From the Sahara to Somerset, the birds that bring spring
ONE of the most joyous sights of spring is the return of the swallows, swooping and diving in the air, their forked tails slicing through the sky.
Few of us give much thought to the journey that brings them back to Britain each year. Tim Dee, who lives part of the year in ‘the last-but-one house from the southwestern tip of Africa’, is watching swallows in January when it strikes him that these birds will soon set off on their epic migration across Africa to Europe.
A swallow flies at about 50 kilometres a day.
Coincidentally, the isotherm — the line on a map connecting points with the same temperature — moves across Europe from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Ocean at roughly the same speed in the period between the winter and summer solstice. Swallows are, almost literally, travelling with spring. Dee, a writer and broadcaster, decides that he will follow the swallows’ progress north and reap the benefits of a prolonged spring.
‘Buds, blossom, songs, nests and eggs . . . who wouldn’t, if they could, try a little time-travel in search of more of the right time, trading the notional middle of winter for some early spring?’ he asks.
He starts his travels in the Sahara desert, where the few trees he sees harbour birds pausing on their journey northwards — birds that will soon be in Europe. A few weeks after leaving the desert, in chilly Bristol, he is excited to spot a white wagtail, a species he last saw hopping around crocodiles in Chad, ‘as busy on the snow as it had been on the sand’.
He marvels: ‘Every migrant arriving in the spring is already a seasoned voyager, every one is already a survivor.’
Travelling to Gibraltar, he observes that the birds are exhausted by the desert crossing; some species have made the 2,000-km journey in one non-stop, 60hour flight.
Like lazy tourists, they hang around Gibraltar gorging themselves and putting on weight before the next stage of their journey.
In Sicily, he and his wife Claire hike up a mountain and he notices that spring turns back to winter the higher they go: ‘As we climbed, we travelled against the season and back in time: to baby leaves unfolding, to blossom, to buds, to bare winter branches.’ May Day finds him
producing a radio broadcast from Somerset, spending the night crouched at the edge of a reedbed listening to the ‘stirring and throat-opening’ of the birds as they wake up.
At this time of year, the dawn chorus moves rapidly across the northern hemisphere. ‘Every minute, about 21 more kilometres of the Earth’s surface are lit up and come alive with bird song.’
In June, close to the summer equinox, Dee travels to Iceland. Unable to sleep in the permanent daylight, he and his wife walk the hills at night.
‘At one o’clock in the morning I came alongside an estuary and woke a sleeping red-necked phalarope — a bird I’d last seen at the other end of the Atlantic in Cape Town sewage works,’ he writes.
Greenery is part memoir, part nature guide and part travel book — though annoyingly it doesn’t have a map. Tim Dee’s writing is suffused with literary allusions: rather too many, actually.
‘Get on with the nature stuff, Tim!’ I wanted to shout at times, because when it comes to chronicling the natural world his writing is a delight, both elegant and evocative.
Watching a group of Bewick’s swans flying overhead, he comments memorably that they look like ‘a washing line of creamy sheets in the northern sky.’
This charming, meandering and occasionally frustrating book ends with a completely unexpected double whammy, which had me first wiping away tears and then smiling in delight.
It’s a reminder that, however grim things look, there is always the freshness and rebirth of spring to look forward to.