A shaft of morning sun broke through the dense conifers on my steep bank and lit up a patch of bluebells, not yet flowering, as I made my way down to the stream edge to fill up my watering can. Having emptied it over some broad bean seedlings in the garden, I returned to re-fill. The ray of light had already moved along to illuminate an otherwise unremarkable pile of dead branches in the undergrowth. The sky was a brilliant blue above. Birdsong filled the air. The water was icy cold. It wasn't yet 8am and the day ahead was full of promise.
I went to check how my tadpoles were doing. I first found the frogspawn two or three weeks ago bobbing around in a large puddle that forms whenever it rains hard, and have been monitoring their evolution ever since. The spawn has released hundreds of the wriggling young things and they are now each a couple of centimetres long. Last week's heavy rainfall had enlarged their home but in the subsequent dryness it has shrunk again leaving dozens stranded in outlying pockets of water. As my parents were visiting I gave my mother the task of topping it up with the watering can. The cold stream water bursting in on their warm puddle must have been an unprecedented shock in their young froggy lives but should also give them an extra lease of life. I wonder when they'll grow legs and hop on out of there so I can stop worrying about them.
A Red Kite drifted into view from over my neighbour's tall firs, low enough to make out the patterns on the underside of its huge wings. It soared slowly overhead as it scoured my land for any animal corpses to pick at. This beautiful bird eats carrion by preference. It saw nothing but picked-clean pheasant bones scattered here, and disappeared off west. Later the same trajectory was followed, almost at the same altitude, by a couple of fighter jets that roared past one after the other down the valley, wings tipped almost at 90 degrees, leaving the pheasants squawking indignantly.
That night over the same neighbouring fir trees, a full Moon rose up through them whilst to the west the black silhouette of the hills gradually merged with the gathering gloom. The planet Mars hung above the white disc and Jupiter glowed high up in the southern sky. With no clouds around the Moon lit everything up, no need for torches. It was an other-world, a ghostly version of my garden, complete with spectral polytunnel and greenhouse, that we inhabited for a while. Peering through the telescope, first half-blinded by the brilliant Moon, we then focused on the planets with more success and picked out three of Jupiter's moons, the fourth (of the big four) presumably obscured by the planet itself.
The next day, a walk in the steep hills that line the Dyfi valley. Everything baked in the surprising April heat, including the bloody remains of a lamb that the Red Kites hadn't finished with yet. Chaffinches, blue-tits, lapwings, flitted in the trees about us. A birch tree clung to the edge of a slate escarpment next to the path, its exposed roots clearly following fissures in the rock to the soil three metres below. We could look down on the fighter jets apparently skirting the valley floor at supersonic speed. Butterflies of varying hues perched on nearby twigs not quite long enough for photographs to be taken. A lamb with one black eye patch gazed our way whilst performing a yoga stance with its hind legs pushed out in a stretch, held for several seconds, before relaxing and nonchalantly wandering back to its mum.
Spring is happening and I am in the middle of it. There's nowhere else I'd rather be right now.
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