IN SPRING they come in their rightful order. Every day or so, one more voice is added to the chorus, one more shape to the pattern of the skies. It is the most thrilling time: the turning of the year, the rekindling of the world: new light, new life, new hope.

It fills the heart as nothing else. Ted Hughes celebrated the return of the swifts:

“They’ve made it again . . . the globe’s still working.” There is now a reassurance in the procession of the spring arrivals from their winter quarters in Africa back to the high spring of Britain.

In the increasingly fragile world, the return of the migrants brings not only cheer, but a sigh of relief: once again, we haven’t destroyed the Earth. Revel in it: the chiffchaff first, later the blackcap, the willow warbler, the great day when the house martins circle round my house to check out last year’s nest sites, and then, screaming across the sky, the squadrons of swifts, with their deafening message of reassurance about the still-working globe.

Climate change is a fact of life. There is something truly heartening in a pioneering warbler in the depths of winter: that sharp call of blackcap, like two stones knocked together, from a bare tree. And from a scientific point of view, it is fascinating: the endless adaptability of life. We are watching evolution on the hop.

At the same time, there is something deeply disquieting about it all. Climate change is something to do with human beings, not natural processes. There seems to be an experiment going on, we have only one try at it, and the results are not amenable to prediction. A winter blackcap: and you admire his bravery, his initiative — for all that these concepts are not to be understood in human terms — in placing himself on the cutting edge of change. He brings a touch of warmth on a cold day. But then you wonder how long the globe can keep working: and even the bravest feel a chill.

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