It may be the hottest, driest, summer since 1976 but on the first day of July I said goodbye to spring and greeted the coming of autumn, within a few short hours.
The farewell to spring came in the form of a calling cuckoo at the RSPB’s flagship Ham Wall reserve in Somerset.
As those unmistakable notes floated through the early morning heat haze I knew this would be the last time I would hear them this year, as by then most cuckoos had already migrated from Britain.
Later that day I headed to my coastal patch, the Brue estuary. Here I found the first sign of autumn: a splendid spotted redshank, feeding with a flock of its commoner cousins as the tide fell to reveal the river’s muddy banks.
Spotted redshanks breed on the Arctic taiga, that vast area of boreal forest stretching from Lapland in the west to Chukotka in the east. They then go south to spend our winter months in equatorial Africa, though a handful do stay put in the UK.
Sporting its dark breeding plumage – an old name for the species is “dusky redshank” – the bird was a fitting symbol of the season to come.
• Stephen Moss’s latest book, Mrs Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names (Guardian Faber) is out now.
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