Country Diary: A day of so many nature interventions | Nicola Chester

Inkpen, West Berkshire: We stop for a bee-fly, hares, sweet yellowhammers and white violets, but it's the woodlark that really has us gaspingIn these showery, rainy, downpour days, spring on the downs has a look of the substrate that forms it - a blue-merle purling of flint and chalk. The contrasts of dapple-grey and white snag my eye as a deeply familiar marker of spring that I always forget to look for. It's there in the chalk tracks and cream-plough fields, hail-full clouds, a snow flurry against an iron sky, blossom by a flint wall. Skylarks, meadow pipits and woodlarks rise up, singing against it all.The woodlark is a relative newcomer (or returnee) here, appearing first on stubble fields that are left to overwinter under agri-environment schemes. In what seems to be a continuing range expansion from a lowpoint in the 1980s, they have bred successfully here in the last few years, and now their song rains down in a more melodic, simpler hallelujah than the skylark's brassy notes. Sometimes I hear them from the back garden. Continue reading...