Winter's end

The view from my living room window

It's a funny thing but the departure of Winter visitors always seems more low-key than that of our Summer visitors. There aren't the great set pieces like the gathering of swallows and martins on telegraph lines or the procession of lots of bright young chiffchaffs and willow warblers through our parks and gardens. Instead you realise it's a couple of weeks since you last saw a fieldfare or redwing and even the skeins of pink-footed geese that noisily honked their way overhead in October go back to their breeding grounds uncharacteristically quietly. Perhaps the closest to a set-piece I see round here are the sudden disappearance of black-headed gulls (literally a hundred or so on the school field across the road one day, nothing the next) and small flocks of starlings having a last feed up before they go. This last catches me on the hop every year: I wonder why I'm suddenly having to refill the fat feeders once a day instead of once every three then I look up into the sycamores on the railway embankment and see the culprits. Yesterday it was sixty-two starlings. Today it was twenty-five. Soon, not long now, it'll be one or two of the dozen or so that are breeding round here.