Symphony of wild harmony

The new greening of willow and larch, the pale parchment sea green of ready-to-open whitebeam leaves, and the crescendo and widening repertoire of birdsong… all that conspires to slow my step and gladden the eyes and ears on the walk to the paper shop.

I still like to walk to the paper shop, to buy actual newspapers I can sit and read with a cup of coffee. I could do the whole lot without leaving home with digital subscriptions, but mine is a newsprint generation and I like a cafe.

Transformation

Then there is the nature of the walk itself, literally the nature of the walk. Right now, it is in transformative throes, the transformation symphonic.

The symphony begins quietly, unspectacularly, a thin rhythmic pulse, chiffchaff, chiffchaff, chiffchaff. Every morning just now that’s what I hear when I open the front door.

It is a signal, a summons that reaches back down the fly-ways of Europe to the Mediterranean and North Africa. Within days, the first piccolo strains of willow warbler drift down from the trees on cool winds.

A pause is appropriate at this moment, to consider what has just happened. The chiffchaff is four inches long and it has just flown from the Med powered only by its own microscopic heartbeat, and without sat nav, specifically so it brightens the day of a paper-shop-stroller in Scotland.

The willow warbler has come further – from West Africa – and now that its voice overlays the chiffchaff’s rhythm, the symphony is under way.

But here’s a thing: some willow warblers migrate from West Africa to eastern Siberia, about 7,000 miles.

These opening bars of the symphony act as a cue for the stay-at-homes, and on my woodland mornings that means especially the wrens. Nothing on earth gives you better value for your money than a spring-singing wren, a stratospheric power-to-weight ratio.

Metamorphosis

So it begins again, and the walk to the paper shop starts to take a little longer.

There is a long strip of woodland on that walk, with a footpath down one side. There a row of 10 larch trees is in the throes of metamorphosis from latewinter drab to spring dream, from chrysalis to butterfly.

The whitebeams are their near neighbours. The willows are on the other side of the path and they throng the woodland edge where they wade out into the shallows of a hidden and desperately overgrown pond.

They live there with their waterloving kin, the alders. The tallest of the willows is a giant which lost its footing a while ago and started to lean at an alarming angle but was saved from oblivion by snagging on a dead straight alder trunk. The symphony gathers force around them.

There was a new soloist in the woodland orchestra. I couldn’t see it, of course, so I did what I always do in such circumstances. I leaned against a tree and stood still.

Finally it flew from the larch above my ahead to the willow-propping alder and revealed itself: a blackcap.

Songscape

I was in Perth recently to hear my friend and writer John Lister Kaye talk about nature. He began by reading the opening chapter of his book Gods of the Morning. It’s about a blackcap, and it is one of the most affecting and thoughtful pieces of nature writing I have ever come across.

“…a virtuoso exhortation to the songscape that awards passion to our spring and splashes musical glamour on the dull face of our summer…”

The symphony – the songscape – takes many forms in different habitats but its common strain is one of wild harmony.

And here is the nonsense of Brexit. We are one continent, bounded by one ocean. From chiffchaff to swift and from willow warbler to spotted flycatcher, from corncrake to cuckoo, nature is telling us that in the most unambiguous terms.

Sometimes we don’t know all the answers. Sometimes we would be better off listening not to our politicians, but to nature.

When did politics ever stop you in your tracks on a sunny April morning?

The willow warbler: a welcome visitor from faraway West Africa.