Spring Fever.

Spring has really sprung. All the blossom is out and the colours are growing vivid and the birds are performing frankly unspeakable acts, sometimes on the wing. I wake in the night to hear the oystercatchers singing like drunken sailors out on a spree. The swifts are here although I have still not seen my swallows. We have a new visitor in the field, in addition to the pied wagtails and the swifts and our two robins and the usual dark complement of jackdaws. He is a proud and vocal chaffinch, and is very interested in the horses. At times, he almost seems to be singing his song to them.

I am so ignorant of birds that I had to look the chaffinch up. It is known, rather distressingly, as the Common Chaffinch, on account of being the second most common breeding bird in Britain. I pucker up at this, furious on my fellow’s behalf. There is nothing common about him. His plumage is as rich and exotic as that of a Chinese emperor. He has a little blue cap and a breast the colour of old roses and singing white flashes on his black wings. He is splendid and remarkable in every way. Common, indeed.

Time is such an odd thing. As I grow older, it races past me in a hurling blur. I quite often get the days of the week wrong, and for most of this month have been captioning my photographs as April rather than May. And yet it seems years since it was spring. The Scottish winter goes on much longer than the English one, and there is no bosky transition period. We do not have the nodding cow parsley in the lanes and the tumbling hedgerows and the sense of burgeoning that comes to England. Scottish nature is much more austere and reticent. There is nothing, nothing, nothing, until it seems that the world will remain brown and bleak forever, and then, almost overnight – spring. It is as if some capricious giant has waved a wand and everything comes out – there are tiny leaves in stinging green and gaudy blossom in vulgar pink and unapologetic dandelions raising their yellow heads. Even the hills change colour, as if they have cast off their sensible winter clothing and gone to Paris for the new modes.

It is very, very exciting.

Horses, famously, go a bit wild on the spring grass, get spring fever, have spring twinkles in their toes. Perhaps humans have that too. My mind is working at eighty miles an hour. I can’t sleep because I am writing three books in my head at once. I have a new idea which I can’t possibly start, because I’m still editing two manuscripts, but this story won’t leave me alone, and I imagine convoluted dialogue in my head as I walk down to tend to the mare.

I do steady groundwork with her, to get the spring out of her. Someone needs to do some groundwork with me.

 

Today’s pictures:

I cannot capture my own chaffinch as he moves too fast, but I found this lovely picture on Wikimedia, available for public use, taken by a gentleman called Michael Maggs:

You see how not common.

A fleeting glimpse of spring

There are intimations of spring. This morning, I found the very first snowdrops. There were just two tiny clumps, on the rough ground, their buds still tightly furled. But there they were, brave harbingers of life to come. I was so excited that I exclaimed out loud.

The birds are suddenly singing their heads off. The woodpeckers are sending out their rhythmic rattle from the woods. The robins and tits are pairing off, and chasing each other around in a frankly blatant manner.

Even Beryl the Bird, the hen pheasant who visits the horses most mornings, pitched up today with a boyfriend. He is a big cock pheasant of several seasons, and the Horse Talker and I have now got it into our heads that Beryl has run off with a dirty old man. She’s clearly after his money. We are quite shocked. We did not think she was such a wanton.

There was even sunshine today, and the mercury climbed to a dizzying four degrees. We took all the rugs off, to let the equines stretch and bask in the sudden warmth. (We are talking in relatives here. It’s still glove and hat weather, but after so many days of windchill and zero degrees, it feels like the South of France.)

Stanley the Dog catches the new spirit in the air, and plays wild games with his ball. He has a very funny habit of burying balls all over the place. He carefully takes one, makes a little hole, puts the ball in it, and replaces the earth with his nose. Then he has the crazy fun of going about digging them all up again. Once discovered, the ball is thrown in the air, caught, chased, and practically juggled on the end of his nose. He is a one-dog circus act of his very own.

It has been a long, hard winter. It’s not over yet. More snow is forecast for the weekend. But just today, as the sun shines, and the air is gentle, and the frost goes out of the earth, my heart lifts with the thought of spring.

