Late in 2015, NATURAL LIGHT reported a remarkable case of environmental protest art that helped in the fight to save the magnificent beechwoods of Zilbeti, in the foothills of the Navarran Pyrenees. 
 
Mining company MAGNA, supported by the Government of Navarra, proposed to fell 54,000 trees to enable the extension of a magnesite mine.  People from the tiny village of Zilbeti and their supporters in neighbouring areas, local conservation groups and national NGOs such as SEO-BirdLife Spain resorted to guerrilla art to highlight the injustice, and the environmental damage, that would be caused by such a fragrant breach of EU law.

While SEO-BirdLife led a legal fight in the Navarran High Court, the local activists created Guernica de Zilbeti - a 25 metres wide by 15 high reproduction of Picasso’s Civil War protest painting, using harmless pigment on the trees themselves.  In October 2015, we reported a High Court victory, but that proved not to be the end of the story.  MAGNA, along with some local authorities, challenged the regional High Court’s decision in Spain’s Supreme court.  Two weeks ago, on 29 March, a definitive decision was made, once and for all, confirming full protection for the forest. 

Over the next few days, the early candidates for the First Day of Spring line up one after the other:

Imbolc, usually celebrated on 1st February.  The Gaelic season whose name is thought to derive from the pregnancy of ewes (“in-belly”), or Old Irish Imb-fholc (“to cleanse oneself”), or from even earlier roots to mean “budding”. 

St. Brigid’s Day, originally the Imbolc festival celebrating the original Brigid, a pagan goddess.  When the Christian saint Brigid of Kildare came along in the 6th century, the two identities we fused, and the Saint was allocated Imbolc as her feast-day.

German immigrants imported a pre-Christian tradition of early February weather prognostication, to the USA, where Groundhog Day on 2 February is reckoned to be more fun than the Candlemas it has largely replaced. 

Groundhog Day/Candlemas is also the global celebration of World Wetlands Day, which I also think of as San Blas Eve.  The following day, on 3 February, is San Blas when, according to the Spanish saying, la cigüeña verás – you’ll see the stork.  “If he don’t show, plenty more snow.”  A silken (cloudless) sky on San Blas morning, means a good year for vines, while planting garlic on San Blas Day is guaranteed to yield seven times as much at harvest: Por San Blas, ajete: mete uno, saca siete.

​Ecologists recognise six seasons in the temperate zone, including one that bridges winter (hibernal) and spring (vernal).  The Prevernal is that time when carolling birds and nebular midges happily delude themselves that winter is over, and we happily collude in the deception.  After the wettest and warmest December and January since UK records began, we still await news of winter.

For me, this year I shall be celebrating World Wetlands Day in at least two globally-important Spanish wetlands:  Laguna de Medina, near Cádiz, and the Coto Doñana.  Then the next day, the first day of my spring, I’ll be looking for storks.  I should see a few, I’ll be going to the biggest colony in the world, and they’re already nesting, I’m told.

I’ll be tracking the advance of spring in a series of journeys that starts this weekend on the North African Coast and into Spain, and finishes at the beginning of June in the Arctic.  There’s a special website, called The Long Spring, where I’ll be reporting back in a regular blog.

I shall be spending World Wetlands Day in one of the World's most famous wetlands - Doñana, in southern Spain.  It is a place I know well and love, and it will be good to get back.  I was last there in spring 2014, on two occasions. In the March Julian Rush and I went there to make a programme for BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth.  A month later I was back with The Observer's Robin McKie.

It was part of an EU-wide effort to persuade governments of the vital value of wild places and the European legislation that protects them.  The EU Birds and Habitats Directives had been under attack for some time, with developers and some governments regarrding them as a barrier to economic progress.  The campaign demonstrated how false this idea was, and just before Christmas the UK government, which had previously been particularly negative towards the Directives, announced that it was not going to push for them to be weakened.

