Do Jackdaws have a sense of humour? A few days before Christmas, one started to lay twigs in the fork of a big oak, high, very high up. Fidgeting, footling, while a companion looked on, and occasionally shifted position. Jackdaws don't normally nest in trees, according to the books, though they will in holes in a trunk. All sorts of other holes, too, in cliffsides, though most of us know their fondness for blind chimneys and may even welcome their cheery presence. Or put up with it. An hour or so after the demonstration in the high tree, not a sign of either, or of sticks in the fork. Take it as an omen, a precursor of better times to come, a hint of a sign that they are on the way.
Underneath the same tree, when the leaves had been swept away, bulbs were found to have put up their shoots - now two inches high. And that rather off putting bush, the flowering currant, has for some time had its thick, long, leaf-buds swelling. It grows like a weed. Not everyone likes its smell. Too cattish. And a neighbour has been going around his territory looking for that strong, really unfriendly growth - the cleevers or goose grass, which eventually produces those awful little burrs which cling to you as you pass. The neighbour reports that they are already growing up through last year's crop, which still hangs on brown and battered though it is.
Gallum aparine in Latin, Richard Mabey in his Flora Britannica finds more than 20 alternative names for it ... Sticky Willy, Kisses, Bobby Buttons, and, of course, Robin-run-the-hedge. It is "an abundant scrambling annual" and it can growth 10 feet in a season. Believe it or not, he mentions beer being made out of it in Staffordshire. There's a thought for Meath. A few acorns, lying among the grass under the leaves, were found, as usual, to have sprouted. Stuck into compost in a pot, they'll probably survive. And is it a sign of the turn of the year that two hours before what passes for dawn these days, both a blackbird and a robin were singing in the pitch dark?