The sun is rising above the trees. I cross the meadow, passing gorse bushes bursting with yellow flowers, and enter the wood by the small gate. I walk up the narrow, winding footpath, and a couple of woodcock fly up from the ground, scattering the leaves where they were hiding. The two striped brown birds dart away through the trees in their panic, as if they’d been fired from a gun. I wait for the air to settle after the commotion, look up to the canopy and listen.



Birdsong is everywhere – a wall of sound pulsing through the wood. I pick out the birds, one by one, selectively listening to each song in turn: greenfinch, chaffinch, robin, blackbird, song thrush, nuthatch, great tit, blue tit, and so on.

Above them all, the chiffchaffs add their descant, a distant willow warbler its falling scales, and lower down, a few feet from me, the wren yells its long, loud trills from dense brambles. Even the restless rooks and jackdaws, with their “chuck-chuck” calls, add a rhythmic backing to the whole soundtrack.

The Swedish have the word gökotta – literally, “early cuckoo morning” – which is the act of getting up early just to enjoy hearing the first birdsong of the day. The cuckoos themselves haven’t returned yet, but they will be here, too, by the end of the month.

As well as the sound, there is movement wherever you look. Squirrels run along branches, treecreepers inch up trunks, long-tailed tits and blue tits flit from tree to tree, bumblebees whirr past. Powered by the sun and its warmth, the air in the wood seems to crackle with the unleashing of stored energy.

Together with the nutrients and moisture from the soil, sunlight feeds the growing mosses and flowers, the buzzing insects, the birds singing and gathering food, and the fresh, bright green leaves growing in the canopy on which caterpillars feed.

A female brimstone butterfly. Photograph: Martin Fowler/Alamy

I follow the path back out of the wood. A large, sulphurous yellow-green brimstone butterfly follows me alongside the hedgerow. It wafts through the warm air and away, a brilliant fragment of the sun.

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