Blooming flowers, fledgling birds … the UK’s spring is early – and always will be

A blackbird feeding a fledged youngster in early January. Red campions flowering four months early. And the earliest recorded sighting of a rare beetle.

Wildlife experts and gardeners are reporting a series of highly unusual early sightings of flora, fauna, insects and birds across Britain, some of them weeks before when they would normally appear, in a further sign that rising global temperatures are having a significant impact on British wildlife.

Spring has been creeping forward steadily for decades. Plants flowered a full month earlier in the UK between 1987 and 2019 than they did prior to 1986, a recent report published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal found. But this year, following a relatively mild and dry winter, experts say they have seen anomalies that could be a sign of shifting behavioural patterns in nature due to climate change.

‘Right now, you’d normally see a few things starting to stir, like snowdrops poking their heads above the soil and coming into flower,’ said Jack Wallington, a landscape designer and author based near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, adding that many developments feel about a month earlier than usual – despite being 300 metres up on an exposed hillside.

He has also spotted ‘buds on trees and shrubs swelling up’, while daffodils are ‘rocketing’.

Meanwhile, several perennials (including Calamagrostis brachytricha, Veronicastrum and Astrantia) are actively growing, which, he said ‘is probably about a month earlier than I would expect to be seeing them’.

At the same time, the Wildlife Trusts are reporting a range of earlier than usual sightings, including barn owls preparing to nest weeks early in Ulster, red campions flowering in January in Montgomeryshire, marsh marigolds flowering weeks early in Gwent and the earliest ever sighting of a black oil beetle in Staffordshire.

‘We’ve definitely seen some anomalies this year,’ said Kathryn Brown, director of climate action at the Wildlife Trusts.

While it is too soon to officially measure whether spring is earlier than usual, she said the broader trends are plain to see. ‘We do know very clearly that spring is coming earlier and earlier every year and that’s due to climate change,’ she said. ‘There’s a whole range of different impacts of that happening.’

Meanwhile, as well as recording a blackbird with a fledgling in Bournemouth, the British Trust for Ornithology reported that a great crested grebe had been spotted with young in Fordwich, Kent, in January, describing such a sighting as ‘remarkable’.

Ulf Büntgen, a professor of environmental systems analysis at the University of Cambridge and lead author of a Royal Society report into plant flowering published this month, which used more than 400,000 observations from 1753 onwards, said the timing of first flowering varies from year to year, mainly driven by temperatures. But in the long term, he said, their research shows that a 1.2C rise in temperature brought spring forward by a month.

In future, he warned, ‘ecological mismatch’ could have a damaging impact- ‘If the trends continue like this, that could have more profound effects, severe effects, on the functioning and productivity of ecosystems, because things that depend on each other in terms of timing – insects, plants, other animals – get disrupted.’

Lorienne Whittle, citizen science officer at Nature’s Calendar, the Woodland Trust’s reporting project, said earlier springs are becoming ‘the new normal’; 2019 and 2020 were particularly early. So far this year, she reports sightings of birds nesting, frogspawn and butterflies emerging.

Using the ‘spring index’ calculators – first flowering of the horse chestnut and hawthorn and the first sightings of an orange-tip butterfly and swallow – between the early 1900s and now, she said spring has moved forward more than eight days.

Juliet Sargeant, a West Sussex-based garden designer and 2016 Chelsea flower show gold medal winner, said she has noticed shrubs coming into leaf earlier. While there had been a general progression towards earlier springs, ‘this year has been so mild, we’ve had almost no winter to speak of, so far’.

But the weather’s unpredictability meant that gardeners had to remain ‘particularly vigilant’ for overnight frost, she added.

The Royal Horticultural Society said it had seen soaring visitor numbers to its five gardens as people made the most of the spring-like conditions, with a 90% increase across all of its gardens in the first week of February compared with the same period last year (when they were open but under Covid restrictions).

The society’s chief horticulturist, Guy Barter, said Christmas roses, bulbs, crocuses and early flowering shrubs such as camelias are ‘looking particularly great this year because they haven’t been spoilt by the rain and frost’.

Mark McCarthy, manager of the National Climate Information Centre at the Met Office, said that, from a meteorological perspective, spring doesn’t start until 1 March, but that so far this winter had been about a degree warmer than the average, ‘with a relative absence of notably cold and frosty conditions’.