Crow in the Snow

It’s suspiciously quiet outside.  Tuning in to the muffled whiteness of the world beyond the purple curtains, as soon as I note that I can hear no birds (despite it being mid-March) a crow answers me, twice.  Your fingertips on mine, heard through drifts of bedclothes, sound like ice floes shifting.  How does such delicate contact transmit through finger, arm, pillow and produce a sensation so great it fills my head?

We walk out to the ruined farm.  It’s coming down widdershins.  We’ve never seen snow so fine, so loose.  Sent on an east wind, it starts to pain our faces.  If we stood still we’d wear domed snow-hats like every fencepost.  John Bishop’s dilapidated house is lonely and lovely; snow is scudding through his missing roof and caking his fireplace, and the sycamores that ring what was his yard are catching whiteness in their lichen beards.

By the miners’ old ale-house I inhale a snowflake.  It goes down my windpipe like a torch down an adit, gutters out with a sharp metallic sensation in my lung.  The snow gathers on the horns of the black-faced sheep that cluster round the gate to be fed.  The road has gone from damp black to powder white.

Winding along the path through the woods, kicking a bow-wave of snow-spray ahead of my boots, I press my cheek against a gorse bush, displacing a pile of snow.  Deliciously soft at first, then the cold registers, enough to produce an instant headache.  My numb face fails to feel the thorns.

The next morning, I realise that when I move my fingertips on the wall of our white cave of bedclothes, the sound my ear receives through the pillow is the same haptic throb as yesterday’s pristine snow under our feet.

Snow notes

What day is it today?  Friday, I think.  Do I feel guilty for not being at work?  No, I do not.  No-one is. 

It’s strange how a fall of snow changes things.  The change in the outdoor scene is well known, how everything seems cleaner, softer, enchanted, but what is less so is its psychological effect.  It’s as though the white layer coating the land is also numbing the brain; we go into a mental freeze, waiting things out. 

This end-of-winter storm had been expected, and when it came, my reaction was interesting to experience.  Like almost everyone else, I had decided not to risk trying to get to work, and so settled quickly into a relaxed cabin mentality, waiting for the white blanket to be spread upon us. 

It had been cold for days, with a searing east wind compacting the ground, fostering strange swellings of ice on the hillsides and scouring the way for the snowstorm.  When it came, on the morning of the first day of March, it was a signal to forget about time.  Immediately I needed reminding what day of the week it was.  The fact that it was theoretically the start of spring only made things more unreal. 

The world went monochrome.  It snowed nearly all day, a fine dry powder stirred by a south-easterly gale, puffing in spouts from the roof.  We were eager but didn’t know what to do with ourselves.  We walked, examining ice formations by waterfalls.  We called in on friends while the storm gathered itself.  Returning home, enthusiasm gave way to a tedious lethargy.  The gale pushed smoke back down the chimney, so we gave up on the fire and retreated to bed to watch the expectant dusk go blue and the woods pile up with white.

The predicted half a metre proved to be merely the depth of my hand.  On the second morning, the powder had frozen into a solid crust that made footfall inordinately loud.  Every twig, blade of grass and stem of rush was layered in a glaze of ‘ammil’ ice.  We listened for cars on the road; there were none.  Fugitive lapwings barrelled westwards, pursued through a grey sky by a wind needled with a million points of ice.  What was it that was falling?  It was neither snow, nor rain, nor hail, nor sleet.  Glinting concave sections of tubular ice lay on the hard surface of the snow where the wind had rattled them down.

All this time, and a lack of motivation to make anything of it except look out of the window at what winter might do next.  I must write something – but the new page waited white and empty.  Blackbirds, seeming twice their normal size, bounced around on the snow in search of protein.  You retreated to bed with a headache; I reached for the whisky, devised pointless chores and thought of my children down in the town.

A stiff, dishevelled song thrush lay where it had died, eyes open, in the lee of a stone wall.  When I went back to show our friends’ children, just the wings and legs remained – it had been scavenged within hours.  Feebly fluttering redwings, their cream eye-stripes pushed up into a surprised expression by the cold, bobbled around the bases of trees and woodpiles, woozily striving to avoid the same fate.  I raked the snow off a pile of woodchips for the goldcrests to forage on invertebrates, strewed seeds on a table.  There was a firecrest here a few days before the storm.  The thought that so tiny a bird might survive it seemed far-fetched.

