Chris Packham
MARCH TEMPTS US OUTSIDE WHERE OUR SENSES ARE SWAMPED WITH BURSTS OF BIRDSONG AND DRUMMING WOODPECKERS.
Spring has arrived!
It’s March and the sun is smiling too hard. Its unrestrained cheer is fraudulent, because whilst its crisp brilliance streaks through the tea-stained hazel poles and lights a thousand silver stripes, it is just too shiny, too showy, too superficial to seriously worry winter’s lingering grumpiness. March is the pretender, the ‘It’ month, it’s the month in the mini-skirt. It’s the giggler – it brims with childish charm.
March flits, March tickles, March teases. March catches your eye like an imagined lover’s smile, March wakes the child in you, March makes you skip. March shows off all its new things – the first gin-clear sky, a flash of primrose yellow and a twinkle of wood anemone white. March is radiant, March is sharp, March is shrill. And when you see it, you’ll tell your friends you’ve bumped into May, that it flirted with you, that you snuck a kiss and felt its warm eyelashes flutter on your cheek. March has the audacity to promise you bluebells.
But March is untrustworthy and it makes fools of us all. It tempts us to rush into spring by swamping our senses. It brandishes bursts of birdsong, bigs up the robin and the wren, makes a dance as well as a song of the thrush and tricks you by chiff-chaffing from the crest of the naked hedge. It will announce itself with a roll of the woodpecker’s drum, it will wipe your nose of the scent of bonfires and of the ruddy muddy rot of Christmas time, it will tug at your curtains a little earlier and beg you to come out to play. And you’ll jump up and rush out in a jumper… but then run back for a coat.
Because March lacks gravitas. It’s just not big or clever enough to outwit the mean inertia of winter. Beneath its pretentious facade, March is squelchy. It might dry a few leaves, and get them waltzing, set them rustling the first time since Halloween, but when you kneel to scratch the skin you’ll find winter is still there nodding smugly beneath.
But for its swanky kitsch and glamour, March does have one gaudy saving grace – it almost inevitably serves up the most startling sight of the year in our woods. It is nature’s bling for sure, it’s garish and it’s glitzy, and if you don’t like fireworks then you may not share the childlike glee I experience each year when I see it.
But I make no apologies: for me simple is best, and if it’s shocking then it’s exciting and I love it when wildlife slaps me round the face.
We’re up, we’re out, it’s sparkly. The chiffs are chaffing and a great spot is doing a brilliant John Bonham impression. We both have our coats on. Scratchy sniffs a primrose and then pees on it. I snigger, he obliterates some foxy scent and we are both happy because I just know if we go down to the woods today we can be sure of the big surprise.
After traipsing through February, my poodle has pepper in his paws again. He trots and tiptoes like the roe I pretend not to see as it blends for its English breakfast in the hazel cage. Its nose sparkles and I imagine that, for all its feeble fancy, March feels good for the self-conscious buck. And then we reach the gate and open it to rapture.
I know it’s coming but I can’t stop the quake. The surge, the shout when it bursts out into the lane. I can’t control the explosion – that instantaneous electrifying supernova which detonates in my brain and for a moment sets me reeling. It’s so brilliant I can feel its glory, taste my joy. I’m giddy.
It darts through the shade and flits up, splitting the spectrum, smashing it apart to make a brand new colour. Yellow! But it isn’t yellow. The primroses are yellow, daffodils are yellow, celandines are yellow – this thing is more than that primary hue. It’s luminous: it appears to generate its own light, not just reflect March’s feckless rays. It has an uncanny intensity, as if the rest of nature’s yellows are watered down and only this creature has been poured neat from the pot of the purest pigment.
It’s like all the world’s sulphur has been condensed into four thin slivers of tissue and when exposed to the first sunlight of the year it ignites and becomes another star, burning so brightly that it dulls everything around it. The brimstone dances on fire and its embers will set spring alight.
MARCH FLITS, MARCH TICKLES, MARCH TEASES. MARCH CATCHES YOUR EYE LIKE A LOVER’S SMILE.”