November

By Peter Conway

In November you stop struggling and become resigned to the fact that it is winter. Hats and gloves come out of the cupboard, and like a prisoner starting a long stretch, you hunker down and make the most of it.

No matter how much you try not to care, the clocks going back and night falling at little after 4pm is always a shock - and the dark evenings seem to spread awfully ahead of you. It will be the end of January before it is light after 5pm again.

The days are so short now that you barely notice they have started before they are finishing. You can no longer relax over a pub lunch on a country walk, for fear you will not have enough daylight to finish the afternoon section. And if you dawdle over breakfast on a Sunday, it is getting dark by the time you get into town.

Days out in the country have to be planned like a military campaign, with exact timings and ETAs. And short days means short horizons - you walk on Boxhill, not the South Downs. On the other hand, there is a cosy feel to being indoors, and the city centre with its lights and animation starts to be a cheerful place to be. And trips to the countryside finish so early you still have time (and energy) for a night out afterwards.

Bonfire Night on 5 November marks the start of a kind of winter festival of light: about a week after it, the Christmas decorations go up in the High Street, accompanied by the ritual complaints about how the celebrations start earlier and earlier each year (they don't: they always start in the second week of November). Yet the jolity has not yet started to take on the frenetic pre-Christmas quality: one can still shop without too many crowds.

WEATHER

At the end of October one may be sitting in shirt sleeves on a sunny day, wondering if the summer will ever end. But almost without fail by 5 November it is cold. Bonfire Night almost uncannily marks the time of year when you suddenly discover you can’t leave the house without a hat, gloves and scarf, and when the central heating goes on at home. It does not seem possible that you were spending evenings out in shirtsleeves only six or seven weeks ago.

The reason for this change is that high pressure trends to establish itself at the start of November after the stormier weather of October. This changes the airflow from southerly or westerly to easterly or northly. The air is generally static, and winds light.

This held true even after the exceptionally mild Octobers of 2005 and 2006: in both years, the first week of the month saw a sudden cold snap, which saw winter clothes come rushing out of the cupboard. However, the change was less pronounced in 2007 when October was dominated by highs and saw cold weather as early as the 17th of that month.

The more static weather in November can mean blue skies and sunshine, more common in the second week of the month than the first for some reason. A good example came in 2005 when 12 to 21 November saw a period of crisp, windless cold and perfect blue skies under an immobile high pressure system. 2007 also saw reasonable amounts of sunshine, with seven frosty sunny days scattered throughout the month (three of them on Fridays, but sadly none on Saturdays!), and some sun on another half dozen or so. 2008 saw a pretty similar pattern, though with a couple of fine sunny Saturdays.

These days of low November sun can be entrancing, but more often the month brings rather nondescript weather, at best cloudy with the odd bright interval, at worst grey and drizzly (November seems to be the month of drizzle). Remembrance Sunday (the second Sunday of the month) is a classic example – it is often a thoroughly miserable day.

One exception to all the above was 2009 when November was dominated from start to finish by an extraordinary series of deep lows which brought heavy rain (flooding in Cumbria) and strong winds of the kind one would normally associated with October. Saturday 14 November was a particularly dramatic day when wind speeds topped 100mph on the south coast and reached over 50mph in Kent. As a result of the westerlies, temperatures remained mild - in the mid teens by day – until the last week of month when they dipped below 10 degrees.

November 2006 also finished on a mild note, with westerlies setting in from the 13th to the end of the month, alternating very wet days with some very lovely sunny ones right up to the end of the month. Apart from the first few days, there was no real frost for the whole month, and gloves, hats and even central heating were not really needed.

Towards the end of November, high pressure often establishes itself to the west of the UK, bringing arctic air down the east coast, the first real blast of winter. In 2005 this happened on 25 to 27 November, and in 2007 there were two periods from the 11th the 16th and then 22nd to the 26th: 2008 also saw the same happen on 21-25 November and from the 28th into the first two days of December. In 2009 the cold northerly air came on 30 November.

This cold air certainly brings frost (often the first real frosts of winter in the south east), and sometimes brings snow. This happened on 21 November 1993, when several centimetres fell in London and stayed on the ground for some days, and briefly in the early morning of 23 November 2008. On 25-27 November 2005, meanwhile, snow in the West Country was bad enough to strand motorists on Bodmin Moor.

