First daffodil in the garden, a tiny narcissus. There are crocus, too, till in the bud, soon to follow. No snowdrops yet; they take a while to get started, and I am starting from concrete, clay and mud back here. Next year, maybe. All along the tow-path, spring is touching life from the trees, buds swelling, almost bursting. Spring is coming. This year, the thing that has struck me the most is not those usual pretty harbingers of spring like catkins and snowdrops, but the masses of fragile young seedlings scrambling out from under snow and hail with astonishing deterination and haste. They're growing everywhere; in piles of old leaves, along the edges of streets, in the cracks in pavements, shooting up so fast, that it seems that you might be able to see the growth if you watched it for an hour in weak spring sunshine. No way of telling what they are yet, though you can guess from near neighbours. Hollyhocks by front gardens, dockleaves on waste ground. In my back garden? Wait and see. In the meantime, ladybirds are coming out to sun themselves when they can find some sun. Aphids, doubtless, will be along any minute. The slugs are certainly here already; look at that daffodil's second bud.

A truly unexpected sight as I left the house on a frosty morning. A substantial, one might even say juicy, caterpillar, dangling from the front fence. It looked on the way to dying, but it wasn't dead yet; and, more to the point, how had it gotten large enough to choke a blackbird by the first week of february?

The answer, I suspect, goes back to shortly before Christmas when I was chopping down chunks of the trees out back to let more light down into the back garden. I chopped lelandia and laurel, neither a likely food-plant for an overwintering egg or larva, but there were also passion vines strung among the branches. A delicious evergreen food plant strung among cosy evergreen trees, facing the morning sun? What could be more congenial for an overwintering butterfly egg?

Chopped and tucked into my green recycling bag, it hatched in the warmth of my shed, and gorged on chilled but still tasty leaves, away from the frost and snow while for almost a month my green waste lay uncollected, recycling lorries kept at the depot for fear of ice and snow. Like a caterpilllar in a jam jar it grew fat and fast.

The morning they finally came to collect the green waste, though, was brutally cold. Shaken from its cosy bag it chilled and died. By the time I got home in the evening, something had made a meal of it. Mmmm! Caterpillar slush-puppy.

What species, though? I'm guessing one of the commoner whites.

I struggled along the tow-path on monday under sky so low and grey it didn't even get light at lunchtime. The birds had stayed in, too; just a single magpie on the frozen field, a lonely gull white against a whiter sky. The snow had turned to filthy slush, churned black along Folly Bridge, slippery and vile.

This morning I was expecting things to be about the same; but some tiny fractional increase of light and warmth had woken up the birds. There was a robin, perched outside a narrowboat, waiting for the inhabitants to wake up and give him breakfast. Here a mob of gulls checking me for food. And as I walked across the bridge, hand clamped to the metal rail, guard against slipping in the slush, a wren darted out from almost under my hand, close enough I could feel the flap of its wings. She'd probably been hinting spiders in the crevices on the bridge; they're still there, even in the cold, guarding their egg sacs.

I tried to photograph one, but it was just too dark.

I tried the frost underfoot today and decided it was worth trying the towpath. By way of reward I didn't fall into the river, but I did see:

Magpies and magpies and magpies.
A mixed flock of Blue Tits and Great Tits.
Two winter flocks of Long Tailed Tits.
A cheeky Redwing.
A pair of sparrows foraging in a leaf-choked gutter.
That thrush again, ducking into the ivy.
An explosion of woodpigeons as I passed six foraging too close to the path.
Assorted gulls, mallard, geese, blackbirds, coot and a swan.

After that I wasn't expecting the walk home to stand out, but I was wrong. It was both brought forward a little and made enormously more exciting by the presence of snow!



Falling snow fills the negative space of the urban environment, making what is usually air a mass of exciting whirling particles, suddenly visible in all its glorious three-dimensionality. This usually invisible and ignored space is suddenly given turbulent life and I see now that it is full of current and eddies, gusts and breezes, particles around which ice can form and fall. The disturbances to the flow caused by vehicles, trees, buildings is suddenly revealed, and as if someone had dropped dye into a wind-tunnel, the air becomes suddenly visible, tangible and real.

This morning the ice had melted and rain was seeping from a flat grey sky. My heart leapt at the sight of such congenial weather. After a week of teetering to the busstop over glass-slick pavements fearing each slush-slippy step, finally I could return to the tow-path.

