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.

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.
​
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.

This 1995 documentary was recently posted on YouTube.  It reminds us that the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) was a keen birdwatcher.  He admits to being more in tune with nature than with humans, and as the programme reveals, his postings as an Anglican vicar included the Dovey Estuary and the Lleyn peninsula, chosen for their ornithological importance.

"I looked for God on Mount Olympus, but all I saw was a crested tit" he said.