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.’

Radio stations across Europe and India are coming together in the early hours of Sunday 7 May to track the sound of birds bursting into song as the sun rises from Delhi to Dublin in a unique broadcast for International Dawn Chorus Day.

The event will hosted by Derek Mooney from RTE radio in Ireland, joined in the UK by naturalist Brett Westwood and singer Will Young.  They are taking over BBC Radio 4 between 12.30am and 7am to host a live through-the-night festival of birdsong, conversation and performance.  We are promised capercaillies in Norway, bitterns in Somerset, bluethroats in Holland; other guests include Jimi Goodwin, lead singer of Doves; author Mark Cocker, and composer Hanna Tuulikki.

​The programme culminates in a live dawn chorus from the RSPB's Ham Wall in Somerset (pictured).

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. 

It is more than two years since NATURAL LIGHT launched its campaign to restore nature words to children’s vocabulary, following the shocking discovery that the Oxford Junior Dictionary had removed over a hundred of them, replacing them with “indoor” words like broadband and chatroom.

The story was picked up on the other side of the Atlantic, by pharmaceutical brand Claritin, whose allergy medicine is an increasingly important part of kids’ outdoor kit.  The rest is in the video:

Winter has arrived – not only the wheezing flurries of redwing but also the final volume in the seasonal quartet of anthologies edited by Melissa Harrison.  I reviewed the first in my blog The Long Spring, and I am pleased to see that the pattern and standards set by Spring have been maintained through the series.

​So some key points bear repeating:  I praised Harrison’s imaginative commissioning of new works and choice of previously published pieces to accompany them; and I applauded the gender balance in the choice of authors.  And the “high number of specially-written pieces including from several newish and/or youngish writers” happily applies to Winter, as it has the whole series.  

Unlike spring, except perhaps in the Highlands, winter rarely arrives with any fanfare.  Most symbols of winter are really signs of autumn – fieldfares and geese from the north, frost-sugared (to cite Deakin) rose-hips.  Opening Spring, I feared – without foundation as it turned out – that the season might prove too burdened with in-built clichés to sustain interest.  With Winter, Melissa and her contributors have again swerved wide of the obvious.  Snow takes its proper place, as a merely occasional feature of the season, many authors choosing to tackle fog instead. Christmas is a brief presence, as Christmas should be, and the myth of dormancy is largely replaced by celebrations of life showing through the cold.

Credit must go to the Wildlife Trusts, on whose behalf the series is published.  It would have been easy, lazy and commercially safe to produce yet another set of romantic, idyllic and ubiquitous favourites, but these books are for life, not just for Christmas.


​​Winter, edited by Melissa Harrison, published by Elliott & Thompson 20th October 2016.

When writers and artists across the English-speaking world heard about the decision by the Oxford Junior Dictionary to remove over a hundred everyday words connected with nature, the response was clear:  we must save words like conker, bluebell and buttercup from extinction.  Writers for whom the loss of such words from children’s vocabulary was unthinkable, from Margaret Atwood in Canada to Andrew Motion and Michael Morpurgo in the UK, wrote to Oxford University Press to complain.  Some, such as writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris, are publishing their own celebrations of what Macfarlane has called wonder-words.

Now prize-winning children’s poet Chrissie Gittins has built her latest collection around forty of the lost nature words, with the message:  “Help save the names of these animals, plants and birds from extinction and be inspired to write your own poems using other words which have been culled!”

Chrissie Gittins was born in Lancashire and lives in south London. She worked as an artist and teacher before becoming a fulltime writer. Her poems have been animated for CBeebies and included in many anthologies. Adder, Bluebell, Lobster brings the natural world up close through dramatic and vivid poetic imagery.  

From Adder to Wren, forty fantastic poems celebrate forty amazing animals, birds and plants and their beautiful names.  Readers are invited to watch out for bossy Beetroot, be enchanted by a Bluebell witch’s thimble and spot a dive-bombing Lark or a cute Great-Crested Newt.
 
Adder, Bluebell, Lobster:  Wild Poems is published on August 4 by Otter-Barry Books, an exciting new children’s imprint aiming to make a difference.  It is illustrated by Paul Bommer, an illustrator, printmaker and graphic designer who worked with Chrissie on her book The Humpback’s Wail.

​#naturewords

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.

With the lengthening days, and this #wierdwinter of record warmth, birdsong is in the air.

Strange times.  Especially today:  I happened to be reading about Paul Klee's (1879-1940) famous fantasy birdsong machine when a message popped up on Facebook alerting me to a real twittering machine.  

Klee's painting of 1922 was the inspiration for Harrison Birtwistle's Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum (‘The Perpetual Song of Mechanical Arcady’).  Klee was a professional-standard violinist and often used musical terms and ideas to explain his work.  Birtwistle has often spoken of Klee's juxtaposing of blocks of colour as a huge influence. Another thing they have in common is an interest in nature.  Klee taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931, witnessing the continual infighting between the giant figures of modernism.  By contrast, “in an age of the colossus, Klee falls in love with a green leaf, a star, a butterfly’s wing." The artist Hugo Ball observed.  "I know of no man more in touch with his inspiration than Paul Klee.”

The real Twittering Machine below was made by Bontems of Paris, famous manufacturers of bird automata.