It would be foolish to underestimate, however, the obstacles in the way of finding and feeling our inherent bond with nature, which will grow substantially as the century progresses; that needs to be admitted. At some unknown moment between 1 July 2006 and 1 July 2007, according to the demographers of the United Nations, a momentous milestone in the history of humankind was passed with no one being aware of it: the percentage of the world’s population living in towns and cities exceeded 50 per cent. Henceforth, most people on the planet would live urban rather than rural lives, and for the first time would no longer be in close contact with the natural or even the semi-natural world (which farming represents); a majority, and a rapidly expanding one, would no longer have direct access to the rhythms of the growth cycle, to the effects of seasonality, to quiet, to the visibility of the stars, to non-industrialised rivers and natural forests, and to wildlife – to birds and wild mammals, to insects and wild flowers – even where, as in more and more places, wildlife was impoverished. Nature in any form would no longer be part of most people’s everyday experience.
It is worth looking for a moment at just how quickly the urbanisation of the globe is now proceeding. In 2014 the proportion of people dwelling in towns and cities reached 54 per cent, according to that year’s revision of the UN’s World Urbanization Prospects (this document redates to 2006–7 the passing of the 50 per cent mark, previously thought to have taken place in 2009), and this figure is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050: that is, 6 billion out of an anticipated 9 billion souls, or two-thirds of the world.
Nearly all of this increase – 90 per cent – is expected to take place in Africa and Asia, much of it in their ‘megacities’, the mushrooming metropolises of 10, 20, 30, going on for 40 million people which will be one of the most notable facets of human geography in the twenty-first century: by 2030 the world is expected to have forty-one of them. Running these gargantuan settlements, and the hundreds of ‘smaller’ cities which will unstoppably expand to a million-plus, 3, 5, 7 million people and more, will present the greatest social and infrastructural challenges, in providing adequate water, food, healthcare, education, transport, energy, employment, and housing. You can take a positive view. A case can be made for cities, and often is, even for the mega-cities: they can generate jobs and income, and can deliver health and education and the empowerment of women, say, more efficiently than can be done over vast rural areas (as long as the cities concerned are well governed). But these are issues which people involved in human welfare, in poverty and its alleviation, are concerned with, and rightly so; I am concerned with the natural world and the human response to it, and I cannot see how that will be benefited in any way by what we might call the great urban shift.
Instead, nature may come to represent for billions – for two-thirds of the world, by mid century – merely what the city is not: a folk memory of clean air rather than smog, of clean rivers rather than polluted ones, of grass and trees rather than concrete and cars, of wild creatures freely existing, now seen merely in visual representations. That will be entirely understandable; and if swelling urban environments continue to intensify the stress and the pollution they inflict upon their residents, we could not but wish city dwellers the world over the chance of escape to the trees and the grass, the pure water and the pure air, which are worth so much, especially when we mix our pleasure with them and find it so enhanced, in the picnic by the riverside or the ramble through the forest . . . but something else too, in the great shift, will be lost.
It is the intimate feel for the natural calendar, for the earth’s great annual cycle of birth and death and rebirth, a feel which was one of the key attributes of our prehistoric ancestors and which has persisted among people living in the countryside long after city dwellers lost the conscious sense of it. Not lost quite entirely, of course: even a geek working in the most concrete-and-glass-bound thirtieth-floor neon-lit air-conditioned cappuccino-dispensing digitised electronic bolt-hole will sense it is hotter in summer and cooler in winter – but I mean something subtler. I mean the feel for the switches and the transformations, for the tiny signs, easily stifled by traffic noise and electronic music or submerged by pollution, that great changes are under way with the earth; the feel for the hints of the journey starting, rather than the trumpeted proclamation of the arrival. These signals, above all of the world’s reawakening after winter, have produced intense pleasure and excitement and indeed reverence in us since we began to be human, they have produced the most powerful emotions, and not infrequently in my own case, they have produced joy.
Journeying into joy, it is where I would start from. And the loss of this, the loss of familiarity with the cadences and pulses of nature which will extend to so many more of us in the two-thirds urban world of the years to come, seems to me to be sad beyond words, not least because it will go unmarked and unmourned, since for someone struggling for food and basic healthcare and education for their children in a megacity shanty-town without sanitation or energy supplies, that will be the most minuscule of their concerns. The rhythms of nature? It will be no sort of concern at all. Of course. And yet it is a great loss nonetheless, as I increasingly feel looking over the joy I have indeed encountered there, the joy I have found in the calendar and in the signals of the awakening world, beginning with the winter solstice.
The winter what? many people will say, especially young people. Believe me, they will. And this, the most significant moment of the year! The moment when the days stop shortening and start getting longer again, celebrated for millennia. It is the reason (or one of the reasons) for Stonehenge; it is the reason for Newgrange, Ireland’s premier prehistoric monument; it is the reason for Christmas in December. (The Wiltshire megaliths are lined up to the winter solstice sunset; the grand tomb in County Meath is aligned to the winter solstice sunrise; 25 December was chosen by the early Christian church as the conventional date of Christ’s birthday since it was the date of the winter solstice in Roman times.) Now it has shifted, partly because of the replacement of Julius Caesar’s Roman calendar by the Gregorian calendar from 1582 onwards, and it occurs on 21 or 22 December. It is not actually a day, but a precisely calculable moment in the earth’s orbit when the tilt of its axis is farthest away from the sun: thus in 2010, for example, it was 11.38 p.m. on Tuesday, 21 December, but as it had occurred after sunset, the celebration, as such, was held the day afterwards.
