Joe Bennett: Signs of spring - warblers warbling, kowhai and wisteria in flower

A tui demonstrates how it helps to pollinate kowhai flowers. Photo / NZME

A DOG'S LIFE

There's a warbler out the back of my place right this moment warbling. Because it's spring time, the only pretty ring time, when birds, as Shakespeare put it, with unusual clumsiness, some 400 years ago, do sing.

Only they don't. A bird's song is less a song than a boast and a challenge. I am here, it announces, this is mine. It's aggressive and territorial. But that doesn't stop it being lovely.

Half an hour ago I sat outside the back door with the spring sun coming over my right shoulder and I ate a bowl of yoghurt and then just sat with the empty bowl in my hand and watched and heard the spring being spring and if I hadn't had to come inside to work I'd still be there because the sunshine felt like a blessing and the warbler warbled.

I didn't see the bird itself. You rarely do. Warblers are half the size of sparrows and drab with it. But the song is bigger than the bird, a great sustained liquid trill, unreproducible in words and unmistakable once heard. And only males do it. Showing off. Spoiling for fights. Aching to mate. Singing the spring.

The kowhai which a fortnight back was bare bark and dry seed pods is suddenly hung with flowers, the shape of commas and the colour of best butter. And the bellbird that somehow hangs on here through the winter, feeding on I don't know what, is hard at it in the kowhai, stabbing the flowers for nectar and moving on and taking a break to sing notes of hypodermic clarity and pitch, again unmistakable, again undoable in words.

The wisteria's bung full of juice as well. The bare and twisted cable of its vine has thrust out what look today like hops, the embryonic clusters that in 10 days' time will burst into a cascade of airy purple, an absurd overabundance of flower and colour and petal.

A normally camera-shy riroriro, or grey warbler. Photo / Darren Markin

Somewhere up behind the pines behind the house I could hear a quail calling. Not a native quail - we killed them off a century back - but its Californian cousin, with the quiff above the forehead like those fascinators worn by hangers-on at royal weddings. Three notes to the quail's song: 'Tobacco, tobacco.'

Half a century ago, in the third form, the music teacher, Jeg, a man I didn't warm to - but then he didn't warm to me - made us sing Shakey's less than impressive words.

'With a heigh and a ho and a heigh nonny no,' we sang, and some of us at the age of 14 had crossed the bridge of puberty and sang bass, while others, of whom I was most emphatically one, were still stuck on the near bank of innocence singing treble and wondering when our time would come and what it would be like.

And of course as we eventually discovered it would be like nothing we had ever known. It would be the advent of juice and sex and insuppressible, inexpressible urges. It would be, in other words, spring. The stuff that birds sing. 'Twas a lover and his lass,' wrote Shakey 400 springs ago.

Kowhai have very similar, easily recognised yellow or golden, pea-shaped flowers.

Back then, 14 years old and solipsistic, I barely noticed the details of spring, spring as I notice it now, spring that fills my old bones with, well, not hope as such, but simple pleasure in a sapid world.

I sat so still with my empty yoghurt bowl that a hedge sparrow mistook me for scenery. Hedge sparrows are shyer, finer and rarer than house sparrows. They keep close to the ground and skulk, as their name suggests, under hedges, pecking at invisibilities, and fleeing at the first hint of danger.

But I sat so still that the bird came within a foot of my foot and I thought for a moment it might perch on me and make me part of spring but a kingfisher flew by all urgent, flat and hammering and I followed its dart of cream and blue with my eyes and the sparrow sensed the movement and knew on the instant that I wasn't part of the sane spring world that lives in the moment but rather one of those human primates that are so convinced of their own difference and importance, and was gone.

With a heigh and a ho and heigh nonny no. Spring. And I haven't even mentioned the magnolia.