On the third day, rain began to grey the ice, washing the snow and our malaise away.  The occasional car started to nose along the road.  Your headache eased and you got out of bed.  The start of the thaw was too late for another song thrush that died in a box just inside the back door.

The sun emerged on the fourth day, producing green patches among the white.  A bee flew past; woodpeckers drummed and birds began to sing.  Still we did not drive anywhere, the roads slushy and opaque.  With the hint of warmth, relief.  Am I losing the thrill of snow I felt as a child?  The excitement of snowfall has been superseded by boredom and relief when it has gone.  Now we are impatient for the rewards of spring.  Will I never learn to take what comes?

Grey Ghosts and Ringtails

Late afternoon on Dartmoor in January.  The hills are merging their greyness with a murky sky.  The sun appears briefly as it descends through a narrow orange band below the western skyline.  As I ascend a slight rise towards the open moor, a low-flying bird of prey scatters a flock of fieldfares preparing to roost on the ground amongst the scattered gorse bushes. 

It’s rangy, all wings and tail, wings canted upwards and forwards, pumping in an uncharacteristically undignified fashion as it struggles to maintain its course through the insistent north-easterly.  This is what I’ve come to see, and I’ve been lucky enough to see a hen harrier within minutes of starting my winter dusk walk. 

As I rise towards the tor, the wind gets stiffer and the light dwindles still more.  What was a sombre sunset now produces a dull glow like an amber traffic light.  White banks of raffia-like dead purple moor grass have piled up on the windward side of every clump of gorse.  A female merlin rakes her way through the wind. 

Further away, above the darkening slopes of the tor, more hen harriers are tilting back and forth.  Three – four – with careful observation and patience, I clinch five above the horizon at once.  At least two of them are ghostly grey and white adult males, especially visible as the light fails.  I keep my distance, careful not to disturb them as they prepare to roost for the night.

I’ve always thought that ‘hen harrier’ is an unfortunate name.  Unique among British birds of prey in being named after its supposed pest tendencies, the handle seems a little unfair.  It’s hard to imagine these shy, graceful open country birds getting close enough to habitation to harry a chicken.  It’s also fairly unusual for males to take anything larger than a skylark. 

Yet like many predators, they used to be more common in our landscape, before changing land use and persecution pushed ever-dwindling numbers to remote northern moors as a breeder, and to heaths, moors and saltmarshes as a wintering bird.  The larger, more powerful females would certainly have killed domestic fowl, a tendency that began a story of conflict with humans that is sadly still as prevalent as ever.

In France the hen harrier is still a relatively common bird, nesting in a variety of open habitats including arable fields, but here in the UK, the parlous state of their breeding population has recently been in the news.  In England we’re down to a handful of birds; last summer only three pairs nested successfully. 

In the uplands of northern Britain the decline of the hen harrier is clearly linked to persecution by gamekeepers who see them as a threat to red grouse stocks.  As a low flying, ground nesting species, it is especially vulnerable to the illegal persecution that has led to calls for a license system for grouse moors, with some even demanding a ban. 

Here on Dartmoor, where it hasn’t conclusively bred since Victorian times, the hen harrier is a very scarce winter visitor and passage migrant, with fewer than ten birds - probably birds from the continent - present in a typical year.  Recently, however, a story appeared in the local press about a proposed scheme to reintroduce nesting harriers to the south west of England, beginning with the translocation of nestlings from the French population to a trial site on Salisbury Plain.  If this scheme is successful, birds might then potentially be reintroduced to other areas such as Dartmoor and Exmoor.

Exciting news, but I must admit to having mixed feelings.  IUCN guidelines state that for a reintroduction to go ahead, the factors that previously limited its population must no longer apply.  In the case of ongoing persecution of hen harriers on grouse moors, this is clearly not the case.  Is the government fudging the issue of illegal persecution?  Will the French authorities allow the translocation of ‘their’ birds for a risky, contentious scheme?  Is Dartmoor still a suitable place for nesting hen harriers?  With ever-increasing disturbance and the poor state of the moorland habitat in many areas, I’m doubtful.

