How's your spring going? Not at all an odd question to ask as a new year begins, despite the harsh easterly that is currently sucking the flesh from our bones. If you have an ear even slightly tuned in to the wild world, you can hear the spring sneaking in.

But it's not an unstoppable march. It's more a matter of advance and retreat: a pocket of fine weather, a little suntrap unleashes a hint of spring, and then it is snuffed out with another wintry gust, only to start again, louder, in the next window of opportunity.

Throughout winter, spring plays grandmother's footsteps: a day of sudden, vivid promise is followed by another of grim silence. As a child on the beach, you stuck a piece of driftwood in the sand to mark the farthest point of the biggest incoming wave. And though the next dozen or so waves fell short of it, you always knew that, soon enough, a wave would come and drown your stick, forcing you to make a new marker, then another and another.

And so I have heard the relentless processes of spring beginning, even as I have hurried past wishing I had put on another layer - the rattle and trill of a wren exploding knee-high from brambles; the flat burble of a dunnock; a great tit shouting out his optimistic disyllable: teacher, teacher, teacher! Then, in a South London garden, as I chivvied my family towards the sanctuary of Pizza Express, the effusive popping and tinkling of a goldfinch, singing as if it were shirt-sleeve weather and time to look for a nice table outside. A day of chill silence followed. But listen out. Spring and winter are going head to head, and in this race there can only be one winner.

Motorway gladness

Sometimes I think it is the stolen moments that I love best, rather than the great set pieces that you travel across the country or the world to see. There is a sense in which two sudden, stolen glimpses on the M25 were the equal, perhaps even better than, say, the humpback whales that I got so close to a few a months ago.

As we returned from our few days in London, whizzing round the orbital road towards the blessed A12 that leads back to Suffolk, I found my eyes, as usual, glancing here and there at likely spots of wildlife habitat - fields, the sky, that sort of thing. (I should point out here that I was not driving.)

Then, twice in very quick succession, on each side of the motorway, I saw red deer. The first was a singleton, a mere silhouette, on the edge of a small copse, in a field of winter wheat. And then scarcely had I exclaimed and pointed, I saw a group of seven or eight in a patch of scrub, two or three antlered stags among them; and this time, other people managed a sighting as well.

It amazes me how much wildlife exists even in the most unpromising circumstances, all there for those of us who have managed to acquire the knack of looking. There is more about than we know, than we will ever be fully aware of.

This is not to say that reckless roadbuilding programmes are acceptable. The continuing and massive destruction of wild places is a disaster for the wild world and for the tame humans whose lives are enriched by the most fleeting contacts with it. But the point here is that Britain is wilder than our tamed senses tell us. A good idea to keep it that way and better again if we can untame our senses and enjoy it, even on the M25.

Undercover bird

There are creatures that are always with us and which are more or less invisible. Who would think that a bird with a glowing rose-pink breast was invisible? That's why it's always good to see bullfinches. It is as if you had been let into a secret.

The male is as spectacular a bird as you will see in this country and yet you hardly ever see him. When you do see bullfinches, they are generally flying away, usually in a pair, looking more or less identical - white wing bars and white bums, vanishing into a hedge together. Even if you know what you're looking at, it's hard to catch more than a hint of the male's staggering colours - the richest possible pink clearly has no terrors for him.

It's possible that bullfinches learnt their furtive behaviour as a result of persecution. They will eat the buds of certain fruit trees and they have a bad reputation among the keepers of commercial orchards, even though the damage that they do doesn't actually affect the crop. They live their lives like undercover birds of paradise, seldom seen and with a quiet song that's easily missed. But when, rarely, rarely seen in plain view, they knock your bloody eyes out - just one more example of the secret splendours of wild Britain.

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