Not by many of us, though. A diverse band of druids, pagans, hippies, and sundry sun-worshippers gathered at Stonehenge that day to mark the moment with rituals and dances, as is their wont, providing useful colour for the news media; but otherwise, the modern mass of humanity got on with their lives while paying the most significant day of the year scant attention. It is the archetype of the momentous marker that we have forgotten, the winter solstice, in our harried urban existence where we don’t see the stars for the street lights and never notice the sunset – we do that on holiday, don’t we? Darling? Come and see the sunset! – and certainly not three days before Christmas when everyone is feverishly preparing for the winter break.
Yet as I have got older, I have come to love it. For whether or not in our flurry of living we lose touch with the rhythms and processes of the earth, behind everything they continue in all their power, and the solstice represents the start of the most powerful of them all: rebirth. The moment when the days begin to lengthen again is the moment when new life begins its approach, even at the darkest point, which is why it has been so widely celebrated in so many cultures right round the world – the miracle of rebirth never ceased to amaze. Death was being refuted. It was wondrous that new life should arrive quite as unfailingly as old life should die, especially since a human individual’s life itself was linear – it only went in one direction. But the earth was different. Its way was not linear; it moved in a cycle, and although you might fear that one year the cycle would break down, it never did.
Ageing has made me more appreciative of the miracle (partly, I suppose, from a rueful recognition that it isn’t going to happen to me) and what that has produced has been a heightened awareness of its advent, even though each year, for most people, it may lie buried deep under the pre-Christmas frenzy of packed stores and heaving parties and crammed buses and suffocating trains and chaotic airport terminals – but if you do take the trouble to look closely, you will see that behind all the craziness, it is happening. Going back to 2010, for example, on Christmas Eve, Friday, 24 December, had you broken off briefly from your last-minute panic present-buying, you would have seen that sunset was at 15.55, but the following afternoon, when the world was recovering from Christmas lunch, it was at 15.56, while on the Monday, 27 December, when some people were drifting back to work and some people weren’t and others were wondering whether they should or not, it was at 15.57; and by New Year’s Eve, Friday, 31 December, with everyone getting ready for the final seasonal splurge, it had broken the four o’clock barrier: it was at 16.01. And so it goes on each year, in these wholly unremarked-upon, these virtually imperceptible yet remorseless gradations, until it’s some time at the end of the first week of March, say, and you’re home from work early for some reason, maybe you went to the dentist or something, and you look out of the kitchen window at about ten past six and you notice it’s still light, and the light has a special calm but intense quality to it, and this is something different, something new: it’s evening. Evenings are back. And you open the kitchen door into the garden and a blackbird is singing from the roof opposite, and a song thrush from the tree next door, both of them liquid and loud and confident in this new-found radiance, in a moment in time which those who have experienced it will realise, Philip Larkin captured with exquisite perfection:
On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork . . .
and you suddenly realise that the whole world is on the tremulous verge of something immense: spring is coming.
The winter solstice is the beginning of that. Friends have said to me their least favourite months are January and February, but I’ve never thought so; I’ve always least liked November and early December, when the movement of the earth is only down towards the dark. The first two months of the year may be harsher in terms of weather but ticking in the background is the wondrous phenomenon, the unstoppable movement back towards the light, and for marking its onset, I have got to the stage now where I look forward to the winter solstice more than Christmas, which so swamps and dominates our culture. Not that I have anything against Christmas itself: having been brought up in the Christian fold, I have reverence for its story and enjoy its customs and music and celebrations, in the way that you can if you’ve been lucky enough to have had them refreshed for you through children, even though they are so naffly commercialised, and even though I recognise that for some people the whole business can be a hateful period of truly glacial isolation.
But the solstice . . . I can only say that, as I move towards the last part of my life, its arrival fills me with joy (even if I don’t trek out to Stonehenge), in the way I tried at the outset to define joy in the natural world: a sudden intense love stemming from an apprehension that there is something extraordinary and exceptional about nature as a whole. I can think of nothing more extraordinary and exceptional than the annual rebirth of the world; and in fact, there are a number of specific markers of the rebirth, of the earth’s reawakening after winter, dates in the natural calendar if you like, which for me are occasions of joy almost as much as the solstice is, and which I celebrate in my heart.
The first of them is the appearance of snowdrops. Small white lilies which sprout up and flower in midwinter, even in the bitter cold – perce-neiges, snow-piercers, they’re aptly called in French – would be notable anyway, but I’ve long been equally fascinated by snowdrops for their cultural resonance. They are closely associated with a major feast of the Christian church which follows Christmas, although while the world and his wife cannot remain ignorant of 25 December, indeed, cannot get out of the way of the Yuletide juggernaut, I doubt if one person in a thousand could tell you today what Candlemas is.
Celebrated on 2 February, it marks the purification, under Jewish religious law, of the mother of Christ, forty days after his birth. (It also commemorates the presentation of the infant Jesus in the temple.) But Candlemas long meant something else as well, in practical terms, especially in the Middle Ages: it was the day when everyone in the parish brought their candles to church to be blessed by the priest. This was so that they could become – that splendid word – apotropaic, that is, they could ward off evil spirits; and after a procession, and the blessing, the candles were all lit and set before the statue of the Virgin Mary. Imagine: on a typically murky February day, in a medieval church that was gloomy anyway, this must have provided a spectacle of brightness that left the deeply pious onlookers spellbound; it must have been the brightest moment, quite literally, of the whole year. (You can get a feel for it if you visit Chartres, and come across the luminous flickering throng of candles in front of the Virgin’s statue in one of the cathedral’s darker corners.)