But a part of me wants this scheme to happen.  Given that the illegal persecution of nesting harriers is proving hard to stamp out, perhaps it would be a good idea to establish new populations as buffers against declines elsewhere.  Raptors are always controversial (witness the debate about reintroducing white-tailed eagles to East Anglia), but reintroductions with this group of birds can work, as proved by the extraordinary recovery of the red kite.  Without direct measures, we may lose the hen harrier as a breeding bird. 

Speaking to Simon Lee, the project leader for the Southern Reintroduction Project (one of six government measures to help hen harriers), I’m reassured that the vexed future of these birds is in expert hands.  He believes that establishing a crop-nesting southern population of hen harriers will benefit the species by creating a new stronghold and generating public support, as has happened elsewhere with red kites. 

Despite opposition to ‘brood management’ or so-called ‘nest meddling’, I learn that hen harriers are surprisingly resilient, coping with well-meaning interventions while breeding.  Up to 80% of French nests are routinely rescued at harvest time by volunteers, who move them out of harm’s way in an ingenious procedure involving a chicken-wire cage (the name ‘hen’ harrier becoming all the more apt in the process).  The parents circle overhead and resume feeding their young as soon as the humans retreat.

Simon believes that using 20 to 30 French hen harrier chicks per year, from a population ‘imprinted’ on farmland nesting, will provide a source of birds that won’t impact negatively on their natal population.  Acutely aware of the controversies over harrier persecution in the north, he thinks that the project could avoid such pitfalls and buy the birds time while raising the profile of key issues.  “This project will help with the issues in the north.  Grouse shooting is a minority interest.  Perhaps this will lead to it becoming more of a mainstream debate.”

Nevertheless, there are tricky times ahead.  There may be a judicial review of Natural England’s license to ‘brood manage’ young hen harriers by moving them out of harm’s way.  The RSPB, among others, is opposed to the brood management approach.  Hen harriers are likely to be in the news for the foreseeable future.  “We need to shelter this from the politics, give it a distinct identity and focus on the pure benefits of a conservation project.”

Simon agrees that it would be preferable to remove the threat of illegal destruction and allow the hen harrier population to recover naturally, but fears that this is not a realistic proposition.  “Even if persecution stopped, their natural recovery would be quite slow due to the birds returning as adults to the areas where they were born.”

If only opposition to brood management were the only potential problem to consider.  However, speaking to a man who has been knocked off his feet by a female hen harrier defending her nest gives me hope for both man and bird.

Watching these buoyant, elegant raptors gathering to roost, I reflect that to lose them would be unthinkable.  The ghostly grey males swing back and forth, easier to see in the fading light than the earth-brown females and immature birds, known as ‘ringtails.’  The five birds conduct their own version of air traffic control, doing some last-minute hunting and sizing each other up to see who gets the prime roost spots. 

This strategy of roosting on the ground seems surprising, especially on such a cold night, but tucking down together amongst the tussocks of grass and dense low stands of western gorse must provide them with shared body warmth, some shelter from the elements and protection from predators.  As the light fails, it becomes harder and harder to see their distinctive slight, long-winged, long-tailed outlines – they’re now just an occasional flicker above the dark mass of conifers on the horizon. 

Roosting communally in winter is a habit that can get hen harriers in trouble.  People connected to shooting interests have been alleged to shoot harriers gathering at their traditional roosts, as it’s easy to predict their presence and to pick off several birds at one time.  The two ringtails allegedly shot on the Queen’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk on the 24^th of October 2007 (a high-profile case that brought national press attention to the persecution of hen harriers) would have been gathering to roost.

One by one these beautiful birds drop to the ground, leaving the sky to the scudding shapes of woodcock flying out from cover to feed on open moorland at night.  I turn my back on the wind and begin the walk back to my car, trying to picture the incongruous image of slender harriers on the cold ground, the wind whistling around their owlish heads throughout the long night. 

Thankfully I have been the only person present tonight.  This roost site appears not to be well known, and no man with a shotgun threatens the elegant raptors that gather here.  The farmer whose animals graze this land is aware of the harriers’ presence and is sympathetic.  It seems that this winter roost site is safe for now from disturbance or burning to ‘improve’ the ground for grazing.  As I walk back,  I hope that I will continue to be able to see hen harriers on the moorland not far from my home.  And who knows, if human interventions succeed, even as a breeding bird once more?

