Halcyon Days

                                                                                                                                                    Leveret photographed by Jo Sinclair

Daffodil flutterbys emerged with the warm winds on Sunday and led me a merry dance. I was seduced by spring which this year has been so brutal and petrified. My head was turned at every step. Nature was going into overdrive. Utterly distracting.

I've returned to my childhood habit of trespassing, crawling through the undergrowth, peering into the depths of ponds. The landscape is full-throated. The woods ring with chiffchaffs and yaffles. The days are spread out like a treasure trail, beckoning me to stay outside. Sunday's brimstone butterflies were the start. Daffodil - or butter yellow - brimstones (said to have inspired the name 'butterfly') are one of Britain's five hibernating butterflies. We usually greet them if we get one or two halcycon days in February. One or two had been on the wing this year but on Sunday they appeared en masse all over the region. Two more hibernators were sunning their wings: I stared at the tatty symmetry of a comma, and fell into step with  a small tortoiseshell.

A leveret took me by surprise. Wedged into an excavation dug by rabbits or dogs beneath a chainlink fence, the baby hare looked too big to be under its mother's care, but too young to have much of a clue. I photographed it just two feet away from me, then it sprang into action and was off. Good. The interference instinct was threatening; I was thinking it might be injured or ailing and, being beside a well-trodden footpath trapped against a fence, bound to end up in the jaws of a dog. A human interference story haunts me a little to this day. I found a leveret in an orchard when I was a little girl six or seven years old. Another girl was present. She was French. In vain I tried to explain to her that it was safe in its 'form' and that its mother had not abandoned it, but I have a hazy memory of finding that she had captured it. She showed it to me. The wild creature was in a shoebox, its mouth wet with squirts of cow's milk.

Hares, creatures of much myth and folklore, are so uncommon now. The only place I've seen a number of them this year is the single, magical convergence point I returned to on Saturday where I counted twenty near the ancient monument but gave up again with the poor visibility of wind and rain.

The Greek myth that put the phrase 'halcyon days' into common use tells of a kingfisher building a floating nest on the sea. While the bird broods its eggs there will be a calm sea with no wind for fourteen days. Courting kingfishers have been whistling up and down the river like halcyon torpedoes. Usually very shy, they can become delightfully conspicuous while billing and cooing, playing kiss chase or, well, fighting invaders to death. But the waters weren't calm enough for a clutch of eggs yesterday. I heard a bell-like trilling I didn't recognise. The noise seemed to come from high up in the trees. Eventually I saw two kingfishers flying around. They were distressed. The trilling continued for the half-hour period I watched them. The birds joined some other species in mobbing something on the other side of the river. Scolding birds can be a rare opportunity to observe species up close; they become so furious and strident they have eyes only for the stoat or cat or owl that they are making such a commotion about. It always reminds me of the words in the nursery rhyme 'all the birds of the air'. I didn't see what all the fuss was about yesterday. It remains a mystery.