The Nature of Spring

by Jim Crumley

Overview

“Delightful … The lyrical prose elevates Crumley’s detailed descriptions of the natural world he encounters … Readers will be transported by this immersive outing.” Publishers Weekly

A BBC-serialized vision of spring, ravaged by climate change yet still astonishing, by Scotland’s leading nature writer.

Spring is nature’s season of rebirth and rejuvenation. Earth’s Northern hemisphere tilts toward the sun, winter yields to intensifying light and warmth, and a wild, elemental beauty transforms the Highland landscape and a repertoire of islands from Colonsay to Lindisfarne.

Jim Crumley chronicles the wonder, tumult, and spectacle of that transformation, but he shows too that it is no Wordsworthian idyll that unfolds. Climate chaos brings unwanted drama to the lives of badger and fox, seal and seabird and raptor, pine marten and sand martin. Crumley lays bare the impact of global warming and urges us all towards a more daring conservation vision that embraces everything from the mountain treeline to a second spring for the wolf.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912235377
Publisher:	Saraband
Publication date:	02/28/2023
Series:	Seasons
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Veteran nature writer and “the pre-eminent Scottish nature-writer” (Guardian) Jim Crumley has written forty books, mostly on the wildlife and wild landscape of his native Scotland, the impact of human activity on the natural world, species reintroduction, and climate change. His work has been nominated for many prestigious awards, including the Wainwright Prize for nature writing and Scotland’s National Book Awards. Jim is a widely published journalist and has a monthly column in The Scots Magazine, as well as being an occasional broadcaster on BBC radio and television.

Read an Excerpt

That island day of birds in never-ending raucous splurges set against a huge, blue east-coast sky, or against breeze-bowed, meadow-like drifts of sea campion, finally distilled down to two individuals, one eider duck and one puffin. These caught my admiring glance and held it, and kept returning it again and again, so that the memory of them has become indelible. I have been studying two photographs, remembering, reconstructing their extraordinary moments.

The eider duck was sitting on a nest, I think. The doubt stems from the lie of the land, for it masked the entire bird apart from the head, which appeared to me as a left-facing profile. Sunlight lit the top of the head, the forehead, and the upper mandible of the bill, the top of one eyelid, the top of one cheek. The back of the head, the whole of its neck and the lower mandible were in deep shadow and looked black. Every square centimetre of the picture was crammed with swarming sea campion. The head of the bird was perfectly positioned at the base of a shallow vee in the land that extended from one side of the picture to the other. The edge of the vee was also where the sea campion flowers were in sharp focus. A tiny cluster of seven flower heads was particularly striking because its immediate background was the black-looking mass of the eider’s neck. The bird must have been sitting on a ledge, just beyond the vee and hidden by it, which was why only the head was visible. The top half of the picture was the high bank that rose some distance behind the bird and beyond the vee, and it was an abstracted, out-of-focus mass of green and white. From top to bottom and edge to edge of the picture, the only thing not sea campion in various states of sharpness was the head of the eider duck, and even that had lost the tip of its bill because it was masked by flowers. The stillness was somehow unnerving. So was the unshakable confidence of the bird in the sureness of its place on the map, its place in the island’s scheme of things. It impressed me. Not least because such a sensibility is quite absent from my own life. My long-standing admiration for eider ducks just deepened perceptibly.

The puffin was also on an edge. But unlike the eider’s fragment of the island, it was a cliff edge, and I could see the whole bird. It stood, presenting a right-facing profile, and it looked at me looking at it, and we were about thirty yards apart. After a couple of minutes of this, it flew, and I assumed my audience was over. But it was back a minute later and came into land with orange webs thrust forward and whirring wings held high, to land in precisely the same spot, to assume precisely the same attitude as before. This happened five or six times over quarter of an hour. Each time it flew, it couldn’t have travelled any distance worth speaking of, did not land on the sea or dive beneath for food. I wondered if it was a game, or if it was unpaired and looking for a mate and that my presence and stillness was completely incidental to the ritual.

Editorial Reviews

12/12/2022

The Scots Magazine columnist Crumley (Lakeland Wild) ruminates on the splendor of springtime in this delightful companion to his previous outings on winter, summer, and fall. He describes visiting sites in northern Scotland during the spring of 2018 and stresses the importance of taking “time to marvel, to relish, to be a fragment of landscape.” Doing so, he suggests, can lead to being awed by the mundane: “If you have never thought there could be beauty in a fly, you need only watch a newly hatched horde of mayflies trekking upstream into the afternoon sunlight above the course of a Highland river with a song in its step.” Relating what he witnessed on nature walks, he serves up Planet Earth–ready anecdotes about ravens pestering a sea eagle, a friendly meeting between a fox and a pine marten, and territorial competition between peregrine falcons and kestrels. The author laments the changes humans have made to the environment, from over-logging and hunting to climate change’s disruption of seasonal patterns. The lyrical prose elevates Crumley’s detailed descriptions of the natural world he encounters, as when he compares the movements of a family of stoats to “spilled mercury.” Readers will be transported by this immersive outing. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Delightful … The lyrical prose elevates Crumley’s detailed descriptions of the natural world he encounters … Readers will be transported by this immersive outing.” Publishers Weekly

“Nature writer and poet Jim Crumley returns with a third volume of close observations [and] charts the arrival of spring, from the February song of a mistle thrush to May’s drowsy warmth.” New Statesman recommended reads

“Mesmerising.” Herald

“Compelling … Radical … Crumley could be Ali Smith’s naturalist twin.” Scottish Review of Books

“A fantastic writer … exquisite observations of details in the landscape as well as sweeping vistas … remarkable.” BBC Countryfile magazine

“Beautifully written … thoughtful and thought-provoking … Jim Crumley does not shy away from the important issues facing the natural world.” Undiscovered Scotland

“There are books that transport us and Jim Crumley’s ode to spring takes us there on the wings of a sea eagle … Exquisitely observed … uplifting and disquieting … Crumley’s masterful words take you into the canvas of nature as into the work of a grand master … The joy, the passion, the complete understanding Jim has for his world is a portal. The world on our doorstep.” Book of the Week, The Courier

From the Publisher