The warm yellow sun is sinking between the rooftops. Thin, white wisps of cloud sail through the blue sky. Sitting in our small walled garden, I close my eyes and focus my hearing on the sounds around me, scanning each, one by one, in a kind of meditation. The house sparrows chirp, chirrup and chitter loudly, bad-temperedly, from the hazel bush they favour in the corner. Wings softly whirr as they fly back and forth from the branches to the feeders, to the tall alder tree outside the garden.
Laughter floats over the walls, a child is bouncing a ball somewhere, a delivery truck passes. Jackdaws chuck as they fly over. Honeybees and bumblebees buzz as they visit the fading blooms of the dwarf cherry blossom tree beside me. Wood pigeons call softly to each other on rooftops. A blackbird warbles its pure, joy-filled song. A greenfinch rasps a slow, falling note – it isn’t pretty, but it is a welcome addition to the garden soundtrack. Greenfinches have bred here in the past, but have been absent for four years, so I’m glad to see them return. There’s even a chiffchaff singing in the distance, somewhere on the edge of town. The lack of traffic on the nearby bypass and planes heading to Gatwick means I hear them all clearly this afternoon.
Butterflies are also appearing more on these warmer days. A male orange-tip flew through earlier, and now a large yellow male brimstone flickers randomly across the bottom of the garden, catching the light, and for a few moments it seems a broken fragment of the sun is sparkling mid-air over the grass.
The bright, butter-yellow male brimstones first emerge from hibernation in February, but the pale, white-green females come later, with the warmer days, their numbers reaching a peak in mid-April. They have one brood from mid-July, preferring areas where they can find their larval food plant – buckthorn, or alder buckthorn.
The wandering, buttery butterfly, with its distinctive scalloped, leaf-shaped wings, rises over the brick wall and disappears. I note down the birds, bumblebee and butterflies for the British Trust for Ornithology’s Garden Birdwatch, and I continue to listen to birdsong as the sun disappears, leaving a soft, pale glow in the sky.
