Its getting Springier and Springier

I love spring!

Buds are turning into leaves, anything that is green is a beautiful fresh, clean green and the animals have all gone a bit daft.

God's own colour chart: each step is slightly

paler than the step below as the ground has drained.

The ground is drying out enough to walk almost anywhere now, the bluebells are showing that they will be outrageous this year, and days are getting noticeably longer every day.

The plum trees are in bloom now, the first of the dandelions are out and there is other blossom too. I reckon we're probably less than a fortnight from starting the first batch of hedgerow wine.

Mmmm..... dandelion wine.

The thing that has really provoked this post though is the fact that yesterday I saw the daftest cormorant in the world. Highly skilled, but very daft. I was walking down the river bank towards Staines earlier and there it was, floating in the middle in the strongest part of the current, grappling with a fish it had caught. Only it wasn't an ordinary fish. It was an eel. The bird had clearly come to grips with the concept of width and diameter, it understood one end of the eel would fit in its beak well enough. It had no concept however of length. At no point did I see the entire eel. I did see at least two feet of it though. In other words, it was longer than the cormorant. The bird would swallow a few inches of it, choke it up again, drop it in the river, dive down, re-catch it and swallow again and again. Full marks for ambition and persistence, zero marks for common sense. It gave up in the end though, only to do that thing I've seen so many supposedly elegant river birds do when they've done something silly - herons, cormorants, swans, everything except ducks and geese - and that is to look round, puff out their chest, flick their heads a little and preen a little, as if to say "I meant to do that!"