and pheasants are nesting on the ground — all perfect food for a den full of hungry fox cubs.

It has not been a very pleasant winter but it has been exceptionally mild and wet. If this continues and the winter doesn’t end up with a sting in its tail, we may be in for an early and luxuriant spring. Perhaps there will be a vindication, for once, of the old belief that spring starts on February 1, Imbolc or Saint Brigid’s Day, depending on whether you’re a pagan or a Christian ... an attractive thought.

However, any pleasure I take from such a thought is tempered by the uneasy knowledge that warm, wet and wild winters are exactly what the computer models predict climate change will do to our weather.

Even if all the moves to curb climate change go exactly according to plan, there’s still a lot more of it to come. And when it comes to warm, wet and wild winters you can certainly have too much of a good thing.