A spring in our step

Winter is clearly on the way out. The first daffodils are blooming in our front yard, while several trees in our back yard burst into blossom this week. This morning I noticed three plump, colourful native wood pigeons in the back yard gorging themselves on swelling blossom buds. We see a lot of these birds in our yard. Not surprisingly, a survey in 2005 found wood pigeons were the UK's most commonly sighted bird.

It's been a remarkably mild winter so far with only a couple of cold weeks in late-January. As of January 20 the mean UK winter temperature had been 0.6 °C above the 1971-2000 average. Forecasters expect the next few months to remain mild. We'll know more when official Spring weather predictions are released on February 26.

Rainfall was also above average, standing at 122% of the same comparison period. However, this appears to be increasingly normal. Winter rainfall since the turn of the century is up by around 30% over the previous 80 years. Grey skies remain as prevalent as ever.