An ode to winter

The silence, subtle beauty and certainties of a British winter combine to make it a breathtaking season of cold and cosiness, says 

- Patrick Galbraith

IT'S possible to feel cheated by I spring. It's supposed to be when everything begins again; there are lambs in the fields, snowdrops in the woods and goslings are marched up and down the riverbank by their dutiful parents. However, it isn't a time of abundance in the way that autumn is. In late September, everything comes to a rich culmination: the last of the grain is brought in, salmon run up the rivers to spawn, squirrels scamper madly around London parks and busily bury nuts. For many, the pleasurable business of pickling begins. All creatures great and small know that the weather is on the turn and we've got to make the most of Nature's bounty.

And then comes that late-autumn calm. Everything is done and a pall of tranquillity is cast over Britain in a way that doesn't happen at any other time of year. All of a sudden, holidaymakers empty out of the country's most beautiful places and are replaced by wintering birds. Great flocks of pink-footed geese, several thousand strong, fly down the eastern seaboard, where they will spend our coldest months feeding on sugar-beet tops and stubble fields by day before drifting out onto the mud when evening comes. Denys Watkins-Pitchford ('BB'), the great wildfowler and author, called pink-footed geese the 'hounds of heaven'. I witnessed a conversation the other day between two contemporary nature writers about whether, if BB was alive today, he would have been keen on shooting. These sorts of propositions can be irritating-it's as if sensitive modern authors wish to erase parts of writers of old and then claim the etiolated version for themselves. I suspect BB would still love wildfowling if he were around now.