Gull love

Herring Gull

“You’re gonna choke, you soft sod!”  A tobacco-wizened woman in a purple Sainsbury’s uniform is speaking in a West Midlands accent, partly to me, mainly to a bird and a little to anyone who’ll listen.  A juvenile herring gull trots forward to inspect something resting on the grubby pavement by a litter bin.  It proves to be an advent calendar chocolate, which rattles briefly in the bird’s beak before dropping down its throat.

“Oh well – one less to worry about…”  She means one less gull rather than one less festive litter item on the streets of Exeter.  She gives a rasping laugh and grins at me toothlessly, wreathed in smoke.  We are involved in a knowing moment: the idea of ‘seagull’ as nuisance is received wisdom.  It will choke on its misguided dietary choice.  How we will laugh. 

Her pronouncement surely unites us in a shared distaste for these winged vermin.  In two short utterances, so much.  Sentimentality crossed with an affectionate harshness, the British habit of talking to animals, a relationship with a familiar facet of nature that she believes to be universal, resentment towards our competitors.  Serves the damn thing right.  Things have got out of hand and everyone knows it.

Across Britain, herring gulls are at the centre of a bitter irony.  They are protected by law, and have been placed on the ‘red list’ of Birds of Conservation Concern due to an alarming decline in their breeding population.  Yet they are coming into contact with people more and more as they adapt to the opportunities provided by our disposable society.  Herring gulls are stealing more ice creams, scavenging more fish and chips than ever before, and by god, we hate them for it.

Everyone’s got a ‘seagull’ story.  An ex-colleague of mine once grabbed a herring gull that had swooped down to pinch his pizza in Plymouth.  It pecked another colleague on the arm; she ended up with ringworm.  My daughter had her finger hurt by a gull that swiped her pasty in flight.  And so on.

Along with foxes and feral pigeons, herring gulls occupy one third of a red, white and blue-grey triumvirate of familiar and resented wildlife, sharing our habitats, our habits, even our food, and starkly dividing opinion.  Yet foxes have hunt saboteurs and their genuine admirers, and even town pigeons are fed deliberately, often by lonely people glad of their company.  Not everyone shares the ‘rats with wings’ position, egging on the small boys who perennially seem to be chasing them.

But where are the gull-lovers?  Who’s sticking up for them when their necks are being wrung on YouTube, as a fisherman from Northumberland is alleged to have done?  Is it only specialist birders with a penchant for rubbish tips who really care about these birds?  If we do lose them, will they be missed?

I’m a lifelong lover of birds, but I must admit, even I struggle with the larger gulls.  It’s not that I bear them any animosity, it’s just that they don’t especially appeal to me, although I do admire their cunning, power and adaptability and their prowess in flight.  There’s something in that cold pale eye that rebuffs affection and warmth.  Here I, like so many, am missing the point.

‘They’re not nice’ – people will say, but niceness or nastiness is not the issue.  Perhaps one of the reasons that herring gulls are so unloved is that they confront us with the bare facts of nature.  They are highly evolved flying, scavenging, breeding machines, with not an ounce of humility or compunction.  That singular lack of conscience is ubiquitous in nature, but we often choose to dupe ourselves on this fundamental fact. 

With gulls we can’t.  That sleek yet hefty form in white and grey conceals a shark-like void.  In their opportunism they remind us of ourselves, but we can’t love them for it, or paint them in a stereotypical likeness.  Unlike the clever fox, the cheeky squirrel, the analytical crow, we look for something anthropomorphic to admire and find it lacking.

“It’s after your flaming pasty!”  An elderly man clad in a red tartan jacket waves his walking stick in my direction.  A lady in maroon on a mobility scooter grins and chuckles as she glides past.  The sullied puddle, its bed riddled with cigarette filters, reflects a clear segment of bitter blue sky.  A cellophane wrapper sails back and forth across the surface.

At my feet, an adult herring gull observes me meekly, its small, greyish eye alternating between hot food and cold sky, which it tilts its head to examine every few seconds for competition or threat.  Its head, neck and nape are smeared with muddy brownish streaks.  The soft grey tips of its secondary feathers curl up slightly with each rasping gust of wind that dashes at us around the sunless corners of buildings.  The white spots on its black primary feathers are as soft as snow.

