Walk on wild side puts spring in step

THE weather has been so sunny in the week since we’ve arrived back from the Canary Islands that we could top up our suntans, had we nothing else to do.

However, I find it most satisfying to be busy and wouldn’t know how to spend my time if I couldn’t find something worthwhile turning to. Maybe that’s suspect, and I should get my head examined — other folk might say, if you’re looking for something to turn to turn the other side of your face to the sun. But it keeps me happy. And now that I’ve finished the various books I was lucky enough to be asked to write in 2010 and 2011, I am gloriously free to footer about on various projects which some might call, quite justifiably, ‘pastimes’.

Walking is one of them. Today, it was down through the woods and along the cliffs over the sea. My wife had said the woods smelled of garlic, so I thought I’d go and see if the ramsons were in bloom. Not yet, but some of the heads will open shortly. Meanwhile, they look like the chrysalis of various butterflies and, especially, of cinnabar moths, parchment-like envelopes one finds attached to tall grass stems later in the year.

However, there were mats of wood anemones in flower on the dappled forest floor, amongst the ground ivy and the million clumps of bluebell leaves which haven’t yet put up flowers but shortly will. I also came across some beautiful wood-sorrel in bloom, with delicate white flowers, not unlike those of the anemones, only much smaller.

The leaves of the wood sorrel are like large three-leaved shamrocks, as big as a €2 coin and pastel green. The leaves are almost as lovely as the flowers.

I came upon a troop of long-tailed tits, eight or ten of them, and a couple of wood pigeons building a nest, if one can call the platform of twigs that they lay on a ‘nest’.

But they were very careful about it, both of them arranging and rearranging the twigs until they spotted me and flew off in a flap as wood pigeons do.

Of nests, few are more beautiful than those of the little long-tailed tits, pendulous bags of lichens and cobwebs, soft and malleable, like a miniature version of an expensive evening bag that a lady might carry, and lined with downy feathers within.

Two herons stalk the field overlooked by the living-room windows of our upside-down house. They are striking when their long white necks catch the sunlight in the early morning or in the evening, like birds one might expect to encounter on the African plains. They are very wary. When I opened the French window to take a photograph, although the bird was most of a hundred yards away, it took flight immediately. Its awareness — and its eyesight — was acute. This pair will be nesting close by; I believe I have already seen the nest platform in the upper branches of a very tall tree. When the leaves come on, it will be entirely hidden.

The raves’ nest on the cliffs is easy to see. Today, I noticed that part of it seems to have slipped sideways and I feared, for a minute, that it might be abandoned.. But not so; I caught sight of a raven perched on a post a hundred yards off, its glossy black feathers shining in the sun. Through binoculars I saw a sliver of deep blue through the thatching of twigs on the side of the nest, probably an egg. But the cup is deep and it’s hard to see.

Violets, primroses, golden celandine and white three-corner garlic are in flower on the verges, and things are stirring in the garden — especially my good wife, who is preparing the ground for spring planting. I’d better not come too near for fear I am handed a spade.

I was supposed to visit old friends in Ibiza and Formentera, haunts of mine in the early 1960s, but when the weather is like this I’m loathe to go anywhere, and haven’t even begun to search for tickets. Meanwhile, I’m most grateful to those readers who expressed their enjoyment of the articles I did on La Gomera. It wasn’t hard to write them; it is another island I love.