Another pillar of international protection is the Ramsar Convention, a global agreement focusing on wetlands.  Every year on 2 February, the anniversary of its adoption in 1971, the Convention secretariat organises World Wetlands Day.

Unfortunately, wetlands are often viewed as wasteland, and more than 64% of the world’s wetlands have disappeared since 1900.  Much of the remaining resource is suffering neglect and mismanagement.  Yet livelihoods from fishing, rice farming, tourism and water provision all depend on wetlands.  They host a huge variety of life, protect our coastlines, provide natural sponges against river flooding, and store carbon dioxide to regulate climate change.

Wetlands for our Future: Sustainable Livelihoods is the theme for World Wetlands Day in 2016. The aim is to demonstrate the vital role of wetlands for the future of humanity and specifically their relevance towards achieving the new Sustainable Development Goals.

An international poetry competition opens tomorrow, 10 January and closes on 24 January.  Entries will be judged by English-born Tasmanian poet Sarah Day whose most recent collection Tempo has been shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards.  There is a prize of AUS$700 and AUS$100 for shortlisted entries.

​Click the button for rules and other details. Note the deadline is midnight on 24th Melbourne time - 11 hours ahead of GMT.

The reason for my visit to Doñana next month is to kick off a new project.  Between February and June 2016 I will be tracking the arrival of spring in Europe, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic.  Starting on the North African coast, and visiting some of the most interesting wild places in Spain, France, the UK, Sweden, Finland and Norway, I will report back on what I find on www.thelongspring.com.
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I’ll be describing wildlife, places, traditions, culture and issues as I look for signs of the coming of spring. I will be finding out how spring is marked by people in the areas I visit, investigating people’s connection to their natural environment and seeing how this is changing.

I'll also use the blog to report on news from elsewhere, such as webcams from special places as the new season gets underway.  

The Long Spring is also the working title of my forthcoming book, provisionally scheduled for publication in early 2018, by Bloomsbury.

Described as possessing a “naturalness and a philosophical bent at the same time,” Seattle folk-artist Wren’s haunting melodies evoke the lands and waters of her native Pacific Northwest, as well as Galicia, Spain, where she learned the traditional Celtic-influenced coastal music.

On May 19th, Wren will issue her first release in three years, the ‘name-your-price’ single The Road You Thought You Knew, with a new album of original songs about transformation, love, and the soul of wild lands due out later this year. A Kickstarter for the Galicia-themed album runs until May 27.

Wren, a.k.a. Laura Brady writes exclusively for NATURAL LIGHT, expanding on that deep connection with nature.

Growing up, my entire scope of reference was my backyard, its sunny, grassy center with currants and other fruits for the taking, and the dark, damp corners where earthworms emerged from the moist soil and snails left shiny trails. I delighted in capturing bugs, and stashed a collection of jars on the side-yard in which various gladiator battles took place between confused insects until I remembered, or forgot, to release them.

School simultaneously broadened me; stretching my thinking skills and teaching me about the world, but narrowed my greater awareness. It took me indoors, to factual books and computers and concrete reasoning. I forgot how to play make believe, and hunt for ants, and watch the green, hard ball of a currant slowly catch fire.

The years passed, and as my academic success grew, my talents receiving more and more recognition, my happiness and vitality plummeted. Something was missing. My health was a shambles (having been diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder), and my mental health was suffering. I felt stuck in the same thought processes – an egocentric framework – that I could not escape.

Then, at age nineteen, I went to Quebec for the summer to learn French and work on organic farms and fell in love with the land. It was a euphoric, breath-taking experience of discovering something bigger than myself, something more. I would rush through my farm chores every day, then run out to the wild fields and woods to prance, leap, and collapse in ecstatic bliss, to watch the sky and breathe the sweet, fresh air. 

I road-tripped to Colorado to study primitive skills, and found the name Wren, which would become my stage name. I began to study permaculture, a holistic way of living on the earth. I moved to Galicia, Spain, a place where many of the old ways and traditions of living on the earth are still preserved, though in hiding. And there, on a tract of land with over a thousand years of history, I truly came home to the earth, finding a place that spoke to me deeply.