 

Today’s pictures:

SNOWDROPS:

The naughty Blue Tits, flirting their heads off:

The limes:

The old oaks and beeches:

One of the very few sadnesses about living so far north is that it is almost impossible to keep rosemary alive. It gets done by the ruthless winds, and turns brown overnight, as if someone has gone at it with a flame-thrower. This is the very first one that I have kept going for more than one season. I don’t count chickens yet, but I live in hope:

One of the things we do with the herd is give them a morning haynet. It means the hay lasts longer than if you just put it on the ground, and it keeps the horses occupied, because they have to pull the stuff through the small holes. We are very lucky to have a magnificent farmer who gets us the best stuff, and the girls absolutely love it. It’s one of their favourite parts of the day:

Autumn the Filly:

Myfanwy the Pony:

Red the Mare, with her goofy hay-heaven face on:

And looking a little more demure:

Stanley the Dog, going ball crazy:

Two views of the hill today:

One of the Dear Readers asked if there was a structure on top of the hill. There is indeed. You can see it more clearly on some days than others. It is a perfect cairn, a built pyramid rather than an ad hoc mound, and it was put up by a widow as a memorial to her husband and son. I do not know who they were or how they died, but it’s very touching.

Consider the birds

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I keep trying to push the BP oil spill from my mind. This week there has been Cumbria, and four young soldiers dead in Afghanistan, shot to death or blown up. There was the madness of the Gaza flotilla and that shooting, and then of course everyone had to pick sides and shout at each other, which seems to me perfectly bonkers because in that particular, intractable Middle East conflict it seems there are wrongs and rights in each camp, and no one comes away without stain.  There was not room in my head for this long, overarching environmental catastrophe, against which the most powerful, most technologically advanced, most rich, most advanced nation in the world can do nothing. It's the country that prides itself on solving problems; it can do. It likes conquering frontiers. The moon? Sure. Quantum physics? Of course. Then everyone gallops off to collect their Nobel Prizes. Now it must stand by, like some wounded titan, helpless, and all people can do is say the President ought to sound crosser.

It turns out I could not not think about it. Two of the bloggers I love to read, The Errant Aesthete and Splenderosa, put up long, thoughtful, furious, moving posts about it, here and here. I read them, nodding my head. I wondered what it was that made this thing impossible to ignore, even in a week when I didn't think I could contemplate yet another horror.

I think it is the birds.

I know that is a nutty thing to say. The big picture is surely the most important: the Western dependence on oil, the carelessness of multi-national corporations, the corruption of regulating agencies in a country that takes pride in its own rectitude, the vulnerability of humans when technology fails. As one livid commenter said, in response to a website showing pictures of gulls glutted with viscous oil: come on, they are only birds, not human beings. In one sense this is right: the cost to communities, the endangering of entire industries such as fishing and tourism, the enduring grief of the families of those who died on the rig, even the crashed pensions of little old ladies who invested in BP shares probably are more important than pelicans. There will be a possibly fatal knock-on effect of the spill: if the wetlands are degraded, their role in containing storm surges decreases, meaning that in the next hurricane season more properties will be damaged, and, conceivably, more people will die. It's not just a dirty sea.

So why should it be that a photograph of a bird drowned in brown filth should evoke such a visceral response in me? It is only a bird; there are plenty more like it, whole flocks of them. I think it may be that when it comes to oil, most people are culpable. However organic we might go, unless we never drive, fly, or use a plastic bag ever, we have all made our pact with the devil. I have absolutely no good idea what we do about that, unless we go back to ponies and traps, but it does mean that even the most concerned citizen will have a little of that oil on her hands.

The birds, on the other hand, really are blameless. They don't ask for anything. In turn, humans are not very nice to avians. They shoot them, put them in cages, herd them into battery farms, hunt them to the brink of extinction, steal their eggs, and trash their native habitats. In return, the birds delight us with their plumage, their crazy mating dances, their warbling song, their astonishing migratory patterns. They give us a living link back to the dawn of time, descended as they are from the dinosaurs.

