Bushy Park Nature Diary - February

The original plan was that this entry would be all about finding those first signs of the on-coming Spring. Well winter, if you could call it winter, has had other ideas, and the theme in Bushy Park this month has been storms. And lots of them! The park is currently saturated with water, with pools and puddles dotted everywhere on our side of the park, and branches and trees blown everywhere. It’s been so bad that Royal Parks decided to close the park when Storm Ciara came through, probably a wise idea given the number of tall trees in there.

In between the howling winds there have been calm periods though, and I have managed to get in a couple of times to look for wildlife and also to do some astronomy. Usually this time of year is when the crocuses and the daffodils come out in huge stands in the woodland gardens, but I wouldn’t know having not managed to venture in there since January!

The Longford River just before Storm Ciara.

In fact most of my visits to the park have been nocturnal ones and this has led me on the trail of some of the more elusive Bushy Park residents – the owls. The last couple of evenings have seen me scouring the park for these birds. You hear them constantly at night, particularly the shrill cry of the little owl but also the haunting hoots of the tawny. Seeing them is a different matter though – being nocturnal means that you never make yourself obvious, and both species are incredibly well camouflaged. There are a couple of tricks to seeing them though. With tawny owls your best bet is to find an area they frequent then stake them out. Following the hoots seems to work quite well, which I did over the course of a couple of nights finally locating an owl's hunting area. The next step is to head down there at dusk, and I was finally able to watch one silently flit from a tree toward some woodland, a privilege to get to see one of these beautiful birds. I’m hoping to make these “my” owls, in that I’d like to observe them fairly regularly and gain a degree of trust. It’s important to avoid disturbance, so now I know where they hunt I'll sit quietly and wait for them to come to me.

The little owls are just as elusive and I’ve seen them most often in the summer hunting near some of the cricket pitches. I used to know a roost for these birds but the dead tree they used has had to be cut back – after they’d vacated of course! I now don’t know of any roosts (Not that I’d reveal the location if I did). Little owls face a real problem from parakeets as both species nest in tree holes and the parakeets are very good at taking them over. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for sparrowhawks taking out a few of the green menaces, but what we really need are peregrines. One of the positives of our urban parakeets is that peregrine falcons love to eat them!

I managed to spot a little owl by heading over to a well known hot spot near Heron Ponds on the other side of the park a few nights ago. The winds were very strong so I didn’t hold out much hope, but I gamely walked across the park to get over there. As soon as I cross the road running down the middle I feel like I’m stepping into another world and the terrain becomes very different. There’s a lot of bracken over this side and sizable population of stonechats, a taste of home for me as a native of the New Forest. I headed over to the pond in the dusk in order to see the owls and the chink-chink of the stonechats was a bonus. I found the owl in one of the plantations, along with the fluttering silhouette of a bat. They’re getting quite active and its worryingly early for that.

It won’t be long until Spring arrives. Maybe I’ll get a chance to go and see those crocuses but we’ll see. I also need to start taking my bat detector down there because I’ve seen bats two nights on the trot while looking for owls. My biggest worry at the moment is that due to the mild weather I might have missed one of my favourite Bushy Park moments – toad season! The amphibians all tend to migrate back to the ponds at the same time when they weather gets milder, usually in March, and you find mating toads everywhere. Although the toads are the main event, I’ve also found frogs, smooth newts and, on one memorable occasion, my wife found a female great-crested newt on the path. The fact that you can encounter wildlife as thrilling as tawny owls, stonechats, great-crested newts and bats in an urban park is testament to what a wonderful place I have right on my doorstep. Roll on Spring!