Love is in the Air

March 5th

Small flocks of Yellowhammer in the bushes

Now I know that Spring will come again,

Perhaps tomorrow:

Edward Thomas, March

We walk in the Hertfordshire countryside, near our home. The Lea Valley, through Wheathampstead; across the fields and through the woods to Ayot St Lawrence; the Brocket estate near Lemsford; Heartwood Forest, between our home and Sandridge; the Ver valley near Redbournbury Mill, and just across the common land between us and St Albans.

Rooks, moving their parliament

In winter, when the days are short and the paths are wet, it is not so easy to spend time exploring comfortably, but when the days begin to lengthen we can venture further, longer.  It is gentle countryside, with no bare mountains, nor wild forests. The creatures we see are familiar ones - this is not the land of great deer or awesome predators - but, despite the intensity of human activity and the pressure of roads and buildings, there are wild things around.

Spring is such a good time of year. Signs of life abound.  Buds, and shoots, the tender green leaves of bluebells appearing amongst the leaf litter of the woods, the unfolding of the early blossoms:

As you look across the fields, green with early wheat, the hedgerows and woods appear tinged with colour. What was spare and twiggy is now fuzzy and here there's a touch of yellow, there a copper hue.  But the lack of leaves allows us to see more, to watch the mixed flocks of tits fluttering through the hazel and birch.

Long-tailed tit

The chaffinches, so quiet through the winter, are tuning up, and it seems that every oak or ash is now supporting that bright interrogative song.

By the river Lea I see a kingfisher flash past, the brilliant cobalt wings whirring upstream too quick for my focus.  But less shy are the Grey Wagtails, bobbing and flitting just above the water:

And the normally shy Wren pauses for me to take a portrait, without the usual scolding Tchik! Tchik! or its trilling warning.

Today, near the railway line through Heartwood Forest, I catch sight of two Buzzards.  At first I think they may just be circling in their usual hunting patterns, but I don't hear them mewing, and as I watch I see they are more engaged with each other than with what's on the ground.  

I, I'm willing and able

So I throw my cards on your table

See, I want to love ya, I want to love and treat ya

love and treat ya right

Bob Marley - Is This Love

Of course it is not all about love....  Though the Jackdaws that flap over my street and frequent the chimney pots and TV aerials of my neighbours tend to fly in til-death-do-they-part pairs, something has disturbed the pattern of this flock....

And, true enough, speeding across the sky in hungry flight, is a Sparrowhawk.

In the meantime the thrushes are busy feeding up for the breeding season.  On pastures near Sandridge the other day I counted thirty Redwing and two Fieldfares, though it was a dim drizzly day and I was without binoculars, so it could have been about thirty mixed Redwing and Fieldfare. What I do know is that this is a bold Mistle Thrush:

And who doesn't long for the evening song of the Blackbird, as opposed to the chattering alarm call?

I love the little pond to mark at spring

When frogs and toads are croaking round its brink

When blackbirds yellow bills gin first to sing

John Clare

And then there's homebuilding.  Storm Doris did the birds a favour, perhaps, in loosening twigs and spilling building material for all to plunder.  Along the Lea the other evening I was surprised by a Red Kite flying low past me and away, clutching a hefty rafter in its talons.... 

While displaying mastery of the air the bird simultaneously stripped some unwanted addition from the wood, just caught here discarded to the top right of the picture....

Then, follow this sequence.  The stick is in the feet.....

Now it's in the beak....

And now it's back in the feet....

I reckon that's worth at least six points on the licence!

Though I'm not sure I would have the nerve to pull this one over....

Anyway, it's all part of the business of Spring, along with Amanda's 63rd birthday!  Here's a bunch of flowers for you dear.....

All token spring and every day

Green and more green hedges and close

And every where appears

Still tis but March

But still that March is Spring

John Clare - Spring

Or, as John Paul Young sang in 1978:

Love is in the air everywhere I look around

Love is in the air every sight and every sound

Heartwood Forest

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist," not long after bludgeoning Nancy to death with his pistol and club in the depths of Spitalfields, Bill Sikes slipped out of his house and walked rapidly away, followed by his faithful dog, Bull's-eye.  He  went through Islington, up Highgate Hill, across Hampstead Heath and wandered, wandered, wandered until he ended up in Hatfield.  He stopped for refreshment in a pub, but a travelling salesman offered to clean the spot off his hat.  In horror, as the spot was Nancy's blood, Sikes fled the pub and eventually found shelter for the night in a shed on a heath.  The next day, having heard that the scouts were out to find him, he returned to London to meet his death at Jacob's Island.

It may be that his route took him from Hatfield through the Forest, but it is just as possible that he wandered west and slept that night on the hill above Sandridge, just outside St Albans, sheltered by woods that even then were ancient.

As I walk up the muddy track to Heartwood Forest, the trees spookily shrouded in mist, I remember Bill, and Nancy, and Dickens, their Victorian creator, who himself loved to walk distances through the night.  It is 'only' twenty-five miles from here to the centre of London, but where once the villages of Hampstead and Highgate were healthy rural retreats from the smoke and smells of the city, it is now almost continuously built up from the Thames to beyond the M25, and over two million people live within fifteen miles of Heartwood forest.  It is quite something to imagine the countryside stretching in towards the city, to think of walking from here in to the centre down muddy lanes and along leafy paths.

Sikes wouldn't have found much rest here now.  The tracks are churned to mud after the recent rains by innumerable dog walkers, runners, cyclists, horse-riders.  It is a much publicised and exciting project, with plans (which began to take shape in 2008) to plant 600,000 new trees on 858 acres of land before 2020.  It is England's largest new area of broad leaved woodland and is already drawing large numbers of visitors who appreciate the open air and like to develop their links with nature.  

For me the best parts are the relatively small parcels of ancient woodland, with names such as Wells and Pudler's Wood.  Here the trees have existed continuously for at least 400 years, self seeding and serving the human factor in a balanced way.  The ecological communities, dependent on the growth of new trees and the decay of old wood, aided by a lack of disturbance, are of great value and consititute natural heirlooms of wildlife for all to admire and enjoy.  

There are hornbeam which used to be coppiced, oak, beech, and other native broad-leaved species.  These woods, totalling some 45 acres, are home to a wide variety of natural species, from yellow archangels to barn owls, bluebells to long-tailed tits.  I am not sure what some of the creatures, previously used to relative peace, make of the gangs of children who build stick houses, or the dogs which charge around on the heels of their jogging masters or mistresses, but life seems to be going on, and my guess is that it will get better as the tiny saplings grow and the woods join up.

At present, there is a lot of open space; in the future there will be wild-flower meadows with corn-cockles and poppies where the soil is thin on the slopes of the chalk, but the hills are crowned with clay and flinty soil, and the trees will like it here.  It is still a developing site, and the stirring of the soil has given life to seeds that might have otherwise lain dormant.

For me it is at its best in the mists and drizzle as it has a muted beauty then, the air pungent with the scent of fungi and leaf mould, and there are less likely to be quite so many children playing, but there is room for all and on a bright day the birds, such as linnets and yellow hammers are easier to see.

I count myself privileged, as it is only half an hour's walk from my home, and I can take quiet moments to sit on a tree stump and think, watched by the woven willow wildlife that don't seem to mind my presence.  I won't see the mature forest, but, like Bill Sikes, my spirit may wander here for some time to come. 

 "Here, Bull's-eye!
Do you hear me call?  Come here!"

http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/en/our-woods/pages/wood-details.aspx?wood=5622#.UPA0uSe6cTY