It's not as simple as saying humans bad, birds good. It's just that when I see those beautiful creatures smothered in crude, so I can get on a ferry to go to a Hebridean island for my summer holiday, I feel a horrible queasiness. I think: they deserve better than this. I think: is it partly my fault?

As I write this, a lone oystercatcher, in from the coast for his summer sojourn, is pecking for worms on the lawn in front of my study window. There are ducks nesting down by the burn. We have a heron, the very occasional fleetingly glimpsed kingfisher, squads of bluetits, a couple of bullfinches, several bright-eyed robins, and a small gang of pied wagtails. There are the swifts and the swallows, of course, and flights of buzzards that sail high over the woods. Along the beech avenue, a clattering of jackdaws gathers each evening at dusk. On sunny afternoons, black-faced gulls trip in from the sea. Somewhere, hidden in the trees, a woodpecker taps out his rattling timpani. If someone came and covered them in oil I don't know what I would do.

I don't know what any of us can do. That's the problem. I was going to write you a short, jaunty, Sunday post today, and instead you get a rather plaintive, inconclusive wail about the birds. So sorry about that. Better tomorrow.

Let's look at them, not suffocated in toxic sludge, but as they should be:




Brown pelican and black-faced gull, photographer unknown.



Mallard, photographer unknown.



Green heron, by Alan Wilson. Don't you love the way he is rather grumpily hunched up, like Winston Churchill on a cold day?



Gull, by Paul Friel.



Pintail, photographer unknown.



Seagull, by Keven Law.

And, finally, a quote from Langston Hughes:

'Hold fast to your dreams, for without them life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.'

The Return of the Swallows; or, why I love the Internet

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The swallows are here. I thought I saw them last night, spitfiring past my study window, but it was in the gloaming and they were moving so fast I could not be sure. Then, this morning, I took the dogs down to see the cows who have moved into the south-western meadow. They are particularly beautiful, in many shades of dun and cream, more like elegant French Charolais than British creatures, and they and the dogs like to do mute stare-offs, which makes me laugh. The sun was struggling to come out from a low sky, and I was looking up at the departing clouds when, suddenly, THERE THEY WERE. My swallows, at last, back from Africa.

They were so late this year that I feared they would not come. I had a horrible feeling that something terrible might have happened to them on the long journey home; Somali pirates or volcanic ash or any number of possible catastrophes. I have been getting reports of the swallows arriving in Angus and various places in the south, and each evening and morning I would scan the sky anxiously, more and more convinced that my pair had, for the first time in eight years, not found their way back.

I have always wondered why it is that they come to me. I suddenly realise that it is a wonderful product of the law of unintended consequences. There are plenty of other sheds on the compound, but everyone else is good and organised and shuts their doors at night. I, on the other hand, am flaky and rackety, and always forget to close the door. That must have been how they found their way in in the first place. Ever since that first magical year, when I looked up to see the original perfectly constructed mud nest, I have left the door open for them each spring. Inside the shed, there is a sloping wooden roof, with thick, sturdy rafters, and the birds build their beautiful home against the beams, tucked right up in the eaves. The nests are so brilliantly made that they never lose their shape or structure, but, interestingly, the swallows do not go back to the old nests, but make a new one every time. I cannot express the delight and fascination the whole thing gives me.

Which brings me onto the eighty-seventh reason I love the internet. I wanted to give you a picture, so off I went to the Google. There, on the first page, was this astonishing photograph:

That was the first delight, because it is such a glorious image. It was taken by a gentleman called Don Bartletti for the Los Angeles Times, and I have no idea how he captured such a shot, but it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. However, these are not normal swallows; these are cliff swallows. I had never even heard of a cliff swallow. (I admit, I am not well-versed in the world of birds.) Apparently, they live in North America, and winter in Venezuela and Argentina, in a tremendously chic way. (For some reason, spending the winter in Venezuela makes me think of cabin trunks and cloche hats and the golden age of steam. Absolutely no idea why.) There is a famous flock that returns every year to the Mission San Juan Capistrano, so regularly that you can set your watch by it. So, because my birds came back, and because I wanted to tell you about that, and because I needed a nice picture to go with, I ended up discovering something that until now had been quite unknown to me. Hurrah for the marvellous cliff swallows and the genius that is the world wide web for allowing me to find them.

