06:30 – Martin woke from a good night’s sleep and sensed something different, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The most obvious thing was that the sky wasn’t the deep black of a winter morning, but it was starting to get light already. 06:30? When did this start to happen? Then the dawning recognition…bird song. That was it; robins, blackbirds, chaffinches, mistle thrushes and song thrushes – all belting out their very own ballads as they tried to woo the ladies. As daylight took hold, the scene around the feeding station wasn’t quite how it has been recently. The blackbirds were fighting instead of feeding, our resident collared doves were nibbling each other instead of the seed that we provide for them – the long-tailed tits were feeding, but just the two of them instead of the dozen or so that usually encapsulate the feeders in a heaving ball of pink fluff.
As we headed up the coast, the warm sunshine broke through the fluffy white clouds that were scudding across the sky, propelled by a wind that was chill enough to remind us that it is still the winter. A sprinkling of snowdrops decorated the roadside verges, another sign of new life after the heavy snow of recent weeks. And then, after a very productive and enjoyable photographic session near Bamburgh, on the journey home we passed fields of very small lambs. Does any creature revel in new life as much as these little balls of white wool as they dash headlong around the fields?