A piece of pasty falls onto my shoe and bounces, steaming slightly, towards the gull.  It takes a few furtive steps forward on silent pink feet, before retreating at the loud approach of a street-sweeping machine.  It opens and closes its bill rapidly as though rehearsing the business of eating.  Finishing my snatched lunch, I step into the stream of shoppers, balling up and binning the greasy bag.  I look back as the gull pats forward in final triumph to bolt its morsel before being shooed away.

I have decided to be an advocate for the herring gull where I can.  To point out that it’s ridiculous to blame them for stealing food that we have brought into their habitat, where they’ve been far longer than us.  That we should hold their adaptability and ability to survive in higher regard.  That they are as worthy of conservation efforts as other, more appealing species.  That we should even try to love them.  I will have my work cut out.  I need to start with myself.

Hi, Hi, Eregou

Hi, Hi, Eregou

“Hi!”

He gives a sudden, loud, ascending whistle that rings through the clearing.  He tilts his head to one side, listening.

“Hi!  Hi!  Eregou!”

We have walked for an hour and a half through the thorny bush country that surrounds the Maasai village of Ewangan.  It’s the middle of the afternoon; baking hot, and not getting any cooler.  We have pushed beyond the area where the village goats browse on their hindlegs, far out into the scrub where the only paths are those made by wild animals.  We have found medicinal plants, chewed the refreshing, moist bark of the Senegal acacia and found the tracks of leopards and dik-diks.  Eagles swing overhead and the bush echoes with the calls of cordon-bleus, crombecs and other exotic species.  But there’s one thing I want to see above all others.

Dennis, our guide, has a hunch.  He’s also almost as desperate as I am to find what we came for.  He speaks quietly - so quietly that sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s in English, Maa or Swahili.  He starts to walk uphill towards the foothills above us.  He whistles again; we wait for minutes on end.  One clearing is starting to look much like another, a green-grey blur at the periphery of my vision.  It’s only when we step close to the trees that I notice the thorns as long as fingers.

Last night the hyenas came raiding; the dogs barked frantically all night.  I have not had much sleep. 

“There he is.  Can you hear him?”  I can hear a variety of bird calls – the chuffing of francolins and the crackle of sunbirds.  A glaringly prominent white-headed buffalo-weaver punctuates the khaki tones of the brush like a snowball.  I’m finding it hard to focus on anything else.  Many of the bird calls are still unfamiliar to me, after only two days’ stay with the Maasai.  I can’t pick out the one Dennis is referring to.

I shake my head.  This isn’t going well.  I feel anticipation laced with a growing sense of futility.

Dennis asks to borrow the binoculars.  My Leicas go well with his crimson and purple checked shuka, his bow and spear.  We’re well and truly tooled-up: I have had lessons in Maasai archery and spear-throwing.  I’ve had a demonstration of how the locals dispatch aardvarks emerging from their burrows.  I have been obliged to borrow a hearty thumbstick belonging to James, the village chief.  If a lion were to come charging out of the undergrowth, we would be well prepared.

Since I was a child poring over natural history books I have been fascinated by the Maasai’s relationship with an unassuming grey-brown bird called a honeyguide.  At some distant point in their history, various communities in sub-Saharan Africa noticed that pugnacious critters called honey badgers were often accompanied in their raids on bees’ nests by a pink-billed bird with a distinctive call. 

Working out that the animal was following the calls of the bird to guide it to a shared source of food, the Maasai, Hadza and other tribes decided to cut out the middle mammal, developing a unique understanding with the honeyguide that persists to this day.  The Maasai get the honey, the bird gets the bees’ larvae; even wax, which they are one of the few birds to be able to digest.

In theory - but not this afternoon.  That is as close as we get.  Neither Maasai communication nor German optics conjure the honeyguide into view.  The bird we’re after goes quiet, its fairytale-like attempt to lead us deeper into the woods for mutual gain thwarted by who knows what.  Was the bird there at all?  I have to take Dennis’ word for it.  Everything that this tall, regal young man has said and done so far has inspired respect and trust. 

Cravenly, I add greater honeyguide to my list of birds recorded in Kenya.  It’s okay: Dennis assures me that we heard one.  The fact that I was unable to pick it out is academic, surely?  I have a qualm of guilt and add square brackets and a note: ‘heard by Dennis.’