But another source of brightness was also closely associated with Candlemas, and that was the snowdrops, for they were the flowers of the feast. It is easy to see how they were perfect for it, flawless symbols of purity that they are. Once called Candlemas bells, it is not hard to imagine what pleasure must have been taken in gathering them, or in merely having them growing by the church, on the day itself; and even now, although you can find great swathes of snowdrops in woodlands or along river valley floors, especially in the West Country – stirring sights, whole sheets of blooms turning the ground white in all directions, nature with all its flags flying – many of our best displays are still associated with the old faith, clustering around churchyards and ancient religious foundations, ruined abbeys and priories, where hundreds of years ago they were planted with Candlemas in mind.
All of this has greatly drawn me to them, yet even more than their delicate beauty, more than the traditions which cluster around them, I am most taken with the timing of their appearance, with their place at the start of the calendar – above all, with the first sight of them in any given winter. I can remember, for example, a walk with my children, a few years ago, through a wood on an icy late January day, and the path through the bare trees took a turn and suddenly there they were, the first of them, a small clump poking through the leaf litter, a small splash of brilliant white on the woodland floor’s dull brown canvas, and I smiled at once, as if suddenly meeting an old friend: Hi, how are you? I was filled with emotion; I was filled with joy, I would say now. I wasn’t quite sure then why the feeling was so strong, but that evening I sat down and worked it out: here was the earth, still firmly under the lock and key of winter; here was I, huddled inside my coat, adjusted to the cold hard season as if it would last for ever; and here were they, the first visible sign of something else. They were the unexpected but undeniable notice that the warm days would come again, and I realised what it was that made me smile: here against the dead tones of the winter woodland floor was Hope, suddenly and unmistakably manifest in white.
Snowdrops are singular. They alone are the flaunters of this optimism, which can seem gloriously defiant, in the heart of the time when the earth is anaesthetised and numb. But as the world starts to stir again, to wake, to warm and to open, there are an increasing number of signals of spring, for some of which my feeling is so intense that I would readily describe it as joy. One is the appearance of the first butterfly, especially if – as is often the case in Britain – that butterfly is a brimstone (which, being bright yellow, the colour of butter in fact, is perhaps the origin of the butterfly term – or perhaps not . . . nobody really knows). This event has on occasion had a peculiar effect on me: it has produced an elation so powerful that I have found myself longing for an unconventional way to account for it, to do it justice, in the conscious knowledge that what is available – science – is inadequate for the task.
It has been well said, that science gives us knowledge but takes away meaning. Certainly, since it began to explain the world in rational terms in the seventeenth century, it has subverted or done away with many parts of our imagination, and there are numerous non-rational ways of looking at the world, once widespread, once resonant traditional beliefs, which we have now ceased to engage with, such as alchemy, or magic, or the power of curses, or the story of Adam and Eve. All of these provided fertile ground for the imagination to flourish, and with their inevitable suppression I think – as with the conquest of the moon, with Neil Armstrong and his great fat boot – that something has been lost.
One day, I found myself wishing that one in particular was still available to us, and that was the idea of spirits. By that I mean disembodied beings, supernatural entities able to speed through the world and appear and disappear at will, some malevolent maybe, some benign, and if you ask me to give you an example, I have one ready to hand: Shakespeare’s Ariel, attendant spirit of The Tempest.
Ariel, you may remember, is bound to serve Prospero, the magician-duke who has been deprived of his dukedom of Milan by his evil brother and exiled, with his young daughter, to a desert island. Ariel flies hither and thither doing Prospero’s bidding – he whips up the storm which brings all the characters together so that the story can be resolved – but he is also desperate for his freedom, which in the end Prospero reluctantly grants him.
Ethereal, insubstantial, even androgynous (I’m saying ‘him’ for the sake of convenience), unbound by gravity, unburdened by human clay, Ariel is a creation who brings to life the ephemeral longing in us to be lighter than air. But The Tempest being what it is, there is more to him than a pet sprite, especially if we see the story of Shakespeare’s last play, as most of us do, as autobiographical: Prospero giving up his magic at the end, is Shakespeare saying farewell to art. In this reading, it is not hard to see the attendant spirit the magician is so reluctant to set free as Shakespeare’s own imagination, to which, as old age approaches, he has to say goodbye. His great gift had roamed the world at his bidding, creating storms of his own, and unforgettable characters and unforgettable poetry, but now, willy-nilly, he has to say farewell to it and go and be an ordinary citizen – albeit the wealthiest – living in a small market town in Warwickshire and waiting for death (it took four years to come).
That Shakespeare could choose a spirit, a ‘tricksy spirit’ to represent his own extraordinary, soaring, wandering gift, creating such a dazzling metaphor, was singularly fortunate, and due to the fact that science had not yet consigned such beings to the dustbin of superstition; but to us, such choices are not open. For us, spirits are over and done with, alas, and we cannot compare anything to them; and one spring, I spent several days thinking of this with regret, as I struggled to find some way of expressing my jubilation at seeing, on a sunny Sunday morning in March, the first butterfly of the year.
For it was indeed a brimstone, a bright yellow brimstone. Using science, and rationality, I could have told you quite a lot about it: that it was an arthropod, and among the arthropods, it was an insect; that it belonged to the insect order Lepidoptera, and in that, to the butterfly family Pieridae, the whites; that its scientific name was Gonepteryx rhamni; that it had overwintered as an adult, one of only five British butterfly species to do so (the other fifty-three pass the winter variously as eggs or caterpillars or pupae); that in its caterpillar stage it had fed on the leaves of buckthorn or alder buckthorn; and that it had hibernated disguised as a leaf, probably in an ivy clump, until the first warm day woke it up.
But that didn’t remotely get it. What I saw electrified me instantly; it was the thrilling sign of the turning year, not just of the warm times coming again but of the great rebirth of everything, the great unstoppable renewal, and the brilliance of its colour seemed to proclaim the magnitude of the change it was signalling. It was like a piece of sunlight that had been loosed from the sun’s rays and was free to wander, announcing the spring, and I realised that science, which has now given us so much knowledge about such organisms, did not have any way of conveying its meaning at that moment, at least to me.
