There is joy

May started with greenflies. 

The insects made such gentle contact with my face and neck, the sensation was not unlike rain, and I spent the start of my shift picking them out of my hair and off my uniform. Mum was excited; the front of her car was splattered with wings and guts. A friend, who’d been working outside, had gone to wipe what they assumed to be sweat off the top of their head only to realise instead they’d just squished hundreds of tiny bodies onto their scalp. With the insect explosion, came drought. Soil peeling back from the sides of our plant pots. Shrubs in the front garden, brown and shrinking. 

I’ve heard older relatives describe their childhood walking along roadside verges, disturbing dozens of common blue butterflies from the wildflowers, and watching with disinterest as they lifted like dazzling shards of pottery, up over the dark hedgerow. Seeing something like that would leave me tingling for weeks. I thought of shifting baseline syndrome. How people forget, little by little, and what’s understood to be normal changes imperceptibly over time. I saw one blue butterfly last year. There’s supposed to be nine different species in the UK.

I lathered factor 50 on my face and neck. The path smelled like a sunbaked balcony on holiday. Catkins writhed on the steps down to the lake, spiny and red like the enormous larvae of some bizarre, tropical insect. You have to come down this way to spot Mrs Swan when she’s putting her nest together. You have to get your shoes muddy. The sheltered path there never dries and is fetid with stagnant water. Mosquitoes and midges. When I couldn’t see her white shape hunkered down among the reeds I knew it had already happened. 

I was sad to have missed their short migration to the top lake, parents and cygnets in single file up the cycle path, like an illustration from a Beatrix Potter story. In previous years, they had to contend with another swan family, and their relocation to the top lake often came to feathery blows. The top lake is more exposed, but also gets more foot traffic and thus more humans offering food. When the cygnets are bigger they’ll take the bread and biscuits pretty much straight from your hand, but for now, the parents escort their darlings elegantly about the water’s edge. Debutants at their first society ball.

It’s always a good day when the swans come to the top lake, regardless of weather. This year, like the last, they’ve got eight perfect silver cygnets, curious as kittens. When the swans come up, passersby are more inclined to look each other in the eye. People will stop to take photos to send to their friends. Adults with young children will crouch to their level and point. “Look, what’s that? See the babies?” There is thrill in the air, a satisfaction with things being as they should, with life being good.

I came one evening and noticed Mr Swan making a kind of coughing, gagging movement with his neck. A couple of years ago I found a swan whose beak was gagged by a red plastic ring from a bottle top. The poor thing couldn’t move its tongue or close its beak, making feeding and preening impossible. Knowing how much litter gets into the lake, I feared the worst again. 

I coaxed the family closer by tossing food into the water, and while Mrs Swan showed the cygnets how they should swallow the biscuits with a gulp of lake, I got a closer look. My stomach dropped. It was a fishing line, and it appeared to be caught both in Mr Swan’s beak and around his leg, held awkwardly out of the water. I thought foolishly for a second that if I could only get hold of the line and pull, I might be able to help. But what if there was a hook at the end of the line? And what if the hook was snagged in Mr Swan’s throat? Anyway, I couldn’t get close to him. He wasn’t coming to the edge, he was letting his family feed and keeping watch for danger.

I took pictures and sent them off to Blyth Wildlife Rescue. Soon enough they confirmed a volunteer from a local rescue would be coming to investigate. I had to be at work within the hour. I could only hope that Mr Swan wouldn’t become further injured, or get the wire caught on something with his head below the water, say, on an abandoned shopping trolley, and struggle to free himself, and drown. 

In Spring, every day is a new drama. Every living thing seems to be fighting for space, for food, for resources. Our neighbours spent upwards of £70 on a sonic deterrent to dissuade gulls from nesting on their roof again this year. We discovered the small black box hanging from a branch that happens to extend over the fence into their garden. We were disturbed by its persistent, whining pulse every time we opened the back door. It seemed a deliberate affront that they’d hung it from our tree. Are they aware it is an offence to disturb a nesting bird? That Herring Gulls are on the Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern? What resource had they been trying to protect with this device? Their own peace and quiet?

Regardless, it hasn’t worked. The stubborn gulls have made their nest in the crook of the chimney shaft and the crows agitate them daily. I sympathised with my neighbour over the wasted money but felt it best not to mention how much I delight in seeing the speckled chicks once hatched, waddling precariously across the tiles as the parents yell with triumph.

Despite all this, when I can catch my breath, I notice there is joy. 

Even when it seems like it won’t happen, like it’s too late in the year, we’ve lost them for good… the swifts return. I don’t know where they are nesting – in someone’s rotting eaves? in specialised Swift Bricks? – but I hope they’re safe and warm. There’s plenty of insects to be feeding on. 

I was delighted to find a second orchid in our wildflower lawn, which we have left unmowed for the fifth year running. A small path appeared in the long grass, on which I spotted a dark nugget of scat. I imagined a hedgehog nesting in the old wood pile at the back of the garden, her soft pink hoglets squeaking in the dark. 

I spent some more time in Northumberland on the West Chevington moors. While surveying for pollinators, we stepped too close to the rim of the pond and disturbed a marsh harrier. The world could not make a sound as the raptor rose up from its hidden nest in the reeds. The clear sky burned my eyes. Later the volunteer leader asked us for specifics, colour of the underwing, was it male or female etc. All that remained in my head besides the awe was: big. 

There were some birthdays also. A baby shower on a canal boat. In a bar I’d never been to, I saw old friends and made new ones. We stayed outside in the beer garden until dusk and bats circled above us, lifted by our laughter. Finally, it rained.