Abstract
WITH admirable promptitude in these difficult times, the fifty-second annual phonological report of the Royal Meteorological Society has been issued, covering the observations on the weather and fauna and flora in Britain from December 1941 to November 1942. This is interesting because the cold spring included the coldest February in England and Wales since 1895, and the dry period in summer included a thirty-two days drought, the longest for thirteen years. It was an abundant year for crops and wild and cultivated fruits of almost every kind, while grass fields appeared exceptionally green in the autumn and the season was sufficiently free from frosts to produce a wealth of autumn tints, many oaks keeping their foliage in sheltered places into December. Migrant birds were uniformly late in reaching the most northerly zone in spring, but the cuckoo was the only bird to be late in all three zones, the other zones showing first migrant arrivals in advance of the average dates.. 1942 was a year of comparative scarcity of immigrant Lepidoptera, especially of the painted lady butterfly, although some localities had considerable arrivals, and three migrant insects, the red admiral butterfly and the silver Y and convolvulus hawk moths, were recorded in the Shetlands.
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Phenology of 1942. Nature 151, 418 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151418a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151418a0