For if I say to you, I saw an insect, which is strictly true, what will that tell you? Nothing. The categorisation, which conveys the knowledge, immediately begins to flatten the meaning. But if I say to you, I saw a spirit, which is what it felt like, then at once we are in different territory, we are in the territory of the imagination, and we begin to approach the wonder of the event, and the joy of it: that on a Sunday morning in March, in a mundane suburban street in Surrey, I saw the spirit of the spring.
•
Part of the allure of the first brimstone, and of the first snow-drops (and of the winter solstice, for that matter), has been that their coming is annually awaited, and the response is accordingly intensified; but there have been one or two isolated or unexpected events, equally marking the year’s rebirth, which have also been exceptional experiences and have produced in me an elation I would readily call joy.
One was to witness mad March hares. For at least five hundred years, ‘mad as a March hare’ has been a commonly used simile in English, referring to the excited behaviour of the brown hare in the fields as the breeding season arrives, which – legend has it – is so energised as to seem unhinged. Lewis Carroll reinforced the notion by giving the March hare literary identity in Alice in Wonderland, and now it is a character and a concept everyone is familiar with without ever glimpsing the creature in real life. Or hardly ever. The March version of it, I mean.
I had seen many hares and had always been greatly taken with them (and glad of them in a country hardly over-endowed with characterful wild mammals). I think it’s partly because we have something to compare them to instantly in our minds, which is the rabbit; we encounter rabbits, and become familiar with them, as young children, long before we ever meet up with their hare cousins, and when we do, the differences are apparent at once: hares are much bigger, and we have to readjust the rabbit template squatting in our brains. Hares’ towering ears and expandable hind legs seem enormous by comparison, as do their bulging amber eyes, and the body is leaner and rangier than the rabbit’s: they’re all muscle. Built to run. They seem wilder, too, like adventurers compared to rabbits, which seem like stay-at-homes; yes, I read Watership Down just like you did, and briefly thought there might be drama in rabbit society, but ultimately, I know you shouldn’t really say this, but don’t you think that rabbits are just a teeny bit boring? When did any rabbit ever do anything interesting?
Nothing boring about your hare. Not only a dashing wild rover of an animal, but also a hint of the supernatural, with any number of magic legends clustering about the beast, not least that hares were actually witches in disguise – something I first came across when I began to read Walter de la Mare and his children’s poems, in my late teens:
In the black furrow of a field
I saw an old witch-hare this night;
And she cocked a lissome ear,
And she eyed the moon so bright,
And she nibbled o’ the green;
And I whispered ‘Whsst! witch-hare’,
Away like a ghostie o’er the field
She fled, and left the moonlight there.
But for all that, and for the great pleasure I took in seeing hares, throughout my life, I had never actually witnessed the behaviour that gave rise to the legend, that in March they were mad – above all, the ‘boxing’, when they rise on their hind legs and square up to each other like prizefighters in a ring. I thought of it sometimes; it felt like a notable gap in my experience. So when, one year, circumstances arose in which I was offered the chance to go out with a regular and expert hare-watcher, in March, I jumped at the chance.
Gill Turner was a friendly woman in her early sixties living in Hertfordshire, about twenty-five miles north of central London, and she had been watching, recording, and photographing hares ever since a chance close encounter with an animal nearly two decades earlier had sparked her interest. She was devoted to them. There were hares in her own area, but to show them to me at their best, she took me another twenty miles north to where the great arable plains of eastern England were beginning, the vast hedgeless fields, the ‘wheat tundra’. There she had made friends with a farmer who, unusually, liked his hares too much to shoot them, and so they were flourishing on his land; but because there was a significant threat to the animals from men illegally engaged in coursing – the competitive pursuit of hares with dogs, usually pairs of greyhounds or lurchers – she was keen for me to give nothing away about the location. ‘It can be pretty grim,’ she said. ‘They come from all over the country to do it. If he [the farmer] calls the police, they [the coursers] dump the dead hares on his doorstep.’
So no precise details about where. But the landscape was fascinating, low rolling hills of thin topsoil, seeming very bare, with scarcely a windbreak: an eastern England archetype. ‘My God, it’s cold here in the winter,’ Gill said. It was the morning of 2 March. It was cold and dry. To my delight, there were lapwings calling and displaying. We walked down a path through a small wood and out on to the plains, and at first we saw no sign at all of Lepus europaeus, while I asked Gill about the animal’s attraction for her.
People were misinformed about it, she said, mentioning the female hare’s habit of giving birth to her young, the leverets, in the open field, in a mere depression in the grass called a form, in contrast to the rabbit’s comparatively safe birthing chamber in its burrow. ‘People said hares are poor mothers, that they have their babies on the ground and leave them. But when I took time to study them, I found they were brilliant mothers, absolutely wonderful mothers. Before they have their young, they spend weeks watching who goes across their land. Female hares will have their young almost in the same spot all their lives; they will find an area that’s very safe, and before they even mate, they will know what crosses that area.’
Over the years she had built up a rich body of observation, with many small curious details. Hares took dust baths, she said. ‘When they find an area of dry powdery sandy soil, they will go and roll in it. There’s a sort of etiquette. A hare will wait for another hare to finish before that one goes in.’ The youngsters would gather together in a group and chase other creatures. ‘I’ve watched them chase crows, pheasants, anything that happens to settle near them. They’ll chase them away.’ You could tell a young hare, she said. ‘The snout is shorter. There’s no damage to the ears. Older hares have damage to the ears, especially the bucks.’ And of course, she had often witnessed the mating behaviour, the mad March hares, the chasing and the boxing, which was once thought to be two males battling over a female, but is now thought to be nearly always a doe hare fighting off an unwanted buck’s advances.
