The first of the month was a day for the buzzards as they looped and dipped into the curve of each other flight then followed on from treetop to treetop. Broad winged, they circle shared thermals in their courting, their call nailed to wall of the sky like a truth. Everything else hunkers down and is quiet as they display. They pass, pushing down the valley and across the floor towards the further hills. Birdsong ripples back across the silence like a wake in their passing.
The hedgerows are bubbling with the sound of birds. Thrushes. Great tits. The trill of the blackbirds. The hissing fit of the mistle thrush. The lonely call of the unhitched as yet Raven. Robins like a bloody crossbow bolt fire themselves into hedges. The woodpecker drums, the tik tak thunk that is now the new and awaited sound of Spring. I hear them as I show a guest the Alder woods that drift from the foot of Hawthorn Hill and across the farm to the forestry.
Not much is in leaf yet. The elder is thinking about it. The bramble has never stopped. Many a year early bramble leaves have saved the life of a poorly ram or ewe. I think the buzzards have been hunting worms in the field. As I drive up the farm road something bursts often from the field. Too big for a thrush or crow, the wrong shape in flight for a raven. It’s a month of almost seens, almost beens, not quite greens. I find the paw prints of badgers digging for grubs in the corners of fields or by the road. The dog fox crests a hill and we catch his casual look as he passes. We are not serious things to him.
Most mornings the dawn chorus is what wakes me. Or keeps me awake when some other dream rouses me from itself.
The sound will build as Spring breaks across the valley fetching itself up last on the far peaks of the mountains and also on our North facing hill. Their number will swell and their song will build and roll through the bowl of the valley until early morning will be crowded loudly with their sound. It already. The ravens tumble towards one another in the air or burst through the naked alder tips one firing itself at the other. The thrushes and finches fight outside the bedroom windows. The Spruce woods are loud with Siskins picking clean what cones they can from the high tree tops. The Dunnocks Tseep tseep, the spit and hiss of a mistle thrush, the skittering stammered hiss of the blackbirds. Wrens. Crows.
Already the first busy columns of midges have thickened in the drive, tumbling whirls of insects, often near where water stands. It is the female that bites. A high pitched zither, a sting, a slap and curse. At lambing, the breath of shepherd and ewe a magnet to midge mothers looking for protein to build their own young with. 2 in the morning. A ewe in heavy breath on her side in the rushes. The wuthering snipe looping with it’s courting flight. The yip and scream of the fox. The hot air thick with the zither of mother midges.
Our wildflowers begin. The bees we can see, legs crammed with yellow and orange pollen. Buff tailed bumblebees zig zag with according to their own urgent geography. We’ve seen the comma, tortoiseshell and peacocks. Drone flies. Hoverflys. Bumblebees. Honeybees. Inquisitive wasp queens. The insect world unfurls along with the flowers.
Mowing the top meadow with a sycthe last month I resolve to make a lower field a traditional hay meadow too. Both I will take with a sycthe. Graze light. Let grow the summer long. Let flowers bud, grow, unfurl, set seed and reproduce. Watch as the new meadow becomes flush, I hope with what the top meadow already has. A riot of wildflowers. A throng of dragonflies and swallows.
This bottom meadow is choked with thick rush. Some of which we will leave. We always do. But in making it a store of forage for the flock we can also make of it a store of forage for our insects. And once that is done, those insects too become a store of forage for so many other wild things. Get the trees, the bees and the flowers right, and all else comes right with it, I think.
At the end of March, in walking down the lane to watch the milky way ribbon across our sky, my eldest spots the bats. Their stacatto flutter in the side field as they hunt the nights midges. His voice peals out in the night, excitement, wonder, discovery. All this in him and all this now out as they fly, dipping and weaving in amongst the trees, close shaved swerving past our faces as we walk.
Towards the end of the month the first Blackthorn blossom comes. Fine white sprays we can see in the hill field. Our early flower currants are thick with bees. Our own two hives still have a thin drift of bees coming to and fro. Bright yellow pollen on their legs. The willow catckins are out in, drifting pollen across the farm. The buds on the thorn trees begin to split. Bright satin swatches of the most electric green peep out. The sycamore too, bursting slowly from it’s buds but not quite free.
And so ends March.
I will take the children and their bat detector and walk the drive after sun has set. The day has been warm, and these clouds of insecsts are theor meat and potatoes. Food for the swallows too when in time they come. They will have flown ha;f a world to breed and feast and will fly half a world bacl fueled by what they hint above the farm. I bless the curse of them, these midges, as I slap and curse at two in the morning.
