Winter Wildlife Spotting in Frosty Countryside

Read the Frost Before the Sun Melts It

The best winter mornings for wildlife are the ones you nearly talk yourself out of: clear, still, and cold enough that the ground crunches underfoot. A hard frost or a light dusting of snow turns every field margin into a page of writing. Get out early, ideally within an hour of first light, because once the sun touches the ground the evidence starts to soften and vanish.

Walk slowly along hedgerows, gateways and field edges rather than down the middle of fields. Animals use the same routes night after night, so these corridors are where the tracks pile up. Learn a handful and the landscape stops being empty:

• Fox: a neat, straight line of prints about 5cm long, four toes and a triangular pad, often with faint claw marks. Foxes tend to walk in a disciplined direct register, back foot landing almost exactly where the front foot lifted.
• Badger: a broad, five-toed print with a wide squarish pad, usually meandering rather than straight, often leading to a latrine pit or a sett entrance under a bank.
• Roe deer: two small, pointed cloven hooves, each roughly 3cm, with a slightly splayed look on soft ground.
• Hare and rabbit: hares leave much larger hind prints, sometimes 8cm long, in the classic three-print pattern where the two front feet land behind the paired hind feet.
• Stoat: small paired prints laid in a bounding pattern, closer together than a rabbit's, often running along a wall base or ditch.

If you find something you can't identify, take a photograph with something for scale beside it — a coin or your boot. Measuring and sketching beats guessing.

Listen for Fieldfares and Redwings

Winter birding on bare ground is as much about sound as sight. Fieldfares and redwings arrive from Scandinavia in autumn and stay through the coldest months, and they're the two thrushes worth training your ear on.

Fieldfares are the big, brash ones: a grey head and rump, rich chestnut back, and a loud, chattering chack-chack-chack that carries across a whole field. Redwings are smaller and quieter, with a bold creamy stripe above the eye and a wash of rust-red under the wing. Their flight call is a thin, high tseep, often heard overhead after dark as birds move between roosts.

Look for them in mixed flocks stripping berries from hawthorn, holly, rowan and ivy. Berry crops are usually gone by late January, which is when both species switch to pasture and hedgerow invertebrates — soggy fields are suddenly worth watching. If you can find a sheltered, south-facing hedge full of berries on a frosty morning, sit still for twenty minutes and let the flock come to you.

Bare Fields: Hares and Stoats

Stripped-back arable fields and rough pasture hide far more than they seem to. Brown hares lie up in shallow depressions called forms, and their camouflage is genuinely excellent — the trick is to scan slowly, looking for the giveaway of long ears laid flat or a dark eye, not for a whole animal. Hares are most visible in the first and last hours of daylight.

Stoats are the other winter favourite. They bound rather than run, arcing low to the ground, and their black tail tip is often the only thing you see before they pop down a burrow or into a dry-stone wall. In the far north and on higher ground, stoats moult into white ermine, though most British stoats keep a brown back and simply look lighter.

Keep dogs on a lead around hare fields, and never follow tracks to a resting place — a disturbed hare burns valuable energy it can't spare in February.

Low Sun, Long Shadows and Quiet Patience

Midwinter light is short but wonderfully low, raking across furrows and picking out every tussock. Open farmland with a hedgerow or two on a bright, frosty afternoon is a fine place to simply stand and watch. Barn owls hunt in daylight more often in winter when voles are hard to find, and kestrels hover over verges. Woodcock, pushed in by hard weather, sit tight in damp woodland edges and flush with a startling clatter if you get too close.

Binoculars make the difference between a walk and a wildlife session, and a compact pair costs little more than a decent coat.

Hedgerow Foraging in the Hungry Gap

Winter foraging is thin pickings, and rightly so — every berry is a meal for a thrush. But there are still honest harvests on a country walk, and taking them responsibly is part of the pleasure.

• Rosehips and hawthorn berries for syrups and jellies, simmered and strained overnight.
• Sloes after the frost has softened them, for gin or a slow-setting jam.
• Crab apples still hanging in hedges, excellent for jelly with a few cloves.
• Winter greens: a few young nettle tops, yarrow and chickweed from sheltered verges.

Take only a small share, leave the topmost and outermost berries for the birds, and never pick from a verge you suspect has been sprayed.

Wrap Up Warm and Carry a Flask

Cold-weather wildlife watching fails for one reason: you get chilled, you leave early, and you miss the best hour. Dress for standing still, not for walking.

• A thermal base layer and a wool jumper under a windproof shell beats a single thick coat.
• Two pairs of socks and boots with real grip for frozen ruts and invisible ice on lanes.
• Gloves you can actually use binoculars in — fingerless mitts with a flip-back top are ideal.
• A flask of tea, coffee or soup, and something to eat. Hunger ends more winter walks than rain does.
• A headtorch, a phone for photographs, and a small notebook for tracks you want to check later.

A hip flask isn't essential, but on a still, frosty afternoon with fieldfares chattering in the hedge, it's a very British sort of company. Get out early, keep quiet, look down as often as you look up, and the winter countryside gives up far more than most people ever notice.