Hares gradually began to appear on the fields as we walked deeper into the farmland, usually fairly distant, the odd animal here and there, and then small groups of them, scattered around, some of them closer. Once you got your eye in they were conspicuous, not least for their ears, black-tipped and perpendicular, and it became clear they were plentiful. God bless the farmer. They seemed to be calmly going about their business – ‘nibbling o’ the green’ – but as I scanned one of these groups two animals suddenly leapt at each other face to face with a flurry of forepaws and I cried out: ‘Yes!’ Gill smiled and said: ‘There you are.’ It was just for a second, though. Quick as a shooting star. I found myself wondering, had I really seen it? And then it happened again, this time for longer, and in the binoculars I could see the hares’ white bellies as they danced at each other, circling around upright on their hind legs with their front paws frantically flailing, trying to land blows. They stopped and sat watching each other for a short while a few yards apart, like boxers in their corners, then – almost as if the bell for the next round had rung – came together again in a collision that was truly aerial: each leapt up towards the other and their whirling paws clashed while they were still in mid-air, before the frenzied sparring continued on the dancing hind legs, and in my mind I heard the shout of young schoolboys alerting their companions when a scrap breaks out in the playground: Fight! Fight! Fight!
Up and down the rolling hills we saw it then, in different groups of the animals, short outbursts of boxing, longer matches, interspersed with frantic chasing of one hare by another, which more hares would sometimes join – Gill said it was the youngsters, who would do it even though they didn’t know why they were doing it – and watching it all, I found an unstoppable elation spreading through me, which was more than just the excitement (though it was tremendously exciting) and more than just the gratification of finally catching up with the rarely seen reality behind a figure of speech. There was a sense of privilege: I was seeing a part of the reawakening, of the movement towards new life, which was extraordinary, which you wouldn’t ever normally see, and that was what was joyous.
It was like seeing the sap rising.
It was like seeing the sap rising at supersonic speed.
•
The other unconventional marker of the reviving year which I have experienced and found joy in is so unusual that I don’t actually know how to characterise it, as it emerges from modern electronics.
In the summer of 2011 the British Trust for Ornithology, Britain’s leading bird research organisation, began a project in which I had a strong personal interest. It concerned the cuckoo, the European cuckoo, the bird with a double claim to fame: it lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, and its two-note cuck-coo call when it arrives in Britain in April is the best-loved, most notable, and most distinctive of all our sounds of spring, being a perfect musical interval (a descending minor third).
I was interested in what the BTO were doing because two years earlier I had written a book about the British birds which are summer visitors, the migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, such as the swallow, the nightingale, the willow warbler, and the cuckoo in particular – the spring-bringers, I called them – some of which, the cuckoo included, were undergoing alarming declines in numbers. It was difficult to know where the problem lay, as migratory birds ‘live in multiple jeopardy’ – they may face difficulties on their breeding grounds in Britain, or on their wintering grounds in Africa, or on the immense and gruelling journeys between the two which they annually undertake.
Quite a lot had by now been established about what cuckoos did during their summer breeding season – how they outwitted the other birds in whose nests they laid their deceiving egg, such as reed warblers or meadow pipits, how the cuckoo chick got rid of its rival chicks once it was hatched, to monopolise the attention of its foster-parents – so the BTO research project was an attempt to focus on the rest of the cuckoo’s year, the journey back to Africa and the time spent there, to see if that might offer any clues as to its decline. Virtually nothing was known of it. There was a single piece of relevant data: a cuckoo ringed as a chick in a pied wagtail’s nest in Eton in Berkshire, in June 1928, was found dead in Cameroon in West Africa in January 1930.
That was it.
The rest was a blank. Where do cuckoos from Britain go in winter? Nobody had any idea.
The project aimed to remedy this by the use of modern communications: the miniaturisation of satellite transmitters had now gone so far that they could be fitted to birds and the birds’ progress followed step by step around the globe. It had already been done with larger species such as ospreys, and by 2011 the satellite ‘tags’ were small and light enough for a cuckoo to carry one without being hindered in its flight. In the event, five male cuckoos were caught that May, all in East Anglia not far from the BTO’s headquarters at Thetford in Norfolk, and ringed and fitted with satellite tags before being released.
In a clever move, the BTO gave them names. In the past, subjects of such serious and expensive scientific research (the tags cost £3,000 each) would probably have been labelled XPWS137 to XPWS141 or some such, but the trust had a sharp eye for public support and it named the five Clement, Martin, Lyster, Kasper, and Chris. They sounded like the members of a boy band. And it went a step further in sassy modern media terms: it gave them each a blog, on which details of their separate journeys would be recorded, and which could be followed on the BTO website by anyone, more or less in real time.
The project paid off instantly and spectacularly, demolishing once and for all the accuracy of the ancient cuckoo nursery rhyme:
In April
Come he will;
In May
He’s here to stay;
In June
He changes his tune;
In July
He prepares to fly;
In August
Away he must.
