Spring!

Spring! It all seems to say, in a way that it didn’t quite yesterday, even though then I had heard the curlews again, calling their names and imbuing the ordinary fields with an atmosphere of wild loneliness that seemed somewhat incongruous with the sheep-flocks and the rushing roads. Here, banks of newly verdant paddocks stretch down to the mill-stream. There’s the striped velvet pile of a recently mowed river garden. A field containing the studiously positioned, elegant forms of an old harrow and plough. A moorhen calling ‘chip’ as it picks it’s way across the stream over an outstretched limb of tree, a pair of mallards taking flight to a soundtrack of their usual bombastic ‘quackings’. The brutal-looking results of some spring pollarding – the sawn stumps, sucker-less now, of a riverside willow. And a familiar sound I haven’t heard since last spring. ‘Chif-chaf, chif-chaf, chif-chaf’ – the metronomic-sounding onomatopoeic utterance which says, unmistakeably, that this migrant bird is back, though it’s voice is all that tells me. The bird itself is invisible. There is blue sky, fragments of cloud; warmth. The spring sunshine brings a brightness to everything I see, like tarnished pennies dipped in acid. Everything seems new; re-clarified.

High over the field beyond the other banks of the Thame’s meandering loop around this meadow, a hundred-strong gang of lesser black-backed and herring gulls communicate in a cacophony of laughing calls which each say something approximating ‘this is mine. I am here’. They thresh and mill over what seems to be a chosen spot far below on the ground in sculptural white forms, shadowed with greys. They remind me of paper birds, sharp-winged origami birds. Their sounds slicing jaggedly at the soft blue air transport me instantly to the coast, to walking along the sea-front at Bournemouth hearing the irreplaceable tones of gulls. I smile to myself, and continue to pass along the right side of the river-meadow, on the walk I have begun on this rip-roaringly beautiful early spring afternoon. I haven’t got much time. Soon, I must collect my daughter from school. But I could not resist this opportunity. When the sun woke me at 7 this morning I was in no position to go for a walk. Time passed with the usual kinds of fillers - the school run, an appointment with the dentist, domestic chores and then lunch, but at last I found an unoccupied hour to make my way down to the river at the foot of the village.

Celandines, lustrous, golden-yellow, many-petalled and belonging, like buttercups, to the Ranunculus family, luridly spangle the winter-faded grassy sward like childish scribblings of flowers. And suddenly my eye is caught by movement. A pair of small tortoiseshell butterflies, both male, attempt to corkscrew above each other in a competition of escalating heights. I, in their midst, feel like an intruder. I feel part of their behaviour is an attempt to see me off. I apologise, as I am wont to do, even to butterflies, and walk away. The gulls’ field is silent now, the birds having flown off to lord it over some other place. Two Canada geese and four swans loaf mutely on the ground. The swans’ plumage is like an advert for a biological washing powder, laundered to a dazzling white, in contrast to the dull curdled-milk shades of the sheep who masticate grass on the ridge of a hilly pasture just beyond the ‘u’ that joins the millstream to the river-channel around the peninsular of this place they call the ‘Thame Island’. There’s a fisherman each to a bank of each. We do not exchange greetings. I leave them to the whip-lines of their rods and their quiet water-communions. There’s a tentative calm to this new spring day that feels like it ought to remain undisturbed, respected. Birds sing and call– whom can I hear? Wren, robin, blue tit, great tit, and the chif-chaf, of course. These are not the only birds singing today, but they are the only ones I can hear near the river right now. Entry to this small meadow feels like a portal into a different world from the other, parallel world outside it, with it’s road and cars, the sprawling old mill-turned-pub with it’s aroma of cooking food and beery counters. You step in here and try not to break the delicate membrane of the atmosphere. The sun deflects off a meander of the river with a foil-like gleam. A glinting glitter-pattern which reminds me of the sea and it’s light on days like this. I think of the sea, which I miss; as a vast amalgamation of water-courses like this one, turned to salinity by the mass of salts from rivers flowing into it. Globally, and each year, rivers “carry an estimated four billions tons of dissolved salts to the ocean”. Yet rivers themselves retain their fresh-water quality through the rain that falls on and is absorbed within them. It’s not just a comforting thought, but a fact, that all these little waters, connected both solely and by tributaries to larger river-courses, will slide into the estuaries which mingle with and eventually become the salty sea of the English Channel.

The day itself has become an engine of change. A conversion of spring’s possibilities into something that actually feels like spring. Today, I’ve heard others reflecting my own thought, or fancy. That today is the first real day of spring. The sunshine is what sells it to us really, though yesterday the call of the curlew was another first of the year, and since moving here almost two years ago, something I've celebrated. Curlews - in Buckinghamshire! I had always assumed these wading birds with their distinctively down-curved bills and moorland-haunting calls to be a specialised species of uplands and coastal areas only. But their presence in the area through out the spring and summer has proved me wrong.

I follow the water towards a small stony weir. Here it courses rapidly and with fresh intention back towards where it flows under the road and onwards in a small loop to join yet another channel of the ‘Shabbington Stream’, a tributary of the actual river Thame. The report of the water as it rushes over this obstacle on it’s otherwise fairly steady path is refreshing to both the ear and the psyche. Thinking of the curlew, I compile a mental list of other new sightings for spring. This morning I saw two brimstone butterflies, in yet another of the yellow hues which so typify the colour aesthetic at this time of year. The pussy willow catkins – yellow-tipped. The dandelions, with their tactile composite yellow heads turning the verges into almost single-species wild flower meadows – mad with dandelions, until the mowers come. The buttercups will come soon, to follow the celandines. The name of a bird – yellow-hammer – whose mesmeric 'hammer'notes, as it's name suggests, I’ve been hearing for a few weeks now. Woodpeckers, greater-spotted; drumming. Chaffinches singing their pulsing, choirister-clear diminuendos, now with added flourishes. There’s an unmistakeable morning chorus which is not yet as full as May’s ought to be, and really more of a competition than a chorus, but is nonetheless obvious as a marker of the noticeable change of season. Newly in flower are red dead nettle, white dead nettle, daisies, dog violet and Persian speedwell. The daffodils’ two-tone yellows are beginning to fold and crumple now, and the snowdrops are going over, blackening.

There is no longer any question about it. Spring is here.