Spring

I perch in front of my computer, listlessly tapping away at the keyboard. A movement through the window catches my eye and I jump up and rush through our entry, stumbling over discarded boots and shoes, out through the front door, craning my neck to follow the V of grey geese on its way northwards up Oslofjord. There must be a hundred in this flock. They make surprisingly fast progress for such ungainly birds, the line rippling as stragglers shift position to take the lead. I smile as their belligerent honking drifts down to me through the morning haze; perhaps they are squabbling over their next rest stop on the grassy shoreline up the coast. They still have a thousand miles to go before they reach their summer breeding grounds in the high Arctic and most likely they’re exhausted and starving after their marathon flight across the North Sea. My heart swells with joy at this first sign of spring and I ponder the unerring ability of these geese to find their way home.

The geese are early this year, the snow still blanketing the fields after this long, freezing, grey winter. But a few tiny snowdrops peak out from under our garden hedge and soon it will be time to hose down the terrace and bring out the garden furniture. The sun has almost emerged through the diaphanous clouds. I pull on a quilted jacket and my sheepskin boots and trudge down the steep road, crunchy with grit, a reminder of spinning tyres on icy winter mornings. The path at the bottom of the road runs through the woods, just a dozen feet from the water’s edge. The fir trees tower above me, drab and thoughtful and still in their winter costume, but the twigs of the silver birches have the reddish tinge of rising sap, the harbinger of the delicate luminous-green leaves of spring. It won’t be long now.

I step gingerly through ankle-deep piles of slushy snow and navigate the puddles, dark with humus. The forest floor is littered with dull, brown, autumnal leaves and pine needles, broken twigs and bleached grass flattened by snow and rain. But here and there, hopeful shades of green: patches of new grass and tiny, trifoliate, wild strawberry leaves. I marvel at the diversity of mosses, their tiny, delicate stems and leaves. The other day, I read in Wikipedia that there are over 12,000 species. Not only that, but moss fossils have been found in Antarctica, in Permian rocks, 300 million years old. These insignificant, diminutive plants have survived burial under ice sheets and extreme heat. They are the first to take root on dark, hostile, rugged lava slopes after a volcanic eruption.

The path emerges from the woods, past the wild cherry trees and dog rose bushes and out onto the narrow sand spit at the end of the peninsula. Black and white oystercatchers with startling orange bills lift off at my approach and skim the surface of the water with millimetre precision. There are banks of mussels here, easy pickings at low tide. I’ve collected them myself in a bucket of sea water, steaming the blue-black shells with lemon and garlic the following day and serving them with baguettes and tall glasses of chilled white wine.

I follow the narrow beach around the spit, my boots crunching the coarse sand and empty mussel shells. It’s quiet but for the occasional drone of a motor boat and the distant twittering of the finches in the woods. Around the corner, the path rises and narrows, disappearing into the woods once again. I step carefully over the knobbly pine-tree roots and skirt the jagged rocks. A pine branch, ripped off in a winter storm, lies splintered across the path and just beyond, a crow’s nest the size of a bread basket. The nest is last year’s, but still perfect, a miracle of woven birch twigs, pine needles, moss and string. Soggy greyish-white down lines the nest; perhaps from last year’s hatchlings. Coastal peoples have harvested eiderdown from birds’ nests, not unlike this one, since Viking times. Eider ducks pair for life, the male a handsome black and white bird, the female a warm brown, and they return to the same nesting site on the rocky shoreline, year after year. Man and bird work together in an elegant dance of mutual respect; the farmer providing a sheltered, dried seaweed nest and protection from greedy gulls and marauding mink, the female eider duck plucking the fluffy grey-white down from her own breast to line her nest. When the ducklings hatch and mature and the eiders fly south to their winter feeding grounds, the farmers carefully harvest the soft down. The down from seventy nests fills a quilt, a quilt that, these days, will sell for three thousand pounds on Oxford Street.

I carefully lift the crow’s nest and settle it on a mossy ledge away from the path: it would be a shame to see this work of art kicked and trampled by blundering feet. Further along, the rocky outcrops, smoothed by wind and water and dappled with grey-green and ochre lichen, slope gently into the dark waters of the fjord. It’s more difficult to pass here; the rocks are slippery and the snow is deeper. So I turn to go home. The oystercatchers are goose-stepping at the water’s edge now, so I skirt the beach to avoid disturbing them and head back along the path through the woods.

I feel lighter now, relieved that the long winter is over with the first blush of spring. The promise of breakfast on the terrace overlooking the water, picnics in the cool, dank forests in the hills and warm, lazy summer evenings. I find the inexorable progression of the seasons immensely comforting; proof that, for all our arrogant attempts to control and organise the environment around us, we will, in the end, never be able to stifle the breathtaking exuberance of nature.

At times I despair: at the way many of us choose to isolate ourselves from the natural world; at executives in their chrome and glass towers in Singapore, New York and Beijing blindly trading vast tracts of wilderness, teeming with life, in order to plant sterile rows of soya beans for the sake of profit; at the devastation caused by war, by landmines, by cluster bombs, by unthinkable weapons; at the ravaging of our natural resources by swarms of starving refugees in Congo and Darfur. But I console myself that through the aeons, life on our planet has survived cataclysmic volcanic eruptions the intensity of a million atomic bombs, producing limitless barren lava plateaus, suffocating volcanic ash that plunged the planet into darkness for years on end and soaring temperatures on land and in the sea. Of course, most land and marine species perished then, but life eventually regenerated, diversifying to fill new ecological niches and to create the luxuriant array of plants and animals surrounding us today. Surely life on Earth will triumph over the devastation caused by Man. Our species may not survive, but other life forms will take our place as caretakers of the planet, and hopefully do a better job.

A ray of sunshine pierces the cloud cover, illuminating the gloomy undergrowth. A pair of mallards, the male’s turquoise, white and chocolate feathers glossy in the sunlight, rummage in the damp briars in search of tasty slugs and snails. Soon we’ll be able to watch half a dozen fluffy tortoiseshell ducklings trailing their sleek mother out for morning swimming lessons. Spring is here!