Not quite Spring yet

There are the first hints of Spring, though nothing you could be so bold as to point at and say ‘ there now, it is Spring’. March the 20th and the vernal equinox is a long way off and meteorological spring is still more than a month away. But still things have moved slowly forward from deepest and darkest winter. 

I scrape porridge bits out for the birds before daybreak and there is more than a hint of a dawn chorus. Quite clearly it is now dark at well after 4 when it was often not much beyond 3. On a good day you can ride a bike till almost 5 though you would not have cast a shadow for quite a while.

Woodpeckers do not have much of a whistling repertoire and stake a claim to a territory by hammering on a hollow log. I have now heard this drumming three times, so they think it is at least the beginning of the start of spring. Snowdrops are now everywhere and perhaps 2 weeks or more since the first were seen and now the top of our garden is in full snowdrop bloom.

But after a winter without snow it is now on the forecast. Two days ago XC Weather, the most pessimistic of apps, said we would wake this morning to a few inches of snow. Nothing of the sort and only a sprinkle not enough for a snowball on the highest bit of this morning’s gravel ride. I could work it out, but a guess is that we have done about 1100Km in the last 4 weeks, with a lot of that being done on muddy tracks and hilly mountain paths. So, not a bad effort at all.

Mostly we never go out without a camera as winter rides are often the ones that look amazing. Nothing spoils a moody bike in a landscape than edge to edge blue sky. There have been some stunning rides. Now you watch us get a dump of snow and half a dozen weather fronts with names.