With cheerful (albeit slightly damp) humour I decided to record my morning bird list, which reads:

House Sparrow (1)
Crow (4)
Pigeon (8)
Magpie (11)
Black Headed gull (20+)
Mallard (10)
Coal Tit (1)
Coot (8)
Robin (3)
Blackbird (1)
Collared Dove (3)
Song Thrush (1)
Canada Goose (30+)

This is the clear identifications only. I've left out all the half-glimpsed or heard-not-seen birds. It's quite disappointing, especially the tits. Where are the Wagtails? The Redstarts? The Long Tailed Tits? Where are the Swans?

However, one thing on that list was a surprise! I wouldn't normally expect to the see a Thrush on the tow path, and there he (or she - they're not sexually dimporphic at all) was, hopping into the ivy with a beak full of something.

I peered round the bush and found myself face-to-beak with a thrush with a banded snail ready for smashing. I'd probably just startled him off an anvil stone.

Off gardening at my friend Melanie's, I found this pretty shield bug huddled against my cooling mug of tea. Sheild bugs are vegetarians, sap-suckers, and generally seen as a bit of a pest (although there's one in New Zealand that's a caterpillar sucker) but I think they look cheerful and handsome. It could be the amusingly-named Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale, the hawthorn shield bug, or a birch shield bug, but from the location, it's probably a Juniper Shield Bug -- like lots of people with overlooked gardens, Melanie has conifers sheilding the borders of her garden, and Juniper Sheild Bugs love that. I remember one christmas, I decided to deck the halls with boughs of lelandii (that being what I had). For the next week, sheild bugs were sleepily popping out of the dense branches and crawling around the sitting room. Lelandii are brutes, but the dense vegetation shelters small birds from predators, and provides a safe and surprisingly warm space for hibernating insects; in spring, watch out for ladybirds creeping out from under them.

All along the tow-path at the moment are swathes of a beautiful blue flower, that grows in long, knotted stems on tough dark green stems with thin, afterthoughtish leaves. I've collected its seeds for a few years now (for wildflowers) but I still don't know its name. Time to find out!

It's a blue flower, so obviously my starting point is a Cornflower, the famous blue face of unweedkillered cornfields. I'm pretty sure it's not a Cornflower (soil wrong, stem wrong, flower the wrong shape) but shock! the third suggestion on google image is clearly the right flower. Number five of Holly Golightly's top 10 something blues is the right flower, and identified as a cornflower. The story of Queen Louise of Prussia keeping her kids entertained and quiet by weaving wreaths of cornflowers, too, that would work better with this flower than with regular cornflowers, it makes itself into wreaths. Perhaps it is a cornflower after all, just a different sort.

Time to get serious about identification. By serious, of course, I mean searching British Wildflower's index page for the word "blue". And, almost immediately, I have a contender; the gorgeous Sow Thistle Common Blue. Alas, though the flowers are right, the stem is wrongly arranged, the leaves all wrong, and anyway, it's not common. My boistrous riverside scrambler is something else. Nothing similar in Floral Images's blue gallery, either. Is it an escaped exotic? Perhaps someone a bit more local might help? Someone selling waterside seed mixes sourced from the thames?

Damn, I've checked through the unfamiliar names, but to no avail. My best match is Hairless Blue Sow Thistle, but given as how it's blue, slightly hairy and more knapweed-like in appearance than sowthistlesque I must retreat defeated. For now!

Thanks to j4 this is identified as chicory, famous for pretending to be coffee and curing intestinal worms. It's also a famous Roman herb: "Chicory is an ingredient in typical Roman recipes, generally fried with garlic and red pepper, with its bitter and spicy taste, often together with meat or potatoes." More culinary uses here.

I spotted this scrap of carrion by the side of the towpath, and thought it was a large insect, then a scorpion (which would really have been strange; no scorpions around here!). Of course, it's a crustacean, a Crayfish -- and from the size and dull colouring I'm guessing that it's one of our native White Clawed Crayfish rather than the larger invasive species, the Signal Crayfish. Mind you, I'm guessing by squinting at the picture on this page, so I might be wrong. White Clawed Crayfish are endangered in the Thames, and very rare, after all. But, Signal or White-clawed, what on earth was one doing dead by a tow-path? It wasn't even on the river side, but tangled in some ivy beside the cricket fields!

Chances are, it was dropped by a predator. Herons and crows both take crayfish, as do minks, rats and otters. I've never seen an otter or a mink in Oxford, but crows, rats and otters are well represented, and all of these may drop a prickly mouthful, especially if disturbed.

The first crayfish I had ever seen on the Thames, and it was dead; once they were so common that everyone along the Thames had a crayfish pot or two, and they were sold in the Oxford market. A dish of crayfish, as scarlet as coral, was not unfrequently seen at a College luncheon... (read on)