August, huh? Well, Clement left Britain for Africa on 3 June and was in Algeria by 13 July. You start on your winter and it’s not even midsummer yet? The BTO scientists were astounded. Clement hadn’t changed his tune in June. He’d simply scarpered, and he was soon followed by Martin, Kasper, and Chris (although Lyster stayed in the Norfolk Broads till mid July). That was only the start of the revelations. The researchers were further taken aback by the direction and nature of the migratory journeys, as they unfolded, for they split into two vastly distant routes but ended up in the same place. Three of the birds, Chris, Martin, and Kasper, flew down through Italy, over the Mediterranean, and straight across the Sahara desert, while the other two, Clement and Lyster, went to Spain and flew around Africa’s Atlantic edge, more than a thousand miles to the west. Yet by the end of the year they had all recongregated in the same, little-known part of the continent, the Congo river basin. Cuckoos from southeast England, it was revealed, fly 4,000 miles to Congo for their winter (not the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the DRC, the huge former Belgian colony, but its smaller neighbour to the north, Congo-Brazzaville, the French Congo that was). Nobody knew that. No one had any idea. It had been assumed that they probably went to West Africa, to Senegal or somewhere. Even more surprising was just how close to each other they ended up. By the new year, Clement, Martin, and Lyster were all wintering on the Téké plateau north of Brazzaville, a sparsely inhabited area of grasslands with forests along the rivers, Kasper was on the Téké plateau’s southern end, while Chris was further to the north-east, just over the border in the DRC.
As someone with what you might call a professional interest in cuckoos, I was wholly absorbed by all of this, and followed the fortunes of the five birds closely from the start: you could see precisely where they were (or at least, where their tags had last transmitted) at any given time, on Google Earth. It was wonderful, cutting-edge ornithology, it was thrilling to see the discoveries as they happened, to watch the ancient migration mysteries unfold, surprise after surprise. But a greater surprise lay in store.
On 7 February 2012 I logged on to the BTO website and its cuckoo pages and read the summary of what was happening with the birds, which had now been in Congo for two months. There were no recent data on Chris or Clement. Lyster had moved 75 miles north to Ndzakou. Martin had moved 90 miles north and was close to the Likouala river. And Kasper had leapfrogged these two, and from further south, had moved 350 miles north to be close to the Congo border with Gabon.
Something stirred in my brain.
I read it again. Lyster had moved north. Martin had moved north. Kasper had moved north.
I clicked on the map and looked at the movements, the thin straight lines, orange for Lyster, green for Martin, and yellow for Kasper.
They were all pointing in the same direction. Northwards. Northwards towards . . . where I was sitting . . . and with a mixture of astonishment and intense delight, I began to realise what I was witnessing, on the screen in front of me.
They were coming back.
The great migration cycle had begun again, and it suddenly dawned on me, however impossibly hyperbolic it might sound, that I was seeing something no one in human history had ever seen before.
I was watching the spring coming, from 4,000 miles away.
I wanted to shout out, at the top of my voice. I wanted to run out into the street, grab the first passer-by, drag them in to my computer screen and cry, Look! Look! It might be February, it might be freezing, but here comes the spring! Down in central Africa! On its way to us! Right now! But the pathetically conformist part of me prevailed and I merely sat there, awestruck at what I was watching, and let the joy wash over me (for joy it truly was) while I wondered what had triggered the great shift. What was the cue? Some whisper in the tissues of faraway Norfolk, and its reed warblers, and their tempting riverside nests? A change in the African rainfall pattern? A variation in day length? Whatever it was, it had instructed the birds, in imperious terms which brooked no denying: start again.
From then on, of course, I closely followed their return journeys, which provided another revelation – all British-breeding cuckoos, whichever route they take to fly south for the winter, fly back north in just the one way, with a major detour, a major left turn, to the West African rainforest; they swing across to Nigeria, Togo, and Ghana, where the spring rains bring forth a burst of insect life, which the cuckoos use to refuel before the arduous crossing of the Sahara.
They need it. For it was a period of cuckoo tragedy as well as cuckoo triumph, illustrating just how dangerous and demanding the annual migratory treks can be. Clement, who had left England so astonishingly early, died in Cameroon on 25 February, cause unknown – he could have been taken by a predator or shot for the pot by human hunters – while Martin died, the scientists believed, in an unseasonal and severe hailstorm near Lorca in southern Spain on 6 April, and Kasper stopped transmitting in Algeria on 9 April, although it was thought that could be a case of tag failure. But Chris and Lyster successfully made it to England in late April – and on 30 April the BTO team actually went and found Lyster in the Norfolk Broads, and caught sight of him, to say welcome back. They were elated.
At one remove, I was elated too. Not only for the happy return, but to have witnessed the detailed unfolding of these 8,000-mile odysseys, through some of the most starkly differing landscapes on the planet. Since leaving the placidity of East Anglia, the cuckoos had plunged into extremes: they had crossed the world’s biggest desert, the Sahara, and the world’s densest rainforests, in West Africa. They had flown around the Atlas mountains and the western Congolian swamp forests (legendary home of the mokelembembe, Africa’s version of the Loch Ness Monster). They had seen not only France, Italy, Spain, and the Mediterranean, but also Mali, Niger, and the Central African Republic. They may have seen Paris; they may have seen Timbuktu.
This sense of wild creatures wandering at will through the world, in a way mere humans never can, was captured by Ted Hughes in a poem called ‘October Salmon’, where Hughes looks at a dying salmon which has come home to spawn and expire in its Devon river after its journey to the seas off Greenland. ‘So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!’ Hughes writes, and indeed, the five BTO cuckoos had roamed their own gallery of marvels, with the remarkable advantage, to us, that we could follow them doing so (and the project continues today).
I found all of it inspirational. I watched their wanderings with amazement. But nothing in it, nothing, compared to the moment when I suddenly saw that they were returning, the bearers of the two-note call, the perfect musical interval, which would ring out over the English countryside and proclaim indisputably that the new season was here; when I saw that the great eternal cycle had started again. I know it was the most extraordinary signal of the reawakening world that I will ever witness, and the sheer joy of it remains: it was like the joy of the winter solstice, the first snowdrops, and the first brimstone, all rolled into one, that day in February when, sitting at my computer screen, I saw the spring coming, four thousand miles away in the heart of central Africa.
