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South Yorkshire environmentalist Ian Rotherham of Sheffield Hallam University shares his tips on the wildlife in and around the area at this time of year. You can read his observations on other months by clicking below.

Ian and Rony welcome your letters, comments, sightings and records. Phone 0114 279 6699. For your nature sightings and photos...

Coal tit

December: Christmas cheer

These last few weeks a few of the garden birds have perked up their appetites with more species and greater numbers on the birdfeeders.

We’ve seen Nuthatch, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Blue Tit, Great Tit, and Goldfinches. A tiny Coal tit has become regular and the Long-tailed Tits are around too. A few cold nights as we had a couple of weeks ago and they soon come in to feed.

Tawny Owl

Mistle Thrush and the occasional Blackbird have been singing but only sporadically. My local Tawny Owls have certainly become more vocal over the past few days.

Is it a sign of early breeding? It might be for some of these birds but not necessarily.

Mistle Thrushes, like Blackbirds, are certainly territorial and they sing actively in the breeding season.

But they are also territorial around favoured feeding sites in winter and can get decidedly stroppy close to a favourite berry bush or fruit tree in winter. Here they will display and repel rival Thrushes, Blackbirds and Fieldfares.

Mistle thrush

The subject of Mistle Thrushes or Mistletoe Thrushes brings me seamlessly to my Christmas theme.

Much of the Christmas imagery and decoration is to do with greenery and evergreens. Indeed most of the greenery which is so prized and celebrated - such as Holly, Mistletoe, and in some regions Rosemary, Bay or other evergreens, is decidedly pagan and has overtones of fertility.

Bitterns booming at Potteric

Potteric Carr Nature Reserve near Doncaster is witness to what will hopefully be one of Yorkshire’s newest additions to the resident bird list.

The Bittern is back as a regular winter visitor and hopefully very soon will stay to breed. Then perhaps Potteric and South Doncaster will resound to the deep, sonorous ‘booming’ of the male Bitterns early in the breeding season.

Bittern in flight, © David Plumpton

This winter there are at least three birds - but maybe more, since in the dense reedbeds and extensive Willow Carr wetland it is not easy to see them, let alone count them.

This wonderful wild wetland environment has only a tenuous grip on its past. Extensive drainage in the 1700s and 1800s removed almost all of what was once a great wetland from the map and from local memory, and turned it into farmland.

Mining subsidence and now conservation restoration have brought some of it back. Yet a feel for the long-vanished landscape can be gathered from the former status of some of the wildlife species such as the Bittern.

In times past this brown bird of the heron family was sufficiently common to have its own vernacular name and to feature in local folk rhymes: ‘When on Potteric Carr the Butter Bumps cry, The women of Bulby say summer is nigh’. ‘Bulby’ was Balby, the nearby village.

Reeds at Potteric Carr

The Bittern also featured in local cuisine. The menus of great feasts included Bittern; that for the enthronement of George Neville as the Archbishop of York in 1466 including ‘200 Bytternes; 400 Hernshawes (young herons), and 1,000 Egritts’.

Many of these no doubt came from the Doncaster area. Not too far away even as late as the early 1900s, older people around Beverley could still recall hearing the local Bitterns. Perhaps soon the good folk of Balby will hear them once again.

In many ways Potteric Carr is one of the biggest urban nature reserves in Britain. You can find out more about it and see pics by clicking on the links below.

Incidentally, the mainline railway runs straight through the once important duck decoy at Potteric Carr - it once produced wildfowl to feed the poor of Doncaster. In the early 1600s this was quite a ‘little earner’ and by 1662 the decoy was let for 21 years at an annual rent of £15! In those days, that was a tidy sum.

By the early 1700s the site was in decline as the bird numbers fell along with the drainage. The last decoy man died in 1794, and by the late 1800s the Great Northern Railway ran straight through what had been the decoy.

Winter woodland

Today despite the nearby hustle and bustle, this magnificent nature reserve holds a wealth of birdlife, butterflies, amphibians, dragonflies and mammals.

A recently-completed massive expansion of the site has provided excellent visitor facilities and a greatly extended wetland area. There’s always a lot to see and do here whatever the season and indeed whatever the weather.

In winter you can expect to see lots of the smaller birds such as Long-tailed Tits in areas of Willow and Alder, with mixed flocks of Great Tits, Blue Tits and Coal Tits, and also Siskin and Redpoll often in large flocks.

These smaller finches will feed down on the ground but are most often seen high in the uppermost branches of big Alders or Birch trees.

As the winter mists fall over Doncaster this landscape becomes one of mystery with secret haunting calls of birds out on the waters, trees shrouded in a blanket of grey, and the occasional bark of a Roe Deer.

Ian Rotherham, SY environmentalist

It is the water which draws the birds and the bird-watchers to this special place, with a wealth of wildfowl, both ducks and swans, and especially the elusive and rare Bittern.

Perhaps late this winter or in early this spring we’ll hear the Bittern’s boom adding to the aura of magic of the carr and touching once again the primeval past of our ancestors. That would be a nice touch.

:: Dr Ian D Rotherham directs the Tourism and Environmental Change Research Unit at Sheffield Hallam University. He has written a book called Ian On The Wild Side of Sheffield and the Peak District. Ian and Rony welcome your letters, comments, sightings and records. Phone 0114 279 6699. For your nature sightings and photos...