four eggs

spring, you are gorgeous and you are wretched

Spring erupts, volcanic and voluptuous and voracious — a butterfly unfurling her dazzling wings after a winter of quiet cocooning.

Sparrows nest above our bedroom window. Each morning, we wake to the sound of chirping parents and peeping nestlings. Swallows swoop in and out of the shed, primping last year’s nest in preparation for this year’s brood. Fulmars chitter and chatter on their cliffside nests. They are joined by razorbills, guillemots, gannets — everyone busy, everyone loud and frantic and preparing for the manic weeks ahead.

Skuas and ravens patrol the cliffs, ready to snatch up any unguarded eggs or offspring. Desperate parents scream and dive at these cliffside ambushers, and their desperation pincers at my heart. I want to join their attack, I want to stretch my arms along the cliff and usher the predators away. But would I condemn a raven chick to starvation so a guillemot chick might live?

Spring always tugs me in two. A season of hope and blood, tenderness and butchery, babies and corpses. It does me well to remember I am built from nature’s rules, not the other way around. While I owe her my life, she owes me nothing.

On my morning walk, I see a newborn lamb, legs quaking, big black eyes blinking out into the world. When I loop back on the way home, its twin has been born. Not yet standing, still wet, its spindle of a neck wobbles beneath the weight of the sky. It lets out a thin bleat. What treasure, to be gifted a sight of these lives right at their beginnings.

The next day, down on the rocky shore, a hooded crow lets me get much closer than it usually would. It must have something precious beneath its feet. As I get within a few metres, the crow flies and I see the body of a newborn lamb, its tiny corpse washed in on the spring tide. The twin blackholes of its empty eye sockets stare, unblinking, back at me.

Oh, spring. You are gorgeous and you are wretched.

A blackbird decides to build her nest at the back of our outbuilding. It is an objectively awful place to build a nest. Just above ground level, it is snack-height for cats. If a raven happens to glance through the door, it will have a buffet. But she is building her nest with such delicate, withering care — thick twigs on the outside, thin twigs in the middle, a soft lining. Against the odds, we hope she’ll be successful.

She lays her eggs over the course of four days. Four perfect, turquoise ovals. We sneak into the outbuilding to remove what we might need for the next few weeks, so that we won’t disturb her once incubation begins. From the kitchen, we watch her forage in the garden with her partner, already strangely protective of these birds and the mere promise of their young.

Alongside all the birthing and suckling and nest-building and egg-laying, the spring is brimming with courting animals too — animals still trying to find their mate. Skylarks sing their little lungs out, sun-high. Snipes winnow and drum¹. Lapwings willow and tumble through the air. All this music and dancing shouts out into the world: I am ready, and, I am worthy.

One evening, wading through the warming Orkney seas (still squeal-without-meaning-to cold), I see a pipefish — a long, reddish-brown noodle of a fish, with a wonderfully dragonesque face. A close relative of the seahorse, both of these peculiar animals have reversed parental care. The male has a pouch in his belly that the female fills with eggs. He fertilises them then broods them until they hatch, providing both protection and nutrients.

But it is probably a little too early in the season for pipefish eggs. This is the season of pipefish flirtation. When this individual finds a suitable partner, the two of them will sway and shake their usually-secretive bodies like ecstatic, jiving noodles, hoping to impress one another enough that they will gift more dancing noodles to the world.

All this courtship — all this noise and colour and showing-off — is loud and bright and unselfconscious and it feels like a protest, like an antidote to death. As if spring’s balance might just be tipped in favour of life and life and life. As if butchery could be swamped by buds.

The blackbird seems to have abandoned her nest. Perhaps she saw a cat prowling around the outbuilding; perhaps she saw my partner and I frantically ferrying things out, and panicked. Either way, we have not seen her enter the building in a couple of days. Her four eggs are now precariously and precisely balanced between what it means to live and what it means to die. If they are warmed by a bird’s brood patch, they might still develop. If left, they will not.

Days pass. She does not return. And so it is that her four eggs grow into nothing more than four almosts, four could-have-beens, four talismans of spring’s two inescapable faces delicately parcelled up in wisp-thin shell.

In truth, it is probably a good thing that the mother has abandoned this nest. If a cat or raven found the nest once the chicks had hatched, it would have been carnage. Having seen the death of countless wild nestlings during my PhD fieldwork, I am glad not to have to witness more. Yes, it is better this way. There is less potential for suffering, for hurt.

And yet. Every now and then I peek at the nest from the doorway, just in case the mother has returned, just in case her brood patch is beckoning those nestlings into becoming. For who on this earth can resist the promises spring makes us? Even though she is a volatile creature — a butterfly with death on her breath, a nectar-seeker and a blood-sucker — spring and her blooming, bursting, brimming promises beguile me each and every year.

But she is no trickster; she is nothing more than exactly who she is. And who she is is a teacher. Perhaps the wisest that there is.

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1. I added the sound of a winnowing snipe to the beginning of this post’s voiceover. It is one my favourite spring noises. The peculiar drumming sound is produced by the snipe’s outer tail feathers, which vibrate as the bird swoops down towards the ground. The recording was sourced from Joost van Bruggen, XC480988. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/480988.