•
There is one more marker of the reawakening earth which has given me joy, and that is blossom. It is a curious and charming peculiarity of English that it has a special word for the flowers of trees – other languages don’t, they simply call them tree-flowers, they say les arbres en fleurs or die Baumblüte – and this echoes the inchoate feeling I had for years that there was something in the nature of blossom which was special in itself. If I saw a blossoming cherry tree in a bed of flowering daffodils, eye-catching though both might be, I would be more animated by the white blossoms above than by the yellow flowers beneath.
Yes. I would.
Why should that be?
I used to think it was because blossom, especially on fruit trees such as apples, cherries, and plums, tends to appear in clusters, globular and luxurious, like the clumps of fruit they will turn into, and in their lush opulence these seem to be the very essence of the floral. But now I think the attraction is simpler and deeper, it is a temporal one: there are flowers all the year round, but there are flowers on trees, generally speaking, only in springtime.
So blossom is of its very nature a banner, a bright banner with spring written on it, waving in the wind, and over the years I have developed in my mind a blossom calendar of my own, with its own special occasions eagerly awaited. You can kick off such an almanac right at the start of the year with some rarefied species such as winter-flowering cherry, but for me it begins in early March, with a foreign one, transplanted to England: magnolia, the tree of enormous, blowsy blooms. In my corner of the world, suburban west London, magnolias flourish in front gardens; on my commuter’s morning trudge from door to station I used to pass several of them, and as February ran its course it was impossible to ignore their great buds, erect, fleshy and tumescent, swelling until they were as fat as light bulbs. It was like watching fizzing fireworks ready to explode, until eventually, Bang!, they did, and suddenly before somebody’s front window was a smooth bare tree covered in waterlilies.
Magnolia bud-burst is pretty regular, and for years I noted the date for a spectacular white example at the bottom of my road, now sadly no more: it averaged 9 March, and it always brought forth a punching of the air from me, a Yes! like the first glimpse of the boxing hares. Joy in the first flowering tree. The world was unquestionably turning. It was a stunning as well as an uplifting sight, for whether white or cream or pink or yellow, magnolia blossoms are exuberant and tropical things, seeming far too exotic to be English, and of course they aren’t: their natural home is split between two far more glamorous parts of the world, in botanical terms, Asia and Central America (including the southern United States). But the intrepid efforts of plant collectors over the last two centuries have brought many of the two-hundred-odd species back to Britain, where, especially in London (and in Kew Gardens in particular), they have flourished.
Their lavish flowering at what is usually a chilly and inhospitable time, while the surrounding trees are wondering hesitantly whether to put out a leaf or two, is one of the reasons why magnolias are so eye-catching here, such a source of pleasure. Another is that in the urban context, where I tend to see them, their bold brightness shows them off particularly well against brick or stucco. But perhaps the reason why they are special anywhere is the structure of the blossoms, which are not only whacking great things – like white doves nesting in the tree, a keen gardener friend once said to me – but appear uncomplicated: like the tree itself, they have simple, clean lines. In style terms, they’re minimalist.
This is no doubt because magnolias are among the most ancient and primitive of all the flowering plants (like the water-lilies their blossoms superficially resemble); they give us a hint of what flowering plants might have looked like when they first developed from conifers around one hundred and fifty million years ago. If you look at a magnolia bud, it looks very like a closed pine cone; you might say a magnolia flower is what an open pine cone became, once it had evolved colour and nectar to attract the winged insects to pollinate it, which were evolving at the same time . . . yet I am cheating, really, writing about this. I am concerned with the natural world, and this is verging on the horticultural. As magnolia is non-native, you will struggle to find it in much of Britain (although there are four national magnolia collections); it’s just that it’s been such a significant part of my own experience of spring blossom, I was reluctant to leave it out.
The next item on my blossom calendar, however, is spread across the country, and this is blackthorn. A member of the Prunus family, the stone fruit – the plums, the cherries, the peaches, and the almonds – its scientific name is Prunus spinosa, or the thorny plum, and it produces sloes, those small black plums which are mouth-puckeringly astringent until the frosts get at them in October. Then they sweeten and can be used to make sloe gin, one of Britain’s great native drinks, out-topping even the fruit eaux de vie of France. Sensational stuff. Don’t get me started on it. Another benefit of the blackthorn is its wood, which makes prized walking-sticks – in Ireland it was traditionally used to make the shillelagh, the fighting club – and a third is that its leaves provide the larval food for two of Britain’s less common butterflies, the black and brown hairstreaks. The black hairstreak’s a bit dull, to be honest, but the female brown hair-streak is one of our loveliest insects, with glowing golden bands across her brown forewings, and you can only see her when she descends from the treetops in late August and September to lay her eggs on blackthorn twigs. One of my most prized possessions is a painting of a female brown hairstreak next to a bunch of ripening sloes by Richard Lewington, insect artist supreme: autumn glory, I think when I look at it.
But spring glory, even more, is what the blackthorn furnishes. When the bush flowers, usually in mid to late March, it looks as if it is covered in hoar-frost rather than weighed down with fat hanging blossoms in cherry-tree style; it looks like trees do on those mid-winter mornings when you wake after a night of freezing fog and every black branch seems to have been dusted with sugar. The reason is that the flowers on the black-thorn appear before the leaves, so the whole arrangement is more spindly and delicate, skinny bare branches that seem to have been sprayed with white. Skinny or not, they transform the landscape. Blackthorn hedges are widely planted and in the monochrome countryside of March and early April they provide the first substantial burst of colour: a month before the greening comes, there is a whitening of the world. I once drove in early spring from Brighton to London, and the A23 was bordered with blossoming blackthorn for mile after mile: every few yards, for ten miles, twenty miles, thirty miles through the Sussex countryside, there seemed to be a blackthorn bush dressed from head to foot in white, and I wondered how many of the drivers pelting along the dual carriageway were appreciating its spectacularly ornamented flanks. Eventually I found a blackthorn-fringed lay-by, pulled in, and greedily broke off two of the blossoming twigs and drank deep of their honey scent. They travelled with me on the dashboard all the way home, thorn branches frosted in numberless small white petals. I loved them. I love them every year.
