Do you carry a nature calendar around in your head? A checklist of reassuring events in the almanac of spring? The first sighting of a primrose, the soporific drone of an early queen bumblebee, a sudden burst of song from a hedge sparrow, maybe? I added another bookmark to mine in mid-March, when I glanced through the open bathroom window while cleaning my teeth and noticed snail toothmarks on the windowsill.
A garden snail, hungry after spending winter sealed in its shell under the eaves, had been reawakened by the arrival of mild, wet weather. On its way down, it had paused to rasp algae from the sill surface before slithering over the edge. A snail’s mouth is on the sole of its foot, convenient for snacking on the move. Its radula – a tongue coated in chitinous teeth – had left a telltale sawtooth pattern of pristine white arcs on grimy UPVC.
A week later and I’m digging the vegetable patch on a day of perfect spring weather, the kind that bestows a sense of wellbeing when the sun’s radiant energy warms your back. Months of alternating freezing and thawing have reduced clods of earth to fine crumbs. The garden fork slides easily into ground that releases the aroma of damp earth.
The end of winter, that great seasonal synchroniser, has released thousands of buried weed seeds from dormancy. Tender, newly germinated seedlings were rising everywhere, ready to be consumed by a rasp of a snail’s radula. Sun-dried, silver slime trails lead from crevices in the garden wall, across the path; during the night, recently roused garden snails have crawled here to feed, then retreated back to the wall at sunrise.
Not without risk though. There’s a smashed shell on the garden path – the work of the song thrush that has been delighting us with its music for over a week. Weeds become snail; snails become songbird and, with luck, pale blue speckled eggs.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” wrote John Muir, the great Scottish-American naturalist. Ticking species checklists is reassuring, but it’s their interactions that make spring such a magical season.
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