JANUARY was a bleak, cold and wet month making wildlife hard to come by, so when you do see it is even more special.

January’s wildlife highlights started with watching a slightly bedraggled-looking fox in the backwoods of Hurcott Pool. He (a bit of a guess as it could well of been a she) was sitting in a clearing in a bramble patch licking its paws, in much of the same way as my old dog used to, and it had such a pitiful expression on its face I began to wonder just how hard life must be for our wildlife as it ekes out a living.

January is also a time when lots of conservation work takes place on the reserves. Many kind folk, both young and old help out with cutting back unwanted scrub on many of the nature reserves, but some time much more brutal mechanical methods are needed, when the situation gets to the point where manpower alone has no hope of real dressing the balance.

Lats month, scrub trees were felled in a dry acid bank area of Redstone Marsh, to restore a sunny herb rich acid grassland habitat. Chainsaws and tractors make a mess so I thought it will not be until next spring before the rewards of this work could be seen. However, the sheltered south facing aspect of this bank warmed up with the weakest of the January sunshine, enticing a shrew out of its slumber to forage on the newly cleared land.

Burlish Top, like many previous years, gets its annual cut in January and if you stand and watch the tractor for just few a few seconds you will be amazed at the numbers and variety of birds that have discovered this operation and follow the tractor around looking for insects and grubs the mowing may reveal.

My particular favourite tractor followers are the pied wagtails, which run in an almost crazed fashion back and forth behind the wheels.

I have also started to notice the first few bird songs starting to brighten up the nature reserves, with the ever present robin leading with some most welcome melodies. Great tits have also begun to sing in their squeaky saw sounding voices.

There is still little evidence of much spring plant life. Hurcott Pool has the first signs with the newly emerged shoots of this reserve’s snowdrops beginning to poke through but there is very little else. There are still some fungi to be found with the most prominent being some of the jelly fungi, like the rather apply named Jelly Ear and the rather bizarrely named Witches Butter.

I understand this fungi got its name as a supposed protection against witch craft, if the fungi was burnt in a camp fire. Not the best of legends from the fungi’s point of view. Witches Butter looks like masses of black jelly that wobble jelly-like from dead branches but as the year warms up and hopefully things get a little drier the fungi will shrivel up and take on the appearance of a hard, black brain.

This month, wildlife will be busting forth from all the nature reserves and wild places we have in our beautiful district.