Another Life: The frogs have trampled down the dead grasses and rushes that hid the pond's water for months, creating a firm, if somewhat damp, mattress on which to copulate and spawn.
To any ecological eye, this annual froggy flattening seems positively designed to hasten the pond's progress into bog.
Meanwhile, my morning emergence with the dog produces, first, a sudden silence as the frogs switch off their motor-bikes, and then a panicked scampering, a leaping and slithering to watery holes in the mattress. Dozens of animals vanish in moments, leaving just a few tired and swollen females to squat among the jelly-moulds of spawn. The dog inspects them closely, stretching her black nose down from the bank, daring them to jump.
Such commotion, or ruaille buaille, every time I appear gets rather wearing after a day or two and is quite out of key with my more measured entry into spring. A few seeds get a start on my warm study windowsill (tomatoes, lettuce, peppers). In the greenhouse, broad beans are launched industriously, one by one, into a winter's worth of yoghurt pots.
And a dry day outdoors finds me picking up sticks and hauling out the knobbly stems of worn-out brussels sprouts: slow, quiet activities that magically, each February, reconnect me to the soil.
The acre's birds have been singing for weeks, on and off, but the special sound of February is the call-notes of ravens. In this, their breeding time, an extra urgency and passion invades the interchanges overhead. Gone is the sonorous, measured crok. . . crok of ravens flying on scheduled flights, or the happy sotto voce soliloquies of lone birds cruising in autumn. Now there are snarls and barks as the resident pair, tenants-for-life of the twiggy nest on the cliff beyond the lake, hunt intruders from their territory.
A battle between ravens can be quite transfixing, whirling the birds across the hillside as if blown in the wind. Once, filming for A Year's Turning, I tracked such an aerial dogfight between half-a-dozen birds that ended with the main antagonists, talons locked, crashing to the ground in a tangle of wings. In my mesmerised, amateur excitement, unfortunately, I neglected to press "Record".
The raven's repertoire of calls and cries may not quite add up to the 64 distinctly different sounds discerned by Roman seekers after auguries. But even reduced to recorded sonograms, there are more than enough to go around. Add in the raven's gift for mimicry, and the unscrambling of its codes is a continuing challenge to ornithology.
Another long-standing puzzle for raven-watchers has been the precise function and nature of the "roll" - the propeller-like spin or flip in flight that is unique to the species. I watch for it now, as a part of breeding display, but it can come at any time of year.
Its niceties have been closely observed, not least to decide when a half-roll becomes a whole roll, for this operation can notoriously deceive the human eye.
"During a half-roll," says one authority, "the raven folds one wing back at the wrist, rolls rapidly onto its back, bends the other wrist and reverses direction to extend both wings." Or, to quote another image: "Hold out your right hand in front of you with the back upwards and then suddenly turn it so that the palm is upwards. Keep this position for a second and then resume the first position." There may be several half-rolls, one after another and to alternate sides - or even (but not often, by all accounts), a full, straight-winged spin of 360 degrees. When a pair of ravens are both on a roll, so to speak, it becomes a beautiful aerial ballet. As to its purpose, the togetherness of a raven pair soaring and rolling in spring, their wing-tips almost touching, speaks of life-long bonding and an enviable joie-de-vivre.
Ravens have always been powerful as symbols, their meaning changing with human views of nature. In pagan mythologies, devised to integrate nature's mysteries with that of human destiny, the raven's predominantly carrion diet gave it the power of deciding who should die, especially on the battlefield.
Ravens whispered in Odin's ear, and confided in Cúchulainn.
Jump forward a few centuries and human mastery of nature had ravens falling to the gamekeeper's guns and poisons - to the point of extinction by 1900 in most of lowland Ulster and Leinster. Today it is the market for hill sheep that largely fixes the supply of carrion and thus the density and breeding success of ravens in their wool-lined nests. We are free to admire their aerobatics and, sometimes, to deplore their fad for snatching golf-balls off the fairway, a habit now reported from Norway to Mayo.
