Rejoice! Spring is in sight
It’s been a long, cold and lonely winter. Joe Shute looks ahead to brighter days
Ayear ago, we experienced spring through fresh eyes. Confined to our homes during the first lockdown, the season exploded in glorious technicolour around us.
Partly, this was due to the period between March and May last year being officially the sunniest spring since records began in 1929, with 626 hours of sunshine recorded. But also our appreciation was fuelled by our national incarceration. With our own freedoms so drastically curtailed, there was something about the joyful abundance of birdsong, insect life and flowers that inflamed the senses.
At this time of year, we all share an ancient yearning for spring. The world is slowly reawakening all around us, and every new flower petal or bursting tree bud, or the rising cacophony of the dawn chorus, warms us from within. It is the season of rebirth, renewal and, something that is needed more than ever during the age of Covid-19, reassurance: a sign of brighter days ahead.
There are two ways of measuring the onset of spring. Meteorological spring begins tomorrow, on March 1, and lasts three calendar months. There is also astronomical spring, which refers to the position of Earth’s orbit in relation to the Sun and this year starts on March 20.
Given the long and harsh lockdown winter we have all just endured you will forgive me for choosing the first option – for rarely can spring have been more eagerly anticipated.
We may still be trapped in our homes, but all around us life is beginning to return. Here are the intoxicating sights and sounds of the season and where to encounter them.
Spring does not, of course, arrive for all of us at the same time. Rather it moves slowly north-eastwards from the south-west corner of Britain taking around three weeks to cover the entire length of the country.
Due to climate change the passage of the season is rapidly speeding up. Historical records of flowering times and wildlife sightings show that between 1891 and 1947 spring moved at an average of 1.2mph while between 1998 and 2014 this had increased to 1.8mph. At the most recent count spring had accelerated to nearly 2mph.
On any given year – even during cold winters like that which we have just experienced – flowers will now come into bloom days or even weeks earlier than they once did. Bluebells, for example, are flowering on average roughly two to three weeks earlier than they were 30 years ago.
All this matters as spring, like any season, is a finely tuned orchestra. Birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles and insects have evolved to take advantage of precise timings in order to flourish. When these timings become disrupted it can push whole species to the brink. The adder is one example that
is having its breeding patterns disrupted by unpredictable weather patterns. The dormouse is another.
A priority species of conservation concern, dormouse numbers have plummeted by 72 per cent since 1993 and in 2016 were declared extinct in 17 English counties. Dormice are a species that evolved to be beautifully in tune with the seasons. Successional feeders, in early spring they eat the flowers of hawthorn and oak before progressing on to honeysuckle and bramble as they come into bloom. Over summer they alter their diets to encompass caterpillars, aphids and wasp galls before gorging on blackberries and hazelnuts in the autumn.
Around October, once they have reached an ideal weight of around 30g, which allows them to endure winter hibernation where they lose a third of their body mass, they burrow down into leaf litter or at the base of hedgerows (their exact hibernating spots remain much of a mystery) where the fluctuations in temperature are less severe and then sleep out the winter until May, when suitable food is available once more.
Nowadays, the dormice are tending to wake up during warm periods over winter and head out from their nests in pursuit of food, only to find that none is available. Prolonged wet weather, in particular, is disastrous for dormice. Unlike other rodents they do not possess any oils in their fur and so water can soak straight through to their skin.
I went searching for the secretive dormouse a few years ago in an ancient woodland in Kent on an early spring day. I remember it well for the electric yellow brimstone butterflies fluttering along the path – the insects are some of the first to emerge for the year. The woodland floor was rich with stars of lesser celandine, wood anemone and bluebells. Here was the perfect spring of all our imaginations. What Shakespeare once described as “proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, hath put a spirit of youth in everything”.