After the blackthorn, in April, the blossom marked in my calendar comes thick and fast. In the small garden of our house we are blessed with an apple tree (a Bramley seedling), a true cherry, and a lilac, and in most years we tend to have a few days when all three are out together, decorating the garden extravagantly in pink and white, pure white, and pale lavender-blue. At such times, drawing back the curtain of my daughter’s bedroom window causes a sharp intake of breath as the apple blossom is right outside and fills the whole window pane; while in the streets around us, the horse chestnuts, their new leaves an iridescent emerald, top off their transitory magnificence with the biggest blossoms of all, the white roman candles, bulky as pineapples. And then one more before the calendar closes: the hawthorn, or the May blossom, named after its month, rich and luxuriant in its hedgerows – cream to the blackthorn’s sugar.
All of these are beautiful, but it is not just their beauty which so strongly affects me, it is that they are markers of the turning year: the very act of setting eyes on blossom locates you in the springtime, and I think our bond with nature is very obvious in the power of the natural calendar and its events to move us to joy, in the fact that the annual rebirth of the natural world is not a matter of indifference; or at least, it is not to me, and I know it is not for many people. On occasions, it has moved me to a joy so intense that I have been at a loss as to how to respond.
One such experience took place in France. For ten years, my wife and I and our two children spent many of our holidays in an old farmhouse in southern Normandy, in the rolling, wooded hills of the Perche, the ancient medieval county which is home to the Percheron great horse, and which is bypassed by most British tourists. One of the house’s attractions was its large garden, which held many songbirds with spotted flycatchers the most thrilling visitor, as well as constant swooping swallows and linnets and yellowhammers singing on the telephone wire, plus the odd mammalian surprise: red squirrels came in from time to time from the wood across the road, and once my wife saw the snaking shape of la fouine, the stone marten. But for me perhaps the most significant attraction was a profusion of insects now but a distant memory in insect-impoverished Britain: the butterflies were splendid, from swallowtails to fritillaries, and at night the moths were magnificent, as I know since I took my moth trap there, unashamed nerd that I am. Among a great moth menagerie there were Jersey tigers and crimson under-wings and several different species of hawk moth, not least the privet hawk moth – big as a bomber, or so it seemed when I first set astonished eyes upon it – as well as the angle shades and the buff arches and the setaceous Hebrew character and the large yellow underwing and all sorts of other stuff, and there was much more than Lepidoptera. Sometimes we would be visited by the bulkiest of all the bees, the violet carpenter bee, navy blue and the size of a cocktail sausage; and when dusk arrived, the children would be entranced by the tiny points of luminous green radiance in the grass, as the female glow-worms lit up their lamps for passing males.
The rear half of the garden was given over to a small old orchard of fourteen different fruit trees, with apples and cherries and peaches and several varieties of plum, including damson, quetsche in French, and greengage, which is reine-claude, and mirabelle, which is the same in both languages and which, if you get it at the right moment, is the acme of all fruits. It is small and round and greenish-yellow as it slowly ripens and then it tastes perfectly pleasant, with what one might call a generalised plum taste; but right at the end of its ripening, in the day or two before it drops off the tree, its skin colour deepens to old gold with red spots and then, ah then, its taste is like nothing you have experienced, the most subtle sideways variation on sweetness your palate will ever be blessed with.
But the orchard held other blessings. In springtime the blossom was spectacular, especially on a couple of the pure white cherries, which seemed, like the Easter trees in A. E. Housman’s matchless lyric (‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’) to be ‘hung with snow’. And there was yet a further blossoming too, and that was the birdsong.
For some years I have thought of spring birdsong as blossom in sound. This takes us I suppose into the realms of synaesthesia, the interpreting or experiencing of one sense via another, not a concept I have ever found particularly rewarding or fruitful, despite its promotion by numerous prominent figures in the arts; but once the suggestion flowed into my mind, listening to willow warblers singing on Skye, their silvery falling cadence softening the severity of the northern landscape as much as flowering trees might do, it would not leave. In the orchard in France the bird-song was fulsome: we woke every morning to a chorus of blackbirds and song thrushes, robins, wrens, and chaffinches, and best of all a blackcap, with the most mellifluous, melodious song you can imagine, and I began to think of this as blossom, as much as the blossom was blossom; and then, in the most extraordinary experience – at least, it was for me – they merged into one.
For one late April the blackcap was singing unseen, deep in a hedge, and it was joy-inspiring; and across the garden was the most gloriously flowering of the cherry trees, and that was joy-inspiring too. Then on a Sunday morning – I remember it precisely – the bird moved into the tree and began its song.
I was struck dumb in amazement.
Here was this God-given, blossoming snow-white tree, which was breathtaking in its beauty; and here was this God-given, breathtaking sound coming out of it. This tree, this tree of trees, was not just an astonishing apotheosis of floral beauty. It now appeared to be singing.
The rational part of me couldn’t cope. It was all too much, and it fell to bits. I had gone way past simple admiration into some unknown part of the spectrum of the senses, and there was only one possible response: I burst out laughing. And there, in the exquisite fullness of the springtime, was the joy of it.