George Monbiot’s recent Guardian article on environmental language should be required reading for anyone in my profession.  In recent years, a number of authors, most notably Robert Macfarlane, have catalogued our deepening nature-illiteracy.  They have linked this back to our growing disconnection from nature, and forward to a future inability to respond to the needs of the natural world, due to our inability to articulate them.

Monbiot has now spoken a painful truth – that scientists and environmentalists must shoulder a significant share of the blame.  He points out that the language we use is cold and alienating – words like “reserve” (as he says, think of what we mean when we use that word about a person) or “sites of special scientific interest”.  For the latter, he suggests “places of natural wonder” is a better reflection of what people really seek when they visit them.

Monbiot goes further: not only is the language of environmentalism alienating, but it leads directly to a shift in thinking about our relationship with the natural world.  He hates terms like “natural capital” and “ecosystem services”, because they ‘[inform] us that nature is subordinate to the human economy, and loses its value when it cannot be measured by money.’
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Professional ecologists, he says, should recruit poets and amateur nature lovers to help them find the words for what they cherish. Having spent 35 years working as one of the thousands of amateur nature lovers who happen also to be professional ecologists and conservationists – and a few of whom are published poets – I find it striking how bilingual we are:  one language for describing to each other our feelings and passions towards nature, another for our dispassionate analysis and advocacy to outsiders.
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​I spent the spring of 2016 on a writing project of my own.*  I travelled north through Europe with the arrival of spring, between “places of natural wonder”.  In Catalonia I discovered Maria Àngels Anglada, the novelist and poet.  Anglada was also a conservationist, whether she realised it or not.  Moved by the imminent destruction of the Aiguamolls wetlands, she wrote a Al Grup de Defensa dels Aiguamolls de l’Empordà.  It foretells the cataclysm of the lost marshes:  “Will they invade this living refuge that so many wings long for from afar?  Will the bird of the north no longer find nourishing water and green retreats?” …. “Flamingoes, our friends the mallards, farewell, farewell, Kentish plover and lapwing, colourful princess of winter.”**  Lines dedicated to the local campaigners who were fighting against overwhelming odds. 

​The first drainage ditches had already been dug, and bulldozers entered the marshes.  The machines found their way blocked, though, by local activists, who stood firm.  Then in 1983, the leaders of the newly-autonomous region realised the political and cultural importance of preserving this vital link in an international network of refuelling points for migratory birds.  Anglada rewrote her poem, a sigh of relief:  “They have not destroyed this living refuge that so many wings long for from afar.  Here the bird of the north finds nourishing water and green retreats.” …. “return, return, Kentish plover and lapwing, colourful princess of winter.” 

Anglada grew up speaking an illegal language.  When the ice of repression receded, her words rebounded off the page, and the words she chose to use were those of nature.  Olivier Messiaen was a composer whose works were inspired by the birds he, and sixty years later I, encountered on the coast near Banyuls.  He wrote his first significant birdsong-inspired piece, Quartet for the End of Time, in Stalag VIII-A prisoner of war camp in Görlitz (now Zgorzelec, Poland).  For both Anglada and Messiaen, wildlife symbolised freedom and identity and their works mined deep reserves of personal and cultural connectedness to nature. 

In Finland I discussed the epic poem Kalevala with Minna Pyykkö, the face and voice of Finnish nature on television and radio, and an artist who has created many works inspired by Kalevala.  As epics go, it is relatively recent, completed in 1849 by Elias Lönnrot, a physician who used his spare time to collect and compile the ancient oral folk tales and myths of the Finnish people. 

“Birds play a big role in Kalevala”, Minna told me.  “They are companions to people, they whisper advice, they tease, they lift and carry tired travellers, they attack and fight with people. They also feel cold in winter and are happy when spring comes.”

When the original poems were spoken, the Earth was believed to be flat.  At the edges of Earth was Lintukoto, ‘the home of the birds’, a warm region in which birds lived during the winter. The Milky Way is Linnunrata, ‘the path of the birds’, the route the birds took on their journeys to Lintukoto and back.  In modern Finnish, lintukoto means a safe haven, an imaginary happy, warm and peaceful paradise.

Lönnrot’s poetry inspired Sibelius to write the music that would in turn inspire the creation of independent Finland exactly a hundred years ago.  The natural world depicted in words and music, whether real or mythic, was an inextricable part of an emerging national identity.
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As George Monbiot says, ‘we are blessed with a wealth of nature and a wealth of language. Let us bring them together and use one to defend the other.’

During The Long Spring journeys I encountered my favourite mammal in only three places:  a distant sandy-pink coloured dog fox of the race silacea at the SEO/BirdLife reserve near Belchite, Aragón (pictured);   a bright red vulpes fox near Falköping, Sweden, and, during my periodic returns home to Yorkshire, monochrome glimpses of our local crucigera animals captured in infra-red light by my camera traps. This year, with the book safely packed off to Bloomsbury, I have been able to devote more time to my local foxes. 

