It's like grandmothers footsteps, as soon as you turn your back everything changes. After months of unchanging winter hardship I take a couple of weeks holiday and its all new when i come back. Well actually the weather is still the same mind with frosts, bitterly cold northerly winds though now seasoned with a sprinkling of volcanic ash. 
But things are happening. Even as I drove down the track to the boardwalk a wheatear flitted off the track onto a fencepost, its just passing through on the way north, and more unusual, a cuckoo swooped across the track onto the Moss - a good few days earlier than normal. Once at the car park the willow warblers had also arrived and were yelling at the top of their voices, curlews were bubbling in the fields next to the moss, the carrion crow was sitting on its nest and the common gulls had reached a gaggle of 20+ on the pool by the seat. Plant life was magically bubbling up from the dead moss surface, cotton grass flowers stuck up like a rack of spears and in one place a small patch of wood anemones showed. These give a hint of a past wooded spring landscape long gone. Spring is in full swing, if you blink you'll miss it.
But things are happening. Even as I drove down the track to the boardwalk a wheatear flitted off the track onto a fencepost, its just passing through on the way north, and more unusual, a cuckoo swooped across the track onto the Moss - a good few days earlier than normal. Once at the car park the willow warblers had also arrived and were yelling at the top of their voices, curlews were bubbling in the fields next to the moss, the carrion crow was sitting on its nest and the common gulls had reached a gaggle of 20+ on the pool by the seat. Plant life was magically bubbling up from the dead moss surface, cotton grass flowers stuck up like a rack of spears and in one place a small patch of wood anemones showed. These give a hint of a past wooded spring landscape long gone. Spring is in full swing, if you blink you'll miss it. 
