40 Days Before Christmas, It's Springtime In The UK- Tadpoles Out, Primroses Blooming In Scotland

[hatrack]

With only 40 days left until Christmas, the countryside should be in the clutches of autumn. Yet across Britain, signs of spring can be found nestled among the golden leaves after a mostly dry and almost balmy start to November.

Amateur naturalists have seen daffodils in Devon and Cardiff while primroses have been flowering in Surrey, Hampshire and as far north as Inverness. Crab apple flowers have been spotted in Nottingham with elder and foxgloves in full bloom in Somerset, apple blossom in West Sussex and Northamptonshire and even wild strawberries in Cardiff and Carmarthen.

The National Trust has also reported magnolias in bloom again in the south-east, and roses, witch hazel and ceanothus also flowering. Other signs normally associated only with spring have been seen around ponds with dragonflies mating and reports of live tadpoles in Fife and young newts in Edinburgh.

In Northumberland house sparrows have been seen nurturing a young brood in an area where Red Admiral butterflies can still be seen.

EDIT

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2007/11/13/easpring113.xml

[debbierlus]

1. 60 degress here in Western MA

However, we did just get done with a cold snap.

Still, 60s in November...

[zalinda]

2. Here in central New York, the leaves are

just beginning to change and fall. This is not good.

zalinda

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. In NW Arkansas,

the leaves have just turned, and are just now falling--about 2-3 weeks behind schedule. And we haven't been getting the autumn rains we usually get.

[phantom power]

4. We have had something like 40 straight days of higher-than-average temps.

We're still seeing temps in the high 80s.

[Systematic Chaos]

5. Right now Weatherbug has it at 74.9 degrees, down from 76.

That is still 10 degrees above the November average, as it has been all month and most of September and October preceding it. The only good thing about this is that the summer was not as bad as 2005 which had a solid week of highs from 116 to 119.

[kestrel91316]

6. We got you beat here in the San Fernando Valley. It was 86 an hour or so ago.....

It was even worse than this two or three years ago, when it stayed into the upper 90s right through Thanksgiving......

[Nihil]

7. It's not so much the temperature as the variability

Had to scrape ice off the car again this morning before Mrs.N could
drop me at the station. Had to do it on Tuesday too but yesterday
was fine (~6C at 07:15).

I retrieved a couple of fresh chillies from the plant out on the patio
at the weekend but there was frost on it today.

Our silver birch still has most of its leaves but the maple's are in a
heap on the ground. The wildlife doesn't seem to know whether to store,
eat, breed or sit there bemused so I've a nasty feeling that although
the birds will tend to survive (using the seeds, etc., put out for them),
the hedgehogs & squirrels will suffer again this winter.

:-(

[tom_paine]

8. This almost seems to me to be a Gaian shift of sorts.

After all, this has been going on for decades, but now it seems that across the board things are making this big shifts this year. A tipping point.

And if indeed the Earth functions as a single organism, then the wholesale month-extra that seems to have been added to the leaves turning and falling is the new Gaian norm (within the individual ecosystem in which they operate, and statistiucally there are likely many exceptions as there always are in biological and environmental processes).

I suspect that, after this year, many places in Imperial Amerika will now see Nov. 15th, not October 15th, as the new norm about which the "error bars" rotate. So what used to be a very late lef-fall will from henecforth be an early turning.

Just a speculation. We might as well speculate.

What was the last Easter Islander who cut the last tree thinking? I know what it was.

"Good."

[Javaman]

9. Just imagine what next summer is going to be like...

:scared: