Timeless joy of England's merry month

It has been lauded down the centuries in poems and prose, and little wonder. For this is the time when the earth bursts with regeneration and the natural world goes into overdrive.

There is something magical about this all-too-short four weeks when the countryside is a patchwork quilt of varying shades of green, the horizon only spoiled by the graffiti yellow daub of oilseed rape.

But alas, all too soon, the time has passed and nothing is ever quite the same again. Once the month of June has begun, the paintbox of greens slowly but surely begin their decline into more uniform tones.

One weekend during this soon-to-be-departed merry month, I experienced one of the greatest natural gifts that May can bestow. I was woken in the morning by Nature's alarm clock - the cuckoo.

I was staying at the house of some old friends in my home village and on hearing its composition of two notes, decided to waste no time and head outside into the sunshine so that I could explore my old haunts.

The village lies in a green corridor between two towns, both extremities defined by enormous, white-roofed warehouses that make up industrial estates. Both developments are hideously out of proportion with their rural surroundings.

Yet wildlife thrives in this former northern outpost of the old Arden Forest, despite the prairie farmers' removal of a large proportion of the hedgerows back in the early 1970s, their palms having been well-greased with fistfuls of Common Market cash.

On my two-day odyssey, a surprisingly large number of small birds were encountered, the bonus being a sighting of two linnets rising from the hawthorn, the sunlight illuminating their delicate pastel colours.

Then it was down to the brook, and here was a truly wild mother duck hiding in the reeds with her brood stuck to her like burrs, relying on camouflage to hide from my eyes.

Further along the field, what I had taken to be a log with protruding stumps, turned out to be two hares, nose-to-nose in the grass, ears held high.

Deciding not to disturb Jack and Gill's romantic encounter, I backed away and left them to it, deciding instead to investigate the first shoal of sticklebacks I had seen in years, jerkily going about their business in the shallows of the brook.

Once, when dressed in short trousers held up with a snake belt, I would have plotted the capture of the elusive Redbreast, lured into a jam jar with a bloodworm impaled on a pin. But now it was enough to watch this little fishy community and leave them in peace...

BACK in Worcester at the pitface two days later and I found myself dealing with a news story that had much relevance to the scenes I have just described.

It related how wildlife in Worcestershire could be devastated if farmers were forced to adopt new European regulations concerning hedgerows.

Britain, the report said, had been allowed to delay implementation of a European policy that changed the way farmers in the EU are paid. Previously, farmers were granted subsidies not only for the area farmed, but also for a two-metre wide margin of land stretching from the hedgerow towards the crops.

Farmers had been warned that if their hedgerows were wider than two metres, they would be punished by only being paid for the land covered by the crops. Britain had negotiated a "roll-over" year, a sort of reprieve, and talks were continuing.

"It could be devastating," said Andrew Fraser of the Hindlip-based Worcestershire Wildlife Trust. "Wildlife that needs hedgerows includes birds, mammals and insects and there are shrubs and trees living in them, too. Wildlife is under intensive agricultural pressure as it is."

You have to hand it to the politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels. They don't do things by halves. First they produced the Common Agricultural Policy, a system which encouraged the first wave of hedgerow destruction.

Then, while that was progressing at a cracking pace, the British fishing industry was sold out by the Heath Government. The family silver that was the great North Sea cod and herring grounds were surrendered as a sop to the unelected ones.

Yes, Tories - in case you wondered, we do have long memories.

Once that had reached a satisfactory conclusion, as a gesture of gratitude, the French and Germans decided to spare no expense in wrecking our beef industry. This came about after we did the honest thing and admitted our mistake in feeding cattle pellets made from infected offal.

Then, when the British beef industry was obliterated, someone in Brussels noticed that we still had some nasty hedges left that urgently required removal...

YET, somehow, Britain's wildlife hangs on. And so I travelled, on past the rookery in Rye Hill Spinney, where I was amused by the strangled caws of the squabs as their parents force-fed them the earthy delights on that day's menu.

A skylark took to the heavens, singing for his supper of sawflies now valiantly defying gravity over the hawthorn tops like stricken, Lilliputian biplanes.

On the margins, cow parsley, hemlock, ground ivy and speedwell jostled for space in the floral crowd, giving way to ladysmock and buttercups. Where water had collected to make a pool in the ditch, whirligig beetles danced their aquatic quadrilles in ever-increasing circles.

From the high ground I could make out the motorway and the industrial estate in one direction, the main road and a mass of grotesque buildings in the other. In between lay a green swathe of England, a river of green flowing past the hostile banks of Man's works.

In the hedge tops, the birds seemed to be singing their defiance, no doubt just as they did when the original Greenwood was felled and the land was given over to sheep and the plough.

Over to the left lay the village, still concealed by low hills that had once hidden the inhabitants from the gaze of mediaeval armies and brigands.

And I couldn't help think that somehow, maybe the Dark Ages were preferable to the destruction we now call "investing in the future" or "meeting the needs of the 21st Century", clichs routinely used nowadays as an excuse to ruin a bit more countryside.

But then, over in a copse at the back of my friends' house, came that unmistakable music of May. Just two notes, repeated over and over again, calling for a mate to join him in the cruel deception that he had been plotting ever since leaving the shores of Africa.

Yes, it was the cuckoo calling across the valley once more. And for some reason I can't quite explain, this timeless signature tune of old England gave me hope that all was perhaps not lost, after all.