I came looking for the Willow Warbler

My first Day at Pudsham Meadows Early morning 4th April. Sunny, a brisk south-east wind.

‘I’d come looking for the willow-warbler. The tiny bird with the yellow eye band and the slender olive green body that migrates thousands of miles to Dartmoor every April from its wintering ground in Africa. I sat under the willows in ‘Sylvia’s Meadow’*. I settled myself down and watched and waited. Children look for secret places and for me it was the waste wilderness at the end of our city street then the apricot orchard at the end of a dirt track where my father built a small house in the bush in Australia. Now I had found another. There was little to see, just green shoots pushing up out of winter’s leaves, the grey twisted torques of the sedge, then a swallow flew and  a willow-warbler sang and another and another-that beautiful lilt and lifting melody. I couldn’t see much life of the meadow, Pudsham is high on Dartmoor and Spring comes late here, but I could hear it, I could feel it. The birds that sang around me knew the meadow much better than me... And I began to write.

Sure enough as the seasons came and went Nature rose like an Anglo-Saxon hoard of treasure out of the ploughed furrows. Wild grasses wove a thick living tapestry, herbs and orchids, butterflies, beetles showed themselves. At the beginning I didn’t comprehend the sheer diversity, the colour, the sensory joy that summer in the meadows would bring. But the birds that sang around me knew the meadow much better than me... 

Although I cannot see it the willow warbler and chaffinch know.

The willow-warbler plays in the coming season, the folk singers of the hedge, The breeze transforms the twigs to trees and tender willow leaves. The alder, the willow and the birch along the hedge will follow after, young and small the withered ash once tall. There goes the pied woodpecker to her nest among the birch trees, following her mate, and the willow warbler singing all the time with the chiff-chaff, that merry first bringer of Spring. The woodpecker swoops low, turns her head to see what I am, a branch, a tree, a stone? Devil’s-Bit Scabious just shows her leaves, quills of sedge doodle on the wind. I imagine Small Copper crysalids snuggled deep in their silk nooks and the caterpillars of Common Blue huddled down in leaf litter.  

On this early Spring morning life here is nascent and I throw my imagination into the field. A swallow swoops low over the gold ricks of sedge-the harvest of last summer's wind and rain, shining tuft on tuft, flaming across the meadow, each a crucible of life. I move across- a giant in the field in a haze of golden sedge that lulls the swallow from the south who swoops low taking account of her territory, how far the season has advanced how fine her world is. One by one jewels  begin to unearth like a treasure hoard from the sun’s plough: butterfly, moth and beetles eggs from raised emerald , ivory, stippled, reticulated tiny forms from the clasp of winters leaves. The warbler and swallow-all know the meadow and the feast to come. Each creature keeps the world in balance, preserves these meadows’ beauty. 

7.15 A willow-warbler swoops before me beneath the willow where I am perched and sings.  Three or four males hotly contest the ground. Earliest arrivals sing loudest. Poetic battles rage around me. The news is it's been a week for long-distance travel, for gentle western tail-winds, ocean-going breezes. ‘This is our place, where we feel safe, these the halls, our willow walls’, the warblers sing in the willow carr stretching westwards beyond the meadow. The strong east wind bursts buds on every: tree, oak, sloe, silver birch and green willow, reveals a feast of moth grub or egg, crysalid and pupa. 

8.15 First bumble bee queen, rises into the lantern-like flowers of the  goat willow. A crack willow catkin flames out, then another and another, censing the air, I brush one with my hand, sherbet lemon dust between my fingers. Creak of a moorhen or grebe in the meadow edge. Or is it the creak of the gate- latch caught by the swell of the breeze? Each tree puts out its bunting of leaf and blossom fast now as the sun warms us. The trees are electric! Each electron and blossom blazing!, singing!, creating shapes, auxins patter the air, restore the familiar world of Spring. I join in the chorus of birds and sing a folk song, ‘The Lark in the Morning’.

9.33 A magpie squawks at bicyclists cycling up the lane,  I collect a crimson kit-kat wrapper moored on the verge. Blackbirds rehearse their warm contraltos and I know I am in Springtime in England.

11.52 Peacock butterfly swoops mid-meadow on a single dandelion flower, sips then wings westwards to Widecombe. Two willow-warblers chant canticles, confirm creed and territory, health and fitness for the task that lies ahead; Life! To Live! and set the brood for this season's nestlings. Greater Butterfly Orchid, Southern Marsh Orchid, Heath Spotted, Meadow Grass-hopper, Eyebright, Yellow Rattle, Knapweed, Self-heal,  Devil's Bit Scabious, Bird's Foot Trefoil,  Common Blue butterfly, Meadow Brown, Small Copper, Large Skipper, Twayblade, I imagine, feel, touch them with my unseen seventh sense.

* Sylvia’s Field is named after Sylvia Sayers, passionate campaigner and CEO of Dartmoor Preservation Society who saved many areas of Dartmoor from environmental neglect and destruction.