​For one so ubiquitous in folk stories, myths and reality, it is a difficult animal to know.   Ours is a rural population, nocturnal, rarely seen, unlike the urban foxes that now inhabit many towns and cities in the UK.  Sometimes, it seems they wield strange powers: in 2011 Czech scientists discovered that foxes are somehow able to ‘see’ the Earth’s magnetic field, and use it for range-finding before pouncing on their prey.   My understanding of my elusive neighbours is almost entirely gleaned from footage recorded while I sleep:  

My two favourite pieces of fox literature are based on direct knowledge and experience of the animal, but make no pretence of understanding.  Instead, mystery and miscomprehension are the starting point for inner reflection, for a teasing out of the authors’ own self-awareness.

Rudolf Těsnohlídek's The Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears appeared as a serialised comic-strip in the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny – People’s News – in 1920, inspiring the seventy year-old Leoš Janáček to write one of the 20th century’s best-loved operas.  The Czech word Bystroušky, sharp-ears, has a double meaning, synonymous with cunning.  The Cunning Little Vixen, as the opera eventually became known in English, transformed the originally comedic cartoon into a philosophical reflection on the cycle of life and death, and desire for a return to simplicity.
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Ted Hughes’s The thought-fox is a poem about writing a poem. In a room late at night the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is dark and silent, but the poet senses a presence ‘entering the loneliness.’  The night is the darkness of the poet’s imagination out of which a vague idea emerges.  It has no clear outline; it is not seen but sensed; it is compared to a fox, delicately sensing its way through the undergrowth.  The fox emerges only slowly out of the formlessness of the night.  The fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox:  ‘the page is printed.’  

Today I walked through the meadows of RSPB’s Adwick Washland, in the company of poets Brian Lewis and Matthew Clegg.  It was the final event for 2017 of a Ted Hughes festival based in nearby Mexborough, where Hughes grew up after moving from Mytholmroyd at age seven.  It was also a celebration of wildlife-rich meadows, today being National Meadows Day.  Brian and Matthew led a small group through a landscape whose history is one of change, where coal mining, farming, and wildlife have dominated in turn.  Old and new landscapes is a recurring theme in Brian’s work, in both miniature – Haiku and Tanka – and more extended form.  As the sun climbed higher, the air was suffused with skylark song, lapwings’ skirls, and the occasional ‘long scream of needle’ – as Ted Hughes put it - from swifts.
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Matthew’s exploring of landscape through words does not, as he explained, always involve making a literal connection.  One reading, at a stone-built viewpoint between two areas of marshland, was of his reworking of the rallying speech from Aristophanes’ The Birds, entitled Hoopoe’s Cuckoo-song.  Birds, real and literary, were always close at hand, from recently-fledged avocets – a local success story – to the ones featured in the final short poem of the day.  In this, Matthew described a flock of starlings landing on high tension electricity cable: ‘their song is a kind of current, and the current is a kind of song.’

Last week I passed along the French Mediterranean coast on the latest leg of my writing project The Long Spring.  I crossed the border on foot from Portbou in Spain, walking over the Colls dels Belitres, into Roussillon.  This is where Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) found the inspiration for two of the masterpieces in his collection of solo piano pieces Catalogue d’Oiseaux. 

Messiaen’s introductory notes to Le Merle Bleu (Blue Rock Thrush) and Le Traquet Stapazin (Black-eared Wheatear) describe the landscape on the coast near Banyuls-sur-Mer in vivid detail, along with the birds he heard, and whose voices he transcribed, and the impressions he gained from the colours and sounds of the sea and the cliffs.  I decided to devote a day of The Long Spring to finding the very places he describes, and listening out for the birds he found in June 1957.

Messiaen is specific in naming where on the coast he based himself:  “Near Banyuls:  Cap l’Abeille, Cap Rederis.”  I set out on Tuesday morning and walked south from Banyuls.  I was looking for a cliff face among the many minor capes and inlets that make up the main headlands he mentions.  “In an echoing rock crevice, the blue rock thrush sings....his song blends with the sound of the waves.”

​I wasn’t at first even sure there would still be blue rock thrushes there, sixty years on, but I need not have worried about that.  They were there, and singing away.  Just inland from the cliff edge, in the heathy garrigue vegetation, a Thekla lark sang, just as it did in Messiaen’s day, playing the same accompanying role as it does in the piece.  And the herring gulls he noted (today we would call them yellow-legged gulls) were there, too. 

​I was struck by the way distance, and the angle of the cliffs, and the way the sea masked certain pitches at times, made a big difference in the sounds that reached me.  The blue rock thrush song in particular, varied in timbre from rich and bell-like, to thin and dry. 

Having travelled through Spain without seeing one, I suspected that black-eared wheatears were late this year, and I was certainly too early for the swifts that feature in both pieces.  But I wanted to explore inland a little, where Messiaen worked among the terraced vines and cork oak woods, notating the wheatear’s song.  I found the place he describes easily enough:  “vineyards in terraces....the garrigue: a jumble of low, spiny shrubs, gorse, rosemary, cistus, kermes oak....cork-oak....”  As well as the birds that had not yet arrived, I missed the spectacled warbler, which Messiaen features in Le Traquet Stapazin. It should have been there, and I wonder if its absence is the main change in the last sixty years, along with evident erosion due to visitor pressure; and the two are probably linked.

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.