My Day of Discovery was not over yet. I thought: since I have found such a lovely swallow picture, perhaps I should find a nice cow picture to go with it. I googled about again, and yet more hitherto unperceived information fell like bounty into my lap. Did you know that there are over eight hundred different breeds of cattle? Had you ever heard of the magnificent Hungarian Grey? I certainly had not. Look at the gloriousness:

(Photograph by Csomor Laszlo.)

According to Wikipedia, they are 'robust, unpretentious, easy-calving and long-lived'. I love the idea of unpretentious cows. They are in high contrast, I suppose, to all those poncy cows with their flim-flammery and their fancy ways.

The clever Norwegians also have a great cow: the Norwegian Red. It is, apparently, noted for its hardiness. I have no information about its levels of pretentiousness:

(Photograph, slightly oddly, from Oklahoma State University.)

I am also much taken by the Nelore, another breed of which I had never heard. They originated in India, over two thousand years ago, by the Sea of Bengal, and somehow two of them got on a ship in 1868 and were dropped off in Brazil, where they are now easily the most dominant cow in the country. I still don't quite understand how a cow which thrived in the Punjab and by the Ganges ended up being the top bovine in Brazil, and I expect I shall ponder that for most of the rest of the day.  Here they are, the beauties:

I love ideas the most, but I also love facts. I have a craving to know stuff. Occasionally, in my more fanciful moments, I think if only I can know enough it will keep me safe.  This is why, for all the grumbling and grouching about how the interwebs are frying our poor fragile brains, I give thanks every day for the amazing prairies of the Net.

 

Bird update: just as I was finishing this post, my sister came to see me and we sat outside in the sun and talked of cabbages and kings (or similar). The swallows were dashing about overhead. And THEN the most wonderful thing happened. The crazy gang of swifts, which live down at my sister's house, and never come up here, flew over in a great roaring rush, and performed an antic dancing display. It was as if they were an official welcoming committee for their feathery cousins. The swallows joined in, and they all soared about at top speed, swooping so low that I could feel the beat of their wings fanning the air above me, and all the time singing their heads off. I never saw anything quite like it.

 

One more thing:

Thank you so much for the particularly lovely and thoughtful and kind comments of the last two days. You know sometimes I get behind and do not reply to them all, but I read them and love them and appreciate every one. There are some new readers this week, which always gives me a great sense of delight; welcome, welcome.

Have a very happy Friday.

Oh, and because it is Friday and the sun is shining, and it feels like the end of a very long and strange week, I can't leave you without this:

Don't you love how she does slightly wistful when she is ready for her close-up? Actually, she has just spotted a bumble bee and is wondering where it is going to land.

And this one, you may think, is practically smiling for the camera, but in fact she is looking at me like that because I have got her stick.

A slight surprise

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Sometimes, I step outside my front door and get a nice surprise, like a fleeting glimpse of a roe deer or the arrival of the swifts for the summer or any kind of parcel. Today, I really was not expecting this:

Or, in fact, this:

Or this:

There was a little bank holiday fete going on across the way, and a gentleman had pitched up with a sea eagle, two owls, a peregrine falcon and a harrier hawk. It really was rather thrilling.

Then my gorgeous niece turned up and my day was made.

I don't want to go too bucolic on your ass, but I would also like to state for the record that I actually observed some lambs gambolling in the south meadow this morning. I'm afraid there was no other word for it. It's not so very long ago that I spent my time running between the All Saint's Road and Dean Street pretending to be something out of a novel by Colin MacInnes, and now I get my kicks watching small sheep jump about in a green field. My friend Sophie was the one who watched the nature programmes; I was much too busy reading sordid biographies of Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker. Now, all I can think about is when my swallows are going to come back from their African wintering grounds to build their traditional nest in the shed. (Each year, I am terrified something will happen to them on the long journey home, and the perfect little wattle nests will remain forlorn and empty.) It wasn't how I thought my life would turn out.  It got this way through a tangle of serendipity and circumstance, and I would not change it for gold or rubies.