When I rediscovered nature, I also rediscovered music.  And as I have deepened my songwriting, I see more and more that each song is drawn out of the deep well that is the natural world. Making music is how I tap into the greater system, the web of symbol and form that is the wilderness around us. My singing is how I translate this process and bring it out into the world to share with others. I sing, and dream, that as a people we can ‘stitch an ocean,’ a new vision for our lives in which we are no longer separate from the earth, but instead a beneficial part. 

The Coto Doñana in Andalucía is where nature and culture hybridise like nowhere else I know.   This Saturday I shall be in Birmingham to speak at the RSPB’s AGM on Doñana:  Portrait of a Wilderness. 

The main point of the talk will be to illustrate the value of EU-level cooperation, supported by EU law, in conserving Europe’s most precious places.  This in the face of an onslaught by the UK Government, the new EU Commission and other short-term interests who are committed to watering down the protection afforded by current legislation.

It’s a subject I covered earlier this year in an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Costing the Earth, which you can hear by clicking the button:

For Costing the Earth, reporter Julian Rush and I met up in the village of El Rocío, on the edge of Doñana’s vast marshes, before driving off into the wilderness.  We wanted to see how Doñana had fared sixteen years since we last met there, when Julian was reporting for Channel 4 TV.

Back then, Doñana, indeed all Spain, was reeling from the country’s worst environmental catastrophe.  A reservoir containing highly toxic mining waste had collapsed, spilling 5 million cubic metres of lead, arsenic and cadmium-laden mud and acid water.  A tsunami of poison flowed into the River Guadiamar, one of the main sources of water for the marshes of Doñana, which lay some 45 kilometres downstream.

En route, the wave of mud and acid killed everything in the river, and spread over 4,500 hectares of farmland, which will never again produce food.  It flooded some of the most important bird habitat, killing all aquatic life and contaminating soils.  Plants absorbed the heavy metals, becoming toxic to anything that fed on them.

The full story, and its aftermath, is related in Costing the Earth.  What proved to be a short-term disaster had its silver lining.  With considerable EU financial support, the pollution was cleaned up.  The contaminated farmland was allowed to rewild and has become a green corridor linking Doñana with the Sierra Morena to the north, and hopefully, one day reuniting the fragmented Iberian lynx population.

On Saturday, I will touch only briefly on the other Doñana: the Doñana of music, dance and pilgrimage.  So this is my chance to celebrate the cradle of flamenco;  and how fitting that this is also the Spanish name for one of Doñana’s great symbols, the flamingo. 

Etymologists cannot agree on whether the bird was named after the gypsy dances recalled in its strutting, head-and-wing flicking display; or the other way round.  What is in no doubt, is that the marshes of Doñana and the surrounding provinces of Huelva, Seville and Cádiz, is where flamenco and flamencos are most at home.

During my thirty-odd visits to Doñana, over the last 25 years, I have been unable to disentangle my sense of the landscape, its smells, its sounds, its birds, its coarseness, its rhythms, natural and otherwise, its troubles and its blessings.  Nor, in the lyrics to the Fandangos de Huelva, the Sevillanas, the Soleás and all the other Andalucian song styles, does any such separation exist.

For this reason, re-reading my birdwatching notebooks covering a quarter century of visits, is to smell the tang of eucalyptus and to hear the insistent clapping – palmas -  of flamenco:

Walking back to the hotel...

....to the piping scops and the k’tocking red-necked nightjar
and half-asleep coots in the black marshes
and clapping.... clapping....

The cante jondo approaches the rhythm of the birds and the natural music of the black poplar and the waves. It is a rare example of primitive song, the oldest of all Europe, where the ruins of history, the lyrical fragment eaten by the sand, appear live like the first morning of its life.  Federico Garcia Lorca 1931