The Worst month – February by Louise Bacon

This blog asked you to write about either the best month of the year or the worst.  The winner of the ‘Worst Month’ category is Louise Bacon with her entry ‘February’.

Louise wins a copy of my book Remarkable Birds.

The winner of the ‘Best Month’ category will be published next Sunday.

Louise writes:  I used to be a Biochemist studying human immune system malfunction whilst being a part-time naturalist and conservationist. Then I converted to being an environmental data geek, which is what I do part of the time in a vague attempt to pay the bills I have been a birder since childhood, and am now the Cambridgeshire county bird recorder, and am also a butterfly and moth enthusiast, with an interest in several other taxon groups including lichens, ants and molluscs, and when not in front of maps or a database can usually be found in woodlands carrying out vital management work, or surveying farmland birds.

February, lowland England, 21st Century.

Greyness, mild, damp.  Its been the same for 4 months now.  No leaves, trees are grey, fields are brown, or worse.  Some are bright green, with monocultural cereal sprouting through, devoid of life despite the colour, some look like rice-paddies, where the usually efficient field-drain is broken, as do the deep tractor ruts in all of the fields in the area, puddles lasting for weeks on end.  The rivers are brown, their levels suceptible to rapid fluctuation the day after yet more rain, pumped with mud and phosphates, dumping more nutrient on the banks. By the end of the month, the first new green nettle shoots will poke through the grey-rimed banksides, ready to dominate anything else bar Balsam with the audacity to try and grow on the riverbank later in the year.

Vague memories of what you’re certain Feburary used to be like, in East Anglia and the Midlands in February; cold, crisp days, snow still lying in places, crispy on top and soft when you drop through.  But that is now just the stuff of memory, as are the days of freezing fog, or the wonderful frosty mornings. Probably just stuff of legend.  February is just 4 more weeks of torture, waiting desperately for spring to arrive.  Memories whilst watching the commuters trundle by into the city, 5 miles away, each car with only one occupant, all with their heaters and demisters on, lights on and wipers going full-pelt, the same thing every day, bare hedges, drab scenery, and the only colur provided by a vital and valuable product which has no benefit to wildlife, the precious winter wheat.

It rains (again).  Working in the woods is slithering in the mud, ankle-deep and liquid on the paths and by product-bundling stations, simply just wet mud away from the paths, picking up the cut coppice poles from a pool of water, working into saleable product, cold fingers in the hammering rain, water dripping off the jacket hood and mud on fingers exposed to the air for efficient bundling of the products to be sold for the benfit of wildlife.  You put your billhook and saw down… slides off the trunk, plops into the ever-present all-encompassing liquid greyness.  Handle needs cleaning. On what – everything is mud.

A brilliant sunny day, brisk breeze; you can almost convince yourself spring is here; a quick glance at the fields reminds you otherwise, despite the first few buds starting to swell, tantalisingly luring thoughts towards spring.  A reckless Red Admiral ventures out of hibernation, finds little to feed on and presumably hasn’t spent too much of its resources doing so before returning to its hibernation spot until spring really arrives…..as the bank of cloud rolls in and the greyness decends again.

The locals don’t call it February Fill-Dyke for nothing.

And the worst part of February, if it really couldnt get any worse, at the end of what is hopefully winter, you find out you’re a year older.

It rains into the all-enveloping greyness, sky merging into land merging into river.

February, from the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry

[registration_form]