As the round earth rolls

After a bereavement it can be hard to find your footing again - the familiar can seem unfamiliar because facts have changed. So on my first day back at work - a bird identification course on route 1 in Edinburgh - when our trainer pointed out that a small brown bird in an urban bush was a chiff-chaff, I thought I had misunderstood. Chiff-chaff? Familiar. In Edinburgh in January? Unfamiliar. For me, the persistent zilt-zelting of the chiff-chaff's call is a welcome sign of Spring - one that I note down each year when I first hear it. Why was I seeing one now? Turns out that, as well as the summer visitors that I know, which arrive from the Mediterranean or Africa in Spring and leave again in Autumn, there is an increasing number of overwintering chiff-chaffs - ones that either stay here all year, or arrive from Scandinavia or mainland Europe as the summer ones leave. The RSPB website suggests there are 500-1000 overwintering chiff-chaffs in the UK, but only around 10 were recorded in the Lothians in winter 2017, so our little one at Roseburn was an exciting spot. And, in finding him, I was given new familiarity to help ground me. Nature, as always, will play its role in healing - giving perspective and providing reassurance, with events unfolding as they should. Already the routes are lined with snowdrops nodding towards a new season, and soon the swifts and cuckoos and (summer) chiff-chaffs will be heard here again, signalling brighter days ahead. As John Muir wrote in one journal in 1938, "This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."