These November cold snaps can make you wonder how you will bear a whole winter of cold. But they never seem to last more than a week, before milder, wetter Atlantic air comes in from the west.

When the sun does shine in November, it often seems to be shining straight in your eyes. In city streets most of it is blocked out by buildings. Though at the start of the month the sun still packs some warmth, by the end of the month it does rise above the tree tops till after 10am and by 2pm it is dipping below them again. By this time, even the midday sun seems to be offer little heat.

On the plus side, the sunshine takes on an ethereal, mystical quality, especially when reflected off water. In general, one rather loses interest in the weather in November, however – days are getting so short that it barely seems to matter anyway.

NATURE NOTES

• Autumn colours reach their climax
• Bare trees reveal views and birds

For pictures of the trees mentioned here, see the photos to the right of this page. Put your cursor over any photo to see its caption. Plenty more photos are available on Flickr: simply click on any photo to see them: this also gives you a larger view of the photo. In addition Wikipedia has photos and more information about many plants.

Autumn colours ought to be over by the second week of November, but only in 2004, 2007 and 2008 out of recent years has this really been the case. In these three years, the first week saw the peak autumn colour, and by the end of the second week there were only a few scattered splashes of colour left.

By this stage in the autumn, the main colour is coming from oak (gold and then rusty brown), hornbeam (yellow and then orange), hazel and sycamore (yellow, though often with some gfeen leaves to the end), birch (whose remaining leaves are a lovely shiver of gold), field maple (whose diminutive bright yellow leaves are suddenly very prominent in field boundaries and on woodland edges) and limes, whose remaining leaves go a fine yellow (for full details on autumn leaf fall see October).

Once the general fall has finished, you may find some oaks, birches and hazel that hold onto their turned leaves for quite a while after the other leaves have gone (until the end of November for all three in 2007 and 2009, for example, though in 2008 all three fell fairly promptly, with only a very few still showing leaves at the months end), and beech hedges can keep brown leaves all winter. Trees that thin without their leaves turning – such as alder or willows – may hang onto some leaves a bit longer than the general fall, as can London planes, but only for week or so.

Weeping willow is also surprisingly robust. It did not turn till early November in 2007 in 2009 and hung onto leaves till the end of the month even though the crack willows by riversides were bare by late October, and white willows only held a few isolated leaves by mid November. (In 2008, weeping willows were bare by mid month, however). You might also notice the larch at this time of year – it is the only conifer to lose its foliage, and just after the general leaf fall its needles turn golden, and then fall (by the end of November 2007 and 2009, by the third week in 2008).

Whenever it comes, the realisation that autumn colours are gone, and the leaves are now bare is a sombre moment. The countryside looks bleak, and on a grey day walks become a rather perfunctory exercise. Nature has shut down till mid January.

A consolation is the sight of bare tree branches etched black against the sky. Suddenly one notices their fantastic outlines, as well as views through them that were hidden all summer by foliage. Some trees, indeed, are quite recognisable in winter, despite the lack of leaves – the rounded shape of the oak, the way ash twigs turn up at the end, the silvery bark of the birch, and the myriad straight shoots growing up from the base of hazel. High in bare trees you may see balls of miseltoe and also birds nests.

Later autumns in recent years

All of the above might be said to be a normal autumn, but in 2002, 2003 and 2005, a mild wet autumn had leaf fall starting very late, and even at the end of November there were still leaves on the trees. 2005 seems to have been the latest year of the lot: peak autumn colour did not come till mid month, and there was about 30 percent leaf cover, and even some green leaves, right up to the end of the month.

2006 looked to be following the same pattern, with many trees looking largely green in the second week, albeit discreetly thinning their leaves. But then around the 15th, despite the weather being very mild, there was a sudden change, almost certainly due to some very cold nights ten days before. Maples, hornbeams, beeches and oaks all turned abruptly within the space of a week, and by the 23rd of so, most trees were largely bare, with only oaks retaining their now brown leaves in any quantity.

Bushes and berries

Once leaves have fallen from all other bushes, one notices those that are still green. Ivy is an obvious example – its berries continue to develop during the month, but are not fully black by its end. Notice also that privet hedges are still green and shedding leaves - inconspicously in the first half of the month, then more obviously with some yellowed leaves in the second half - though many never go completely bare the whole winter.

