The birds know it, the animals know it and so do we. Spring is in the air, a visceral sensation, even the silver wattles are stirring, feeling the urge to break into flower.
It’s the time of the year when we realise we are truly at one with nature. No need for a calendar to announce winter is about to come to an end. We feel spring all around us, it stirs, rouses us, quickens our step. And birds erupt in song.
As if by intuition, I felt compelled on the sunny, warm morning of August 12th to check a nesting site used by migratory striated pardalotes, to see if the birds had returned. The portents looked good with a north-westerly wind and a clear night sky, and so I was not surprised to hear the pardalote’s “pick-it-up, pick-it-up’’ call when I arrived, the migratory night-flying birds using the stars to guide their way.
A pair of pardalotes were busying themselves renovating an old nesting site, in a crack in a sandstone culvert. Near the spot a white-faced heron was also feeling the pull of spring, arriving to feast on skinks sunning themselves on logs, the skinks fresh from the torpor of winter.
Unlike Mother Nature, we set timeframes for the seasons, putting three months of the year into a strait-jacket of days that more or less mirror changes in daylight hours and temperature. But natural forces are more flexible and birds certainly do not fly by deadline. They merely await favourable conditions to make their move.
The first Tasmanians also viewed nature’s division of the year differently to that of Europeans. Instead of the notion of a rigid four seasons appropriate to Europe, according to Aboriginal calendars across Australia the seasons blend and meld together. Spring and summer, the time of rejuvenation and plenty, merge and with the approach of colder weather and shorter days, autumn slowly drifts into winter.
Hunting might continue all year, but spring and summer is a time to gather eggs, seafood and fresh plants, and autumn and winter the time to pick fruit and nuts.
Instead of having four seasons, it might make more sense in modern Australia to have just two, ignoring the fact that our seasons are a throw-back to a colonial power, Britain, where the year is clearly defined by deciduous vegetation. Trees like oaks and beeches shed leaves in winter, dramatically transforming a landscape from a kaleidoscope of lush foliage to bare skeletal trees. In contrast, the gums and wattles of Australia retain their form, shedding and replenishing leaves in graduated stages.
The silver wattles are the first trees to be festooned in yellow flower in early August as the sun warms. And within days green rosellas arrive to feast on the bounty of pollen and nectar.
The rosellas follow a timetable of their own.