Is Spring Arriving Earlier?

As unseasonal weather and wildlife sightings make headlines, pete dommett asks what on earth is happening to the great british spring?

- Pete Dommett

They’re back! I’ve been searching the scruffy foreshore, just a few minutes’ walk from home, since the beginning of the month. And today, I find one at last. Bobbing up and down on a twisted wishbone of driftwood – an immaculate male, airbrushed in Air Force blue with an apricot breast and bandit-black eye-mask. When I take a step too close, he flits off to the rocks, showing me a pure white bottom that confirms his identity. It’s a wheatear, fresh from a winter spent in Africa, and for me, with its return comes the arrival of spring.

We all have our own favourite signs of this loveliest of seasons, eagerly anticipated since the turn of the year. For some, it will be crocuses or daffodils bravely pushing their hard, green shoots through the frozen soil in the park, for others it will be frog spawn suddenly appearing in a garden pond. It might be the familiar (but almost forgotten) two-note chime of a chiffchaff, groups of hares tearing round a field, a lemon-yellow brimstone butterfly spotted from the car as it flickers along a hedgerow, or the shadowy shapes of pipistrelle bats foraging for insects around a streetlight. All signs that point to the fact that spring has surely sprung.

Some people diligently note the date of these events in a dedicated notebook or calendar. I have to confess that my own records of the first wheatear of the year (and the date I first see a swallow, or, if I’m lucky, hear a cuckoo) are embarrassingly erratic, though a scribbled entry in last year’s diary tells me that it was nearly a fortnight later before I spotted one. But have wheatears really returned earlier this year – and, if so, what does that tell us about spring?