Читать книгу The Times A Year in Nature Notes - Derwent May - Страница 80

THE BLUE FLOWERS of common field speedwell, or Persian speedwell, are making bright borders alongside the young corn and oilseed rape. The plants are tall and sturdy, with broad leaves, while the flowers have three blue lobes with dark veins, and a whitish lower lobe. The speedwell family is a large one, and two other species will soon be following at the field edges. One is ivy-leaved speedwell, a sprawling, weedy-looking plant with small lilac flowers and leaves shaped as the name indicates. The other is the most handsome of the speedwells: the germander speedwell, or bird’s-eye, which has gleaming blue flowers with bright white centres.

Great tits are now singing for much of the day. Besides their best-known song, the loud, repeated ‘teacher, teacher’, they have a number of others, including a triple-note variant of that song, and a strange combination, also steadily repeated, of a thin note and a faint click.