So goes the merrie month of May

With returning swifts screaming across the rooftop and golden buttercup pollen gilding his Wellingtons as he strides across the cow meadow, John Lewis- Stempel marvels at the many pleasures of May

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IN the copse, owlets sit on an oak branch imitating rolled-up balls of socks. Bluebells challenge the sky in the purity of their blue. The fragile anemones have gone as if they had never been and the wild cherry trees puff white clouds of blossom.

Beside the brook, the marsh violet gleams above the fading kingcups. The thrusting spears of bur-reed have almost reached the black hole in the bank where the kingfisher nests and is already sitting on her eggs. Mayflies pirouette and drop dying onto the surface of the bright water—tragic insect ballerinas. The wrens are feeding their first brood in the crack in the barn wall, taking their pick from the bustling host of caterpillars in the oaks. (At dusk, high in the same oaks, the cockchafers gather and are pursued in a merry-go-round by flitting noctule bats.)

The skylark soars, plummets to earth and runs sly and sideways through the growing barley. Pollen from buttercups gilds Wellingtons on strolls through the cow meadow, a fascination for children. The afternoon air is lazy with the susurration of grasshoppers. Virtuoso blackbirds lead the euphoric singing of the birds in gardens to crowds of flowers at dawn.

The wood pigeon has fashioned a crude home—a stranded raft of sticks—in the hawthorn by the pig-gate. Suddenly, from the south comes a scream of swifts that skirl around the rooftop of the house. The swifts are home! Yet the chaffinch is oblivious as she weaves her meticulous nest from moss and the wool of our black sheep, snags she has plucked off the barbs of brambles.