Welcome to winter in Mayo
by Barbara Daly
THERE has long been debate about when the four seasons start and end in this corner of the world.
Some say spring begins on the first day of February. Others are happy to wait until March, while still more have winter enduring until the spring equinox, which occurs between 20th and 22nd of that month.
In 2024 the equinox, which is Latin for ‘equal night’, falls on March 20.
The actual moment the earth sits upright in relation to the sun is 3.06 a.m.
For the meteorologists and astrologists among us, that might be the moment spring begins. For the majority, six minutes past three on an otherwise random Wednesday morning might go unnoticed.
It feels too long to wait. If that is the case, we are only just out of autumn.
What we should do is restrict our current season, winter, to no more than a month by bringing spring forward to the day the blackbird first begins to sing, in which case spring started at the tail end of last year, even as autumn storms raged over the country.
We think winter has no proper purpose, and that the few weeks consumed by that most unwelcome of seasons are wasted.
Yet if we put our minds to it, we can learn from the world around us and soon make the most of the time it accords.
By now, most of us know how important bees are to the world. Without them, most of the food plants and a great many of the pretty ones would struggle to exist.
But where are the bees at present? Asleep, that’s where. It seems the course of wisdom that we do the same. After all, don’t we deserve a good rest after the exertions of 2023?
Even if we under-exerted for at least part of the time, that constant deluge of bad news served up by the mainstream media was probably enough to leave us exhausted.
So perhaps we could look at the bees and learn. When the time is right, and they will know, out they will come to get on with that important business of saving the rest of the planet, an object we seem determined to avoid at all costs.
On the other hand we still have bats on the wing each evening. How they must long for a cold spell, so they too can make a proper stab at hibernation.
Quite how such temperate autumn-into-spring seasons affect them in the long run, I cannot say.
If that much-telegraphed so-called ‘Beast from the East’ should put in an appearance, bats that aren’t cold enough to enter a state of torpor yet can’t find enough insect prey to sustain their body weight are then likely to suffer. For them, any onset of proper winter is likely to prove very challenging.
For those reasons alone, the length of time assigned to winter should be kept to a minimum.
January might feel like the dullest month of the year, yet there is plenty to do between bouts of rest and slumber.
This is the time to prepare the ground for our own mini wildflower meadow.
Modern grass varieties are the enemy of wild flowers. The best way to limit the impact of these is to get a spade under the scraw, lift it and put it back green side down.
Yellow rattle is the seed to buy. Scatter it now, while we still have hope of that cold spell which will help the seed germinate.
We must do it now, at autumn’s end, for spring, with its bees and happy bats, is just around the corner.