Still a large part of me wants to return to the Maasai Mara and watch the age-old teamwork of human and bird that I so narrowly missed.  Perhaps remember to ask what ‘hi, hi, eregou’ means.  Perhaps one day I will.

Post mortem

When an animal dies, the first question is always how?

 

Our clue about the presence of the body was the dog, who was behaving strangely.  She wasn’t coming when called and was spending a great deal of time in a certain part of the woods where she doesn’t usually go.  I got the binoculars on her and realised she was chewing on something large.  She growled at us and wouldn’t allow us to retrieve her find.  I managed to get hold of her and remove the item, which proved to be part of the hind leg of a roe deer – still fresh and furred, not yet stinking, with the delicate black hoof still intact.  I took it and a section of thigh bone down to the river and threw it in.

The next morning, my mother shadowed the dog to find the rest of the deer, lying in a quiet grove under Scots pines.  When I arrived, crows and jays flapped away from the scene.  The carcass had been thoroughly scavenged, probably mainly by badgers, with very little flesh remaining.  I had arrived too late to glean any clues about the cause of death.  It certainly wouldn’t have been the Jack Russell.  That question: “how?” remained hanging. 

The rounded pugmarks in the snow, the deer carcass three years ago, completely stripped of flesh before it had the chance to go off, the depression in the moss on a boulder where a large mammal had been resting, the rabbit fur on the tree trunk, the scat in the tree – all of this is fascinating but ultimately inconclusive.  Meanwhile I read about potential lynx reintroductions; as well as direct persecution, one of the factors that is thought to have contributed to the extinction of lynx is the lack of deer prey in the middle ages.  No such problem now.

A large mat of skin (licked clean, fur still attached) lay alongside the body of the deer.  Several ribs, the lower jaw and two legs were missing.  The head, dark eye still glistening like frogspawn, was still attached firmly to the spine.  Clumps of surprisingly grey, long winter fur lay amongst the cold leaf litter and brambles.  The dog was gnawing something behind a boulder.

In three trips I dumped the remains into the river, the only place I could think of where the dog wouldn’t keep coming back for more.  The section of hide smacked flatly on the surface, floating and drifting downstream.  The two legs and head-with-spine sank immediately.  It was a strange thing to have to do, and I did it without any ceremony.

There was then a bitter spell in which the river all but froze over.  Snowstorms came; their cargo melted.  Heavy rain followed, the river rising frequently.  I assumed that the bones of the deer would be swept far away, or perhaps I would find them lodged against the granite stepping stones just downstream. 

One day at the end of March, when the weather had calmed and the river dropped, I found that this was not the case.  The curved spine, still attached to the head, had come to rest in a slow stretch of water on the inside of a bend, against a large stone on the river bed.  The remnants of the skeleton looked sculptural, placed.  It formed a reversed question mark against the yellow sand of the riverbed, with the skull as the period.  The vertebrae were tasselled with riverweed and dead grass.  Minnows darted in its lee and nipped in to feed on the remaining scraps of flesh.  Small silent white islands of froth slid on the surface above. 

I’ve been seeing up to four roe deer every day.  They’re becoming more and more casual, ambling away rather than bouncing with white scuts flying, or even standing and watching me.  In the recent snow, one walked past our front door.  The buck has now lost his velvet, and now the prongs of his horns stand bare against the sky, tinged pinkish with blood, forming a counterpoint to the stems of dead bracken at his feet.  The fur rippling over his shoulders resembles thick brown moss.  He squeezes under the gate and gives a guttural disyllabic bark of alarm.  My presence is still enough to scare them – good.  Perhaps they will retain the sense to save themselves if need be.

Splitting logs in the barn, I startled his companions, trapped in the vegetable garden.  One cleared the fence intended to exclude them; the other got a front leg caught in the wire and dangled painfully, writhing.  I set down the axe and approached, speaking softly, preparing to lift her, relieve the weight and set her free.  Just as I spread my arms to gather her up, she thrashed wildly and broke free, hurling herself vainly against the fence and then dashing past me.  She found a clumsy, crashing way over the bottom fence and then limped across the field, looking back at me.

If I had not been there, enacting a primal scene with my axe, she would not have got caught.  But she may have tangled herself anyway on trying to leave, and then hung there painfully: a slow and ghastly death.  Now she may shake off her limp, or it may prove the end of her.

