The information that final month was the warmest ever February in England and Wales is not going to have come as a lot shock – in any case, we’re used to climate information being damaged commonly due to the local weather disaster.
In the direction of the top of the month, temperatures in Kew Gardens in London reached a excessive of 21.2C (70.16F), a UK report for February. This allowed a lot of our resident breeding birds to begin breeding a month or extra sooner than common – although the month’s report rainfall might have precipitated them issues. And if we do get even a short chilly snap in March or April, they could fail to boost their treasured brood of chicks.
A heat February is just not totally unprecedented: 1989 was the mildest February that century at that time. This resulted from an enormous space of excessive stress over Iberia and southern France, producing a light, south-westerly airstream, which raised temperatures on 5 February to an unseasonable 14C (57.2F).
What a distinction to the massive freeze of the winter of 1962-63 when a persistent excessive stress system between Scotland and Norway produced a bitterly chilly February. Afterwards, the ornithologist and broadcaster James Fisher grimly famous: “Evidently at the very least half the wild birds dwelling on this nation earlier than final Christmas are actually lifeless.”
But such is the power of small birds to bounce again that inside two years, populations of most species have been again to regular, as if that horrible winter had by no means occurred.
