Five Years of Flowers

 

This was my final column of 2021 for the Halifax Courier, part of my "Wildlife Watch" series which appears in the paper roughly every fortnight.

I'm looking from my window onto the Rochdale Canal, watching a mallard float amid the ripples. It reminds me how these columns began with my walks from here in Sowerby Bridge along that same canal, taking in the birds, buds, and the coming of spring.

The clouds and puddles this December morning are a far cry from the the warm colours of those April days. Paths are streaked in residue of rain, car bonnets veneered in frost. The canal, whose sun-sparkled surface glittered below flowering trees, shivers now, beneath skeletal branches and doomy skies.

But recent snows, together with festive birds and berries, remind us that winter heralds beauties of its own. Every day I watch goosanders dot the cold canal, males with heads of polished green, females eagle-eyed with snow-white breasts and ginger tufts. Though year-round residents, they seem tailor-made for winter, silently sliding with a cool finesse, like flakes of stately ice. Geese, like ruffled bundles of fresh snow, paddle frosts, or gaze across the water, beaks bejewelled by beads of sleet.

In uncertain times, the natural world has provided some stability. Against the backdrop of a continuing pandemic, nature has persisted, and endured. I have felt greatly this year the influence of my own mother, who died in February, whose love for the wild world inspired my own.

It was a year of first sightings - butterbur in early April, bunched by the towpath like little pink totem poles, the speckly brown female mandarin duck bobbing along the Ryburn one autumn afternoon - and old favourites, too: leggy herons sweeping over ponds, kingfishers, shimmering like sapphires down the Calder, wild roses, red as blood, trellising moorland edges, and, up on the tops, the freedom of fresh autumnal air, wind whistling through heather and hissing over rocks.

I've enjoyed the lesser loved novelties of nature - multitudinous invertebrates like red soldier beetles bending stems of grasses at the Copley reserve, weevils the colour of cola; alder leaf beetles, tiny balls of polished jet, multicoloured molluscs, the frog bouncing down my street, a lithe, elastic acrobat, pogo-ing through the rain.

I've been struck by fungi - from squishy jewels of crystal brains, to ruby-red toadstools; white bracket fungi chunked around decaying logs, "King Alfred's Cakes," studding tree trunks like black blisters, mushrooms small as finger nails, hooded by grass blades amid farmer's fields.

I'm recalling my first sightings of slime molds, on the towpath trees, rubbery gems, bubbling bark in blobs of red and orange. I'm thinking back to algae, filming the edges of Willow Hall Dam in chlorophylly glops of gooky green, yet whose swirly patterns were beguiling as mirages.

As 2021 draws to a close, I'm thinking back with gratitude to the diversity of wildlife that has graced our Valley, taking comfort in the current cast of characters - the blackbirds, thrushes, gulls and grebes, whose colours brighten winter trees and waters, and looking forward to the flora and fauna to come as we turn the page into a new year.