I stand at the riverbank most days.  As the remains of the dead deer are washed by the water, and the minnows polish it whiter, the living ones grow bolder, oblivious to the fate of their sister, more and more habituated to harmless humans, heedless that some sort of death is waiting for them, too.

Yellow

As I pick up my sons from school, something remarkable is taking place in a strip of shrubs planted between a busy road and a building site, where the new school is to be.  The home-time procession of hand-holding humans appears not to notice the wonder just above its heads – signifier of swelling life and the rush of spring.  The fluid, opulent song of a blackbird, purling through the swish of traffic and the voices of children.  For me, that song is an aural hyperlink to elation.  For most others, just another part of the background.

I encouraged my youngest boy to hear this song on his street and notice the jet-black bird with the orange-yellow bill that was producing this lovely sound.  He walked quickly towards the blackbird and turned around to smile at me.  It was a pure smile, not one designed to please.

This morning, frost had greyed the grass.  The rising sun illuminated a fresh knot of daffodils, provoking their yellowness.  They all faced downhill, trembling, an expectant brass section.  A pied woodpecker drummed; woodpigeons woozily re-emphasised their five syllables, growing in volume now that the long winter showed signs of surrender.

I had a to-do list growing by the moment, a mounting feeling of stress, and not long before having to set off for work.  The laptop sat blackly, waiting.  I walked out. 

I paused to enjoy a blackbird singing.  He stopped while I watched him, keeping his bill (as vivid as a sliver of ripe mango) firmly closed, shifting on his perch, waiting for me to go.  We tend to think of a male blackbird’s bill as yellow, but now, in spring, it’s really on the verge of orange, matching the crimped crepe coronas of the daffodils.  As soon as I left his line of sight he started up again, his rich chuckling tones coiling around me like syrup.

My path through the woods is growing in its significance.  I cut it last summer at the cost of many sneezes, ticks and horsefly bites.  It’s now serving me well.  Its winding route causes me to choose my footfall carefully, to step slowly.  Church-like in snow, on these calm sunny mornings the south-facing clearing gathers the sun and a secluded pocket of warmth and light is mine. 

Perhaps the best lesson my path can teach me is to take my time.  Yes, work will still be there.  I will probably not be late.  This path is now.  The green spears of these new bluebell leaves squeak under my boots.  Stop.  At my feet, one bluebell is bursting from a purple casing that prefigures the flower it will become.  Look at the greenish lichen and the purple birch twigs against cirrus.  Note the raindrops caught in the thorns.  Hear the river against the stones, bullfinches piping – and nothing else.

My path ends at the wall, where a fallen stone gives me and the deer an easy crossing into the field.  Pause again to take in the way the remaining frost follows the receding outline of the shadow from the blackthorns.  Take yet another photograph that will underwhelm me later, but which may remind me of what happened next.

All of these pauses add up.  These lacunae are the best of it.  The rushing and chores and the hollow feeling on waking – they’re all chaff.  I know this, yet still I mostly rush from one thing to another.  Each day should be one long pause, on the cusp of the moment when the heavy-headed bird swings across the last of the frost, flashing panels of white in its wing.  In another pause, the sort that form the actual punctuation of my life, the bird remains visible among the thorns just long enough for me to fully realise it.  Then it is gone.

This is one reward for leaving the laptop closed and walking out into a March morning.  A moment when a chunky pinkish bird flies in front of me, pushing a swathe through crowding cares and perches - just long enough.  One with slatted white and black wings like Venetian blinds and a bill that could crush my finger.

Yesterday, it was honeybees on hellebores.  Today, a hawfinch.  Then, as an addendum, the sulphur dot at the bottom of the day’s exclamation mark, the first butterfly of my spring – a brimstone testing its unique hue of green-charged yellow against the primroses as it wavers back and forth. 

On the bank near the school where the blackbird sings, spring has entered its yellow phase: a massed display of daffodils, primroses and celandines, comparing their different shades.  Gold, brass, brimstone and butter.  These yellows speak of sun, of Easter, of the impulses of the emerging insects, of clear skies, fresh breezes and the seeds and succulence to come.  Is there any more innocent, hopeful colour?

Later in the year, when the days reduce again, the park is empty and leaves are severing from the trees, it will be hard to recall the profusely yellow bank and the blackbird’s song.  But I’m going to try.