An Untypical Spring

Jim finds nature all out of place and routine, but surviving doggedly, in the wake of severe weather

MARCH comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. It is one of those clichés with which the folklore of our seasons is carelessly strewn. The missing word is “sometimes”. In the backward spring of 2018 – remember the beast from the east? – March came in like a polar bear and went out like a flu victim, spluttering and out-of-sorts.

For more than 30 years, spring has arrived with the sand martins to a bay on the north shore of Loch Lubnaig. I know this because for more than 30 years I had followed the nesting season fortunes and misfortunes of a pair of mute swans there.

Reliably in the last two weeks of March, I would arrive at the loch to find the bay aswarm with the dull brown charms of hundreds of sand martins, and within days of arriving, the flock would fragment and a hard core would drift a mile upstream to where a 10ft-high bank of bare earth curved round the inside of a long bend in the short life of the River Balvaig.

The Balvaig flows east out of Balquhidder Glen, snakes lazily across a wide flood plain known locally (but not on any maps) as Loch Occasional, beyond which it heads more decisively south to Loch Lubnaig.

Halfway between the two lochs is the bend in the river that the sand martins call home, where they begin to excavate old and new burrows in the bank’s accommodating soil. The first sites to be claimed are 