Matt Jackson of the wildlife trust on how crickets and birds respond to altering world

While we humans argue about whether climate change is real, whether we caused it and whether we should do anything about it, wildlife has been quietly getting on with adapting.

Some of the ways our wildlife has been adapting have had quite a high profile. The trend in flowering dates of plants, which are between two and 13 days earlier than they were 250 years ago, have been well publicised.

A Climate Change Impact Report Card drawn up by Government bodies last year as part of a project examining ‘living with environmental change’ points out that deciduous trees come into leaf two to three weeks earlier than they did in the 1950s, and there’s a clear link with changing spring temperatures.

Other changes have been more subtle, or are only apparent to wildlife watchers. I remember distinctly, in the early 1990s, the first time I heard a Roesel’s bush cricket, a native species that used to be found only in coastal habitats.

Crickets and grasshoppers make a sound called ‘stridulation’ by rubbing body parts together. Grasshoppers use their legs, and bush crickets rub their wings.

The Roesel’s bush cricket makes the most incredibly strident noise for such a small creature, like a loud free-wheeling bicycle, or overhead electricity wires. That sound first moved inland in the 1980s, and now you can hear the buzz of a Roesel’s bush cricket on sunny days on almost any rough grassland across southern England, including road verges. You’re sure to hear their distinctive stridulation on BBOWT nature reserves Asham Meads, near Otmoor, and Dry Sandford Pit, near Abingdon.

Bush crickets have an advantage over some other forms of wildlife: they can fly, and it’s easy for them to respond to a changing world.

Other mobile species, such as birds, seem to be doing the same thing. In recent years the delightful Dartford warbler has edged into heathland habitats further north from its traditional haunts on southern heaths in England.

Oxford has a long history of important research on birds, especially great tits. Researchers from the Edwards Grey Institute working in Wytham Woods found that great tits have struggled to match their breeding time with the emergence of caterpillars, a major food source for fledglings.

A separate study by the same institute suggests that short-lived species, like great tits, stand a good chance of adapting to a changing climate.

A global study in 2011, published in the auspicious Science journal, pulled together data on the changing distribution of species around the world, and showed that, on average, species have been moving northwards at a staggering rate of 4.6 metres a day, or 1.7 km a year. There was huge variability from species to species.

We have to be ready for our wildlife to change locally, and welcome some new arrivals.

The small red-eyed damselfly only reached the UK in 1999. In 2002, BBOWT reported a sighting at Pitstone Fen, near College Lake nature reserve. Now this attractive insect can be seen on several open water sites across Oxfordshire, and as far north as Yorkshire.

There are less welcome arrivals too. A few years ago the oak processionary moth, a significant pest, turned up in Berkshire and is very invasive in south-west London.

We can help wildlife to adapt by maintaining our nature reserves and wild spaces so they are as wildlife-friendly as possible, and linking them up so that less mobile species have a chance to move into more favourable habitats.

It’s quite clear that lots of wildlife hasn’t waited for us to help. Those species that can move around the countryside are already getting on with it themselves.