Primroses in February show that our seasons are being lost to climate chaos

Imet two flowering primroses a few days ago. Wild ones. Tucked into a sheltered corner of a south-facing hillside where Highland meets Lowland, on the upslope of Scotland’s great geological hinge.

Primroses flowering in the second week of February. You might expect it in Kent, say, but not on a hillside that could stake an undeniable claim to being the first upthrust of the Highlands.

The role of the seasons in nature’s scheme of things has dominated my writing life for the past seven years, the raw material for a quartet of books beginning with The Nature Of Autumn and ending with The Nature Of Summer.

Now that their hardback and paperback lives are about as established as my books are ever likely to be (we’re not talking Ian Rankin or JK Rowling numbers here), I am currently embroiled in the unlovely task of editing the four into a single volume.

A fair bit needs to be cut, otherwise I’d end up with a 1,000–page book and no one wants one of those. But it is a bit like shedding my own blood.

The result is a head full of the ebb and flow of Scotland’s seasons and the undeniable collapse of their accepted order.

My Scottish wild flowers reference book has phrases in it like: “...anyone in search of wild flowers in springtime will find more colour and variety in lowland woods than in the Highlands, where the climate stops most plants from flowering until well into May…”

It was true enough when the book was published in 2000, but not now. Twenty– two years has taken care of centuries of natural process and human tradition.

In The Nature Of Spring, which was published in 2019, so written the previous year, I quoted from new research by polar ecologists from the University of California: “Spring is arriving earlier, and the Arctic is experiencing greater advances of spring than lower latitudes.

“Over the past 10 years, spring has come a day earlier, but two weeks earlier in the Arctic, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the global average and ice fields are rapidly shrinking.”

The report added that in April 2018, temperatures in the High Arctic (despite having had no sunlight since the previous October) had been above freezing for a total of 61 hours.

Ah, but spring 2018 was memorable in Europe for the “Beast from the East”, when everything went briefly bonkers.

A telling symbol came from the Woodland Trust, which runs Nature’s Calendar, where members send in details and dates of significant events in nature’s year.

In this case, it was the first records of flowering bluebells. In 2017, the first recorded date was February 9 in south– west England. In 2018, it was in the south– east of England and the date was March 20, so 39 days later.

By April 20, 2017, the trust had received 716 records of flowering bluebells. By the same date in 2018, the figure was 73.

The point is that nature’s reliable system of renewal, thriving, withering and resting to renew again is being completely destabilised. It is not climate change we have inflicted on nature, it is climate chaos. The consequences are far–reaching. The relative stability of seasons created a predictable ecosystem, in which the interdependence of birds, mammals, insects and flowers was reflected in the timing of mating, hatching, blooming, calving. If young birds and mammals enter the world too early and there are no insects and plants, for example, the results can be catastrophic for the ecosystem.

Last summer, unprecedented wildfires in Siberia were so sustained and intense that there was smoke at the North Pole, almost certainly for the first time ever.

You could call it a smoke signal. Yet COP26’S fine words are still not transforming into deeds.

Somewhere in the world, a single nation, large or small, has to set an example, to demonstrate that the planet can only be healed by sound environmental practice, and economic growth has nothing to do with it. I believe that an independent Scotland is perfectly placed to step up and set that example.

My two flowering primroses were in the Woodland Trust Scotland reserve at Glen Finglas, where 10,000 acres of hillside have transformed before my very eyes in 25 years into a phenomenally galvanising woodland.

On the same day, in the same woodland, I watched a small cloud of siskins and goldfinches and a solitary linnet tumble through a thriving stand of hand-planted alders.

Food for a winter-weary flock of small birds just when they need it most.

Food for thought for the watching nature writer.

The bottom line is this: nature is everything. The health of our own species is dependent on one thing only: the health of our planet. The only thing damaging the health of the planet is the behaviour of our species.

Without a change in the way we behave, we are writing the longest suicide note in the history of the world.

COP26’S fine words are still not transforming into deeds

UNPREDICTABLE: Once, primroses in the Highlands would have arrived in May. This year, Jim has spotted some already.