Chorus

Spring rushes on apace, making up for a start delayed by the cold. The churr of great spotted woodpecker chicks spills from a dark hole in a leaning oak. A parent approaches cautiously so as not to give away the chicks’ location, before ducking inside to their evident delight, exiting again within seconds, stuck on the treadmill of feeding for the next three weeks. A pair of coal tits, in the same boat, bills brimming with caterpillars, leap from the willow that overhangs the post box to a crevice in a dry stone wall across the road. The wheeze of jackdaw chicks is amplified by the chimneys they are secreted within, parents perching on the telegraph pole before a last leap across the lane to the stacks. But they seem less fraught, finding time to harass the local buzzards who, judging by how unusually low they are flying, deep within the valley rather than soaring above it, would just like to be left alone to get on with the feeding of their own young. 

A stonefly, newly hatched after years in the water during its nymph stage, has found its way from the nearby river to a bench in the school playground, and is scrutinised by the children. A froglet is forced up through a drain cover outside the opticians in town during a rare downpour. There are no blank patches left in the Horsehold beeches, the job of colouring in their canopy finally complete. Most of the oaks in Callis Wood are re-orienting themselves, changing from the autumnal brown of their first flush to the in-season vivid green. The rounds of the Edge End lambing fields continue, but the number of newborns each day has now wound down. 

In response to a string of 20-degree days, the female goat willows unzip their capsules into the shape of a fleur-de-lys, a hundred on each catkin, thousands of catkins on each mature tree, in a valley of many thousands of willows, and from each floats free innumerable seeds suspended in what a sheep’s fleece would be like if it was made of silk. It is a spring snowstorm that only happens on the warmest of May days, the glinting downy flakes drifting in the air’s soft currents and banking against the verges. The dark waters of the canal are sown with a galaxy of its stars. It is a seasonal spectacle of which this stretch of the Calder Valley, which has quietly reforested itself over the last century and in which goat willows thrive, can be proud. 

At the top of the unrelentingly steep Cat Steps and along the old forsaken path that teeters along the plummeting slope of Rawtonstall Wood, the oaks are hung with their unopened flowers, like the tenderest suspended stems of broccoli. Bracken spears up on the clear headland that overlooks the wood. Some hawthorn flowers remain stubbornly shut for now, but the umbel of a young rowan is crawled over by a Rhamphomiya, a dance fly, probing with its proboscis into the creamy flowers. Green longhorn moths, though, are the ones that are dancing; a swarm of 30 whirl and caper beside the lane to Ferny Bank, with occasional rests on the glossy oak leaves. The spiked black hair of their bodies is a bundle of iron filings on a magnet, their wings plates of bronze, their fantastically long antennae whip about like cast fishing lines. 

In the pasture beside the ancient way to Lower Rawtonstall, a new post-and-wire fence now snaking beside its orthostatic stones and around the windswept hawthorn that was felled by Storm Arwen in 2021, a new flock of sheep has been introduced. They are making short work of the long-neglected sward, and they do the same with the fence, escaping into the neighbouring pasture. The meadow foxtails are flowering, taking on the colour and form for which they are named. The common sorrels on the old, mysterious ledge on the Turret Brink hillside, meanwhile, are going in for a deeper cherry red, and its cushions of grasses are liberally sprinkled with cuckoo spit, in which the cloudy forms of froghoppers are safely cocooned.     

At this same spot days later, at 3.45am, in the dim grey of the pre-dawn light, the first robins are rousing the rest of the dawn chorus. The night shift are not quite finished yet, though: the sharp ‘kee-wick’ of a female tawny owl is answered by hoarse hoots from two males; a bat flits across the newly-planted hedge that splits the Meadow Field in two; two roe deer bark as they wade through the long, dewy grass; and a succession of red-eye flights from Boston, New York, Chicago and Washington pass over, heading into the dawn with vivid pink vapour trails, towards Frankfurt and Vienna and Amsterdam.

But soon the robins are joined, first by the liquid songs of blackbirds, then by the piercing trills of wrens, willow warblers’ lilting refrains and the hazy murmur of wood pigeons, all backed by the fall of water across the valley in Beaumont Clough. At 4.23am, as the light is growing, a cuckoo calls down the valley. The honking of Canada geese resounds from the canal and up the hillsides, and not to be outdone, a cockerel and pheasants further up the hill, and the peacock on the other side of Jumble Hole Clough, all chime in. Two ambulances turn their sirens on at the junctions through the town below, and together with an alarm at the substation by Whiteley Arches, briefly add some discordant notes, but harmony soon returns. 

Robins and blackbirds are still doing the lion’s share of the choral work, but flourishes are added by the skittering call of a curlew, the drumming of great spotted woodpeckers, the endlessly varied repertoire of song thrushes and the determinedly unvarying calls of chiffchaffs. Corvids, though not enrolled in the ensemble as such, are about their business: jackdaws chat on their morning commute, the inhabitants of the three raucous rookeries at Savile Road, Mytholm Meadows and Stubbing Square are awake, magpies cackle, though a jay that barrels through resists tearing the still air with its screech, and a crow atop the single aspen in the hazel coppice also keeps quiet. The official sunrise time is 4.58am, but it takes a further 45 minutes for it to heave itself over Midgley Moor and the smudge of cloud that sits above it, the light first striking Stoodley Pike Monument and the Reaps Moss turbines before sinking into the valley. By then, the chorus has quietened and is beginning to disband. Its members have a long day of feeding fledglings ahead.