Little tussocks of white wool decorate the grass, sparkling with dew, and the sky is a perfect, unbroken blue. The sheep have been moved, leaving cropped grass that is easy to walk on, and as I near the brow of the hill I feel something lighten in me.
I’ve been flattened by an irritating cough and residual tiredness, but there comes a point when sitting indoors will no longer do. Today I need natural light and to see the unfurling signs of spring: the catkins tickling the air, the fresh spiked stalks of teasels and the emerging green of bluebells.
Not all heralds of springtime are so polite. Just feet from me, a skylark whips up from the ground. Helicopter-straight; up and up and up. And all the way he goes, that reedy, complex tune spilling out around me. This is not an unfurling, it’s a wham bam thank you mam public service announcement. “Listen to me, it’s time, it’s time.”
Now, I know I’m not the target audience, but to me the song of the skylark, much celebrated in poetry and music, is scratchy, persistent and a bit tinny. But it is undeniably impressive: orchestral, convoluted and immense in volume and stamina. It’s a mating-time display of fitness; I’ve seen a skylark sing from high for 30 minutes without a pause.
This small, mottled brown bird, cryptically camouflaged and unseen for much of the year, is on the UK’s red list as a species of the highest conservation concern. Practices such as year-round cropping leave no suitable bare patches for these ground-nesting birds. Despite farmers leaving small fallow plots, numbers have continued to decline.
Most of us are content to listen from below, the sound getting quieter as the lark ascends. Not my dad, he loves to record the sounds of nature and decided that he could get a better recording if he sent his retro Sony up 100 metres, suspended below a meteorological balloon. The first couple of times, the recorder was ignored. The third, a male skylark did not stand for an imposter in its territory and sang right at the microphone, as well as attacking it.
The skylark takes us up with him. It’s springtime; we’re skywards and singing all the way.
