Читать книгу The Times A Year in Nature Notes - Derwent May - Страница 26

ON MANY HOLLY bushes, there are little yellow blotches on the upper surface of the older leaves. Sometimes a whole tree can be affected. Inside the blotches there lives the tiny grub of the holly leaf miner, tunnelling away. Its parent is a small fly that laid an egg there.

It is hard to get rid of these insects. Insecticidal sprays run off the shiny holly leaves. Blue tits are better at the job, and can often be seen pecking at the leaves to extract the creature inside. However, leaf miners do not seriously affect the basic health of the tree they colonise.

Blue tits are also beginning to sing their spring song – but it is not very noticeable. It is not much more than a run of their usual thin call-notes followed by a short trill. On a fine morning, they can already be seen looking into nest-boxes and other holes where they might decide to breed in the summer.

Great tits are now singing regularly. They have a variety of double or triple song phrases, vigorously repeated, but the one most frequently heard is a repeated double note that is like the steady, rhythmical wheezing made by a squeaky bicycle pump.