The first month of the year is named after the Roman god Janus. He is often depicted with two heads – one for looking ahead, the other behind. He is also the god of doorways, beginnings, and the rising and setting of the sun.
I think of him, and doorways generally, as we open the door on the new year. It’s not a door I open readily – I would much rather leave it closed for another few weeks. I struggle with the too-short and often overcast days, the huge amount of winter still to go before spring.
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Still, I open the door, pushing myself outside to take the dog to look for fieldfares, redwings and waxwings on the last of the winter berries, and to the beach to laugh at pied wagtails, which also roost in a street tree in the city centre.
When it’s cold, I rejoice, briefly, that the seasons are still behaving as they should, though these days it’s often unseasonally mild. There may be glimpses of spring that shouldn’t be here yet: last January, a pair of frogs spawned in my pond some six weeks earlier than usual, and I found a buffish mining bee basking in the sun two months before it should have been.
Many of Sussex’s chiffchaffs no longer bother to head south for winter, and instead overwinter in my local park, yo-yoing about the treetops and singing tseep to each other, occasionally calling out their unmistakable chiff-chaff. I try not to hear them.
Stubbornly, I feel spring markers are for spring. Instead, I focus on winter markers.
My dad lives near the marshes in Southwold, where geese and other winter migrants, including curlews, lapwings and various ducks, gather to feast on the worms, shellfish, crabs and other marine life found in the rich mud.
The dog and I traipse along the old railway line, our ears cocked for overhead calls, our eyes peeled for birds arriving or departing from nearby fields.
I peer through hedges while she sniffs important bits of grass, tracking the scents of still-awake wildlife. I wipe rain droplets from the lenses of my binoculars so I might make out the faces of birds I do and don’t recognise.
Mostly, they are barnacle and Canada geese, but there may be ducks here, too: wigeon, goldeneye, tufted duck, gadwall. In very cold weather these birds may be joined by Bewick’s swans, which are smaller than mute and whooper swans, and have more black than yellow on the beak than the whooper (the mute swan has an orange beak).
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I fell in love with whooper swans a few years ago, their calls a cross between that of a cuckoo and one of those bamboo water features where the two bits of bamboo knock together pleasingly when they empty.
Could the Bewick be so charming? Could I be so lucky to see some in the January gloom? The brown sky rings with the eerie sounds of oystercatchers. There are no Bewick’s swans.
It might be cold, it might be mild, it might be different, it might be challenging, but it’s still January. The door is opening onto an unknown.
It’s exciting, if a little scary, especially with weather and seasonal patterns changing as they are. There are still winter rituals to find, though: geese and their many friends in the winter mud, other migrants feasting on the last of the berries, buds not yet bursting.
If we look, we might see songbirds pairing up and searching for homes to raise their young. Spring always springs – it has to. And it will do soon. Happy new year!