Unnoticed, elder also continues to slowly lose leaves throughout the month, as do brambles, whose leaves can turn a lovely maroon before falling: once again, the plant preserves some leaves all through the winter, usually on new shoots. One bush that suddenly comes to attention once its leaves are gone is the snowberry, whose white spherical fruits have in fact been around for weeks, but which can stay on the plant all winter.

Many other shrubs still have some berries left over from October – you see some rosehips and haws, plenty of sloes on blackthorn (don’t the birds like them?), and the striking and strange pink berries of spindle. In hedgerows you can still see bright strings of berries on now leafless climbers – probably black bryony, though white bryony and honeysuckle are also possible. Another suddenly very prominent climber is old man’s beard, the popular name for the fluffy seeds of traveller’s joy - surely it was not so abundant when it was flowering? In gardens, firethorn still sports its bright orange berries. The inconspicuous red berries on yew fall to the ground as the month comes to an end.

Seeds and catkins revealed

Falling leaves in general reveal seeds and catkins on trees. Hazel has put out new catkins in late October, though they will not open till February, and on alder new catkins also join the female cones (it is the only tree to have both and so is easily identifiable this time of year): once again the catkins are not destined to open till spring. Limes also retain some of their winged fruit, and London planes keep their bobble-shaped fruit, which do not shed their seeds till spring. Bunches of dried ash keys hang on their branches too.

The removal of leaves reveals the brightly coloured twigs of certain trees and shrubs – dogwood twigs are a bright red, while those of a certain common variety of white willow glows orange. All trees and bushes have their buds set ready to produce next spring’s leaves – black ones on ash, sticky brown ones on horse chestnut.

Birds quiet – but easier to see

Once the foliage falls away it is suddenly much easier to see birds – though not very easy, as they are still nervous and liable to fly off if they see any human watching them. Birdsong gives you a little help in locating them, but only a little as it is fairly muted at this time of year.

The main bird noises are contact calls between groups of sociable tits or finches. Particularly active on the sound front are great tits, one of whose characteristic calls is a double cheep and then a rattle (blue tits and magpies also make a rattling sound), another being a kind of “see-choo-choo”. In trees or bushes you might hear goldfinches or greenfinches, or the minute squeaks of long-tailed tits, which look like hyperactive balls of fluff.

Dunnocks also give the odd high-pitched tseep, and you might get a sudden outburst of song from a wren (recognisable as a flurry of notes with a trill in the middle). Both of these tend to be isolated incidents, however.

For more organised song, robins are still reliable – they trill away particularly at dawn and dusk. Great tits occasonally burst into their see-saw mating song, but only go a few bars before realising they are two months early. The most extraordinary sound in November, however, can be the song thrush, which now and again bursts into full song, creating an endless variety of noises, each of which it repeats several times. Thrushes sing from quite high perches but are also nervous and tend to fly off before you can train binoculars on them. Blackbirds do not sing, but indulge in prolonged bouts of tup-tup-tup-ing towards dusk.

Near buildings, sparrows also cheep away, as they do all year, and in surprising locations (including Brighton Pier) you can get enormous flocks of starlings collecting at dusk and making the most extraordinary racket before they settle down for the night. If you are lucky you can also see them wheeling in the sky in unison in incredible numbers (thousands at a time) – Brighton Pier is especially good for this.

Apparently some of these starlings actually migrate from the continent to winter in the UK. There are also migrants from Scandinavia who arrive in late October to winter with us, such as the siskin, fieldfare and redwing – the former a very quiet yellow finch that likes alder trees and the latter two colourful relatives of the thrush. I personally have never found any of these particularly easy to spot, however.

Flowers

It seems ludicrous that any flowers can still survive in November, but amazingly some do, at least in milder years. Hawkweed oxtongue and others of its relatives can be found growing with dandelion-like flowers right through the month, as can bristly oxtongue near coastal areas. I have also seen very localised mayweed and yarrow, and both speedwell and white deadnettle – the latter two early spring flowers which have surely mistaken the season. Towards the end of the month you might see the odd-looking winter heliotrope – a true winter flower – growing on verges, while in gardens winter-flowering cherrries can put out blossom.

Astonishingly in mild November 2009, new shoots of cow parsley and goosegrass were also springing up widely on path edges and woodland floors, starting the big long run up to next spring (see Green shoots on the woodland floor in January).

© Peter Conway 2006 - updated 2007, 2008, 2009 • All Rights Reserved • From his South East of England Almanac