Welcome signs of Spring are in the air

IN days of yore, people could tell the transition from the end of winter to the arrival of spring only by information gleaned from the natural world. We still do it. As soon as Christmas is over people comment about the first hint of the grand stretch in the evenings, and by the second week of January that stretch is well and truly firmly established.

The arrival of spring was particularly important for farmers. The flowering of Hazel was a traditional marker in the annual turning of the year. The ‘lamb’s tails’, the fluffy, yellow, dangling male catkins came first followed by the tiny, scarlet-red, anemone-like female flowers.

Nowadays, with global warming and different cultivation and storage techniques for crops, flowering and fruiting times have gone astray for many plants what with Daffodils blooming before Christmas and strawberries on supermarket shelves in the dead of winter.

While Saint Brigid’s Day, the first day of February, is regarded by some as the start of spring, Met Éireann maintains that, meteorologically, February is a winter month, and that the first of March is the first day of spring.

In any event, the signs were all around when I was on the nature trail last week. Walking down a laneway, my attention was drawn to spatters of frogspawn on the stony surface. There was no sign of a dead Frog. There was evidence all along the verge of where a Badger had been digging for earthworms, so the possibility sprang to mind that perhaps the foraging mammal had happened on a pregnant female Frog hopping across the lane, caught it and eat it.

Or maybe the hungry Badger happened on the fresh remains of a dead Frog? Or maybe not? I walked on noting the Lesser Celandines in flower, the first of the buttercups to bloom and heralds of springtime.

On reaching the wetland I was greeted with the sight near the water’s edge of a flock of wading birds probing the wet ground for tasty morsels to eat. Among the local resident Oystercatchers and Redshanks were two Ruff, scarce sandpipers on passage migration from their wintering grounds in Africa to their summer breeding grounds in Scandinavia and Russia.

The Common Frog, one of the harbingers of the arrival of springtime, hibernates for the winter and emerges in February.