No rain for 10 days and a steady light breeze from the north-east had put a brake on spring. Stretches of path on Ramsley Moor, commonly shin deep with mud at this time of year, were hardened and dry. Frost at night had checked April’s unruly, joyful burst of growth; the trees seemed paused somehow. Tell that to the birds, though. They weren’t waiting. Approaching Fox Lane across the moor, I was suddenly bathed in the song of curlews overhead, angling down towards the heather on sharp wings strung tight against the cooling air of dusk. A curlew’s looping liquid bubble of song has a sweet sadness ordinarily, but in April there’s something urgent about it, a hardening edge of excitement, of business to be done.
Quickly now, the air filled with noise. From scrub along the soggy border of a disused reservoir came the tumbling calls of three or four willow warblers, dropping down their octave and returning me gently to earth, a steady warm rain of sound threaded with the insistent tin-eared two-tone piping of another warbler, the chiffchaff, unseen in a gnarled stand of pines to my left. A little way off I could hear the rounder, brighter music of a blackbird, but abbreviated into bursts of melody, like a blackbird being sampled. Was that a ring ouzel? I hoped so.
Sometimes all you can do, all you should do, is lie down in the heather and let the present take you in, so that’s what I did, despite the fading light and the faint northerly tugging at the upper branches of the trees. Washed with song, I followed the progress of a kestrel quartering Leash Fen on the far side of the road. Despite the breeze, it still needed to work hard as it stopped periodically at points on a grid visible only to itself, to pin itself to the sky, head stilled, indifferent or oblivious to the soundscape around it, and everything else too, except the precise spot on the ground below caught in its motionless eye. And then a swallow darted past and angled away, my first of the year, and I struggled to my feet.