Have a lovely weekend.

Consider the birds

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I woke this morning to a tremendous rattling sound. It took me a moment to work out what the racket was. It turned out to be a bird, flapping madly against the Venetian blinds.

I am afraid of birds in the house. I catch their panic. They are so unfrightening outside, in the air, but so alarming in a confined space. But the poor thing was going crazy, so I bravely got up, put on my dressing gown, and set about a rescue. The dogs, oddly calm, settled themselves on the bed to watch.

Of course, I could not get close to the little creature. Each time I approached it, it flew away in panic. I opened all the windows, but it was now blind with terror, and could not find its way out. I stepped back, not wanting to frighten it more, and then it suddenly took off across the room, in full flight, and crashed head first into the window pane. I thought it must have broken its neck. It fell down onto the shelf below, amazingly still alive, and sat stunned and panting (I did not know birds could pant, but this one was), next to one of my treasured Lulu Guinness bags and a copy of The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger.

It was a Great Tit, its breast vivid yellow, with a dusty green back and a neat black cap. There was nothing great about it now, as it sat, diminished and shocked from fear and collision. It seemed unable to move, so I could finally get close enough to pick it up. Its tiny little body was so fragile it seemed hardly to exist. I carried it gently downstairs and set it down outside my front door. There was a hard glittering frost on the grass and the sun was dazzling out of the first blue sky we have seen for days. (The rain has been so bad here that half the roads are closed from floods and mudslides; half a hill has collapsed near Stonehaven.)

I was afraid that the bird was mortally wounded and would never fly again, but just die quietly in front of me. I had a forlorn hope that it had just dizzied itself, and might recover. The dogs and I settled down on the step to see what it would do. It sat, very still, fluffing up its feathers against the cold, occasionally turning to look at me with a plaintive stare, its beak open in silent entreaty. I was uncertain what to do next. If it was too badly hurt I should have to do that brutish country thing of finishing it off with a stone or a tree branch, as we sometimes have to do if we find wounded rabbits in the woods. Despite being brought up on a farm, and having a tremendous appetite for ratting when young, I have never had much stomach for mercy killings, even though it is by far the kindest thing to do. I wondered if I should have to call my friend Matt, who can do anything, and is always rescuing me from errant pigs and mechanical problems.

And then, just as I was losing hope, and the morning cold was seeping into my bones, the bird shook itself, gave me a parting look, and took to the sky. It felt like a present. It felt like a portent. I shouted out loud in delight.

I don't generally think much about birds. I get very excited every year when my pair of swallows comes back from Africa to nest in my shed, and I once almost fainted in delight when I saw a kingfisher flying low over the burn, so iridescent that I could not believe it was quite real. Down the road, at my sister's house, a gang of swifts arrives each spring; they spend all the summer quarrelling and flirting and mustering as if for some important event. Someone told me once that they do everything on the wing: sleep, eat, have sex. It must be exhausting. But apart from these momentary glimpses of glory, I do not consider the birds. It turns out, I discover, that they really are descended from dinosaurs. I always thought that was an urban myth. (Must, must, must brush up on my evolutionary biology.) It also turns out that no one can agree on how flight evolved, which I did not know. It is thirty years since we put a man on the moon; a device the size of a pack of cards can store 100,000 books; satellites can pluck words and pictures from the very air; and yet we still do not know how birds learnt to fly. There are four theories apparently, and even the very best scientists cannot choose between them. One day, some clever person will work it out. In the meantime, my little startled Great Tit is a miraculous mystery, as it flies off into the blue.

The bird, recovering:

And a bonus shot of the burn, in today's lovely misty morning, with vivid dogwood in the foreground: