Out into the delirium of spring, riding fast and light-heart- ed towards today’s grid square. Birds belting out love songs in every hedgerow. The first blush of sunshine in the oilseed rape fields, pret- ty but terrible for leaching nitrates into waterways. The first sulphur- ous brimstone butterfly, a yellow that put the ‘butter’ into butterfly. In Every Day Nature, Andy Beer suggests you note the first date you spot one and call it your Brimstone Day each year. I liked that idea. 

My computer calendar already reminds me of the various dates of the first snowdrop and daffodil outside my shed in recent years. The first green leaf on the tree by my window, the return of goldfinches to my feeder, the first swift and, from today, the first brimstone butterfly. I enjoy seeing these differences in nature’s calendar year on year, the phenology of where I live. 

It is a start, but my novice observations are a long way from those 

of the Reverend Gilbert White, whose detailed decades of notes about the natural world around his village resulted in The Natural History of Selborne, a book that has remained continuously in print since 1789. He was a pioneering and inquisitive natural historian with astonishing powers of observation. His writing also offers an invaluable insight into rural life in the 18th century. It was often carried by emigrants to North America and Australia who wanted a nostalgic reminder of home. 

White paid minute attention to nature and recorded it diligent- ly, a practice he called ‘observing narrowly’. The more he focused, the more engrossed he became in the small wonders on his doorstep in Hampshire. For example, he observed that owls hoot in the note of B flat and surmised that willow wrens were actually three separate species by tiny differences in their songs and plumage: chiffchaff, willow war- bler and wood warbler. I’m quite proud of myself if I even glimpse one of those as they dash from bush to bush, never mind playing spot the difference between them.