Close inspection shows tiny buds – millions of them – are starting to prick out of the long fine stems, and within a few weeks there will be a soft, diaphanous faded-lemon shawl drawn across the willows as new leaves begin to emerge. Te Awamutu’s widely-renowned cherry-blossoms will soon be splurging masses of brilliant pink all across the town, as they will in private gardens and farm driveways elsewhere around the region.
Of course, for those on the land – the farmers, the block-holders, the land-workers, the vegetable and flower growers, the contractors – these subtle changes will have already been noticed and acknowledged. Spring is about to start springing, and the warm weather over the past week or so is urging on that new growth and the birthing of new life all over the place.
New lambs, calves and a variety of other, smaller mammalian life are already to be seen by those who enjoy looking over the roadside boundary fence, and no doubt walkers around Hamilton’s Lake Rotoroa, or Lake Ngaroto north of Te Awamutu, or those on farms with the big drains way out on the big flat country around Ngatea, may already have seen early clutches of ducklings or pukeko. Pairs of paradise duck have, for some weeks, been pegging out claims on water troughs, soggy areas of farmland and lengthy stretches of drain, prior to Mrs P.D. secretively and suddenly vanishing from the scene and devoting herself to “family matters.” The old man will loiter and skulk about nearby, on guard but far enough away not to draw attention to Herself.
And outside my little Te Awamutu home for the past few weeks one or several tui – it or they have been decidedly shy in making public appearances – has/have been chortling, chuckling, chirling and generally making their musical presence known. I think it or they is/are currently feasting on the early-flowering magnolia, though yesterday I watching for some minutes as one of them dabbled about amongst the dense foliage of a neighbour’s flowering manuka. It’s nowhere near flowering yet, but the big, white-bibbed bird was apparently nibbling something – sap, perhaps? – from the main branches and trunks of the tree as it scrambled here and there.
Two days ago I saw the briefest flash of a kereru in scalloping flight between two large totara in a small plantation on the other side of the road; and this morning I watched as a sassy little sparrow beat the daylights out of a straw on my driveway. It harried it and flogged it and twisted and bent and twirled it, and then, satisfied it would fit the specifications required by the local building inspector, it suddenly launched itself up and away, with the suitably-submissive straw trailing along behind. Who knows – that piece of straw may have become a pivotal stud in the wall of that little guy’s 2015 glamour-home. The best of good luck to him if it does.
Then, while I was sitting here beating this keyboard on another matter, I looked out and there were two starlings, perched high up on the power-wire above the footpath at the end of the driveway. They were maybe 10cm apart, almost surely a he and a she.
Now, I can write this only from a bloke’s perspective, and I accept – from long, hard-earned knowledge – that from a woman’s perspective, a bloke’s perspective is, at best, valued at about five per cent, max. But even at that generous concept, this young swain starling was, at this early flush of spring, apparently not having much luck at all. The body language read like the pages of a picture-book, albeit seen from 50 metres from where I sat.
Mademoiselle, chill, disdainful and totally uninterested, leaned slightly away, her beak turned haughtily in the other direction, perhaps on the lookout for other, more interesting admirers; adjacent, Churlish Youth stuttered and gibbered and flappered and shuffled, all to no avail. He leaned in, whispering sweet-nothings; she leaned further out, whispering the age-old reply of sweet-nothing’s-doing. He looked askance; she continued to take close interest in the far-off scenery.
Rebuffed, diminished, dismissed, ashamed of himself, the Churlish Youth fled. Mlle, suddenly finding herself alone and unseduced, looked appalled. She fluffed her feathers, fluttered her wings, cast rapid glances hither and yon with increasing anxiety, twittered aghast at the lack of ardent attention, and then suddenly burst away in a frenzied huff.
I admit, it’s only a 5-per-cent bloke’s perspective, but as I’ve been moved to suggest before, it’s not easy being a bloke in the 21st century. Ask any bloke – he’ll gladly give you his 5 per cent’s worth.
Be all that as it may, it is indeed, very close to spring. Long-range forecasters are telling us that the next month or so is likely to be exceptionally mild, and Mother Nature is also giving broad hints that such may definitely be the case. On National Radio I recently heard the plea for listeners to phone in or txt or twitter (how gloriously appropriate) details of soundings of shining cuckoo calls anywhere round the country, also sure harbingers of spring. What a good idea.
It hasn’t really been a dreary winter, at least not here in the Waikato. We’ve had a few frosts, there’s been some rain, and a wind-storm or two has made a mess of trees here and there. But in fact, the Waikato seems to be a remarkably calm, safe, unbattered location compared with a number of other places in this country. There was a mild dusting of snow on Pirongia the other day, but it was cause only of curiosity, no alarm to any degree.
By comparison, Northland has had a thrashing with gales and floods; the Coromandel has been drenched with wrecking-ball floods; Taranaki, Whanganui and southern parts of the North Island have had a drubbing; areas of the South Island have had snow and wet and wind in unpleasant abundance.
But somehow all the seasons are sort of different. It seems we get hundred-year floods every two or three years; we get gales that uproot trees which have resolutely stood for most of a century but have had the ground around their roots softened and loosened by so much recent rain; winters are either feeble or excessively severe; springs are rich and warm and effusive in their lush growth; summers dribble in rather pathetically and then, unannounced, turn off the taps and shrivel the world to straw and dust and parched haze; autumns have become something of a favourite of mine – usually warm and dry with long afternoons ideal for bunny-hunting, and great smothers of magnificent colour on the liquidambars and poplars, elms and ginkgos.
I have no idea where it’s all heading, but I’m not inclined to worry about any of it very much. After all, there’s not a lot I can do about it anyway. And in spite of the dour possibilities of what may or may not happen in the future, spring is coming yet again and there’s a bundle of new life ready to surge out into the wide world, all of it full of hope and wonder and considerable innocence. That’s been happening in this little speck of a nation at the bottom of the world for a good 20 million years or more, and a great deal of what has been created here continues to survive.
I don’t think it’s likely that everything will suddenly quit during my lifetime. So I’m going to really enjoy the coming spring.
Fifty of Kingsley Field’s earlier Outdoors columns are now available in a two-volume illustrated set. He is currently working on Volume III. He can be contacted at kingsley@accuwrite.co.nz
By Kingsley Field. Read more here.