ANOTHER LIFE/Michael Viney: As I write, it is winter: a crimson sky behind the mountain, slate-dark clouds above the sea, a bitter gale lacing the air with ribbons of dead moorgrass. The wind has torn the nut-feeder from its branch in the oaks, so the birds have moved round to the hedge in the lee of the house. Here the nuts are braced by spiky hawthorn, and boxes of goose-fat and oatmeal are wedged on the windowsills with stones.
The ceaseless flurry of birds includes a dozen goldfinches with scarlet, Mardi Gras masks. They keep their distance from my window, battling greenfinches, chaffinches, sparrows and tits for a turn at the nuts. But a song-thrush comes to the sill, scooping up fatty beakfuls between fearful glances through the glass. By not quite meeting its gaze I can prolong its visitations just beyond my computer.
I trace the sepia chevrons round the creamy swell of its breast, the curve of the pale ring that sets the orb of the eye - this not from any draughtsman's relish but from sudden, sensual pleasure in the intimacy (like being handed a baby to hold). Light flows around the bird's shoulders, wrapping it in golden buffs and deep creams, a radiant warmth. I enjoy the dart of its beak into the goose-fat, the spatter of greasy crumbs: the sheer messy vitality of its feeding.
A few weeks ago, it was already trying to be spring. A pair of cooing collared doves called in, as if drawn by the volume of birdsong in our trees. In the last days of December, a walker in west Cork found precocious dollops of frogspawn. What used to be welcome hints of change are now received more like omens. Thus, the reassertion of winter has reassured those of us who, like John Hewitt, would pace our thought "by the natural world, the earth organic, renewed with the palpable seasons".
Hewitt turned to the glens of Ulster "because men disappoint me", finding in nature a dependable progression and balance, an alternative scenario quite innocent of malice. To experience nature now is constantly to be reminded of how we are warping its rhythms and rules.
Back in the 1980s, when intimations of global warming were beginning to be taken seriously, I suggested they could soon bring a revival of phenology, the study of nature's calendar - dates of bud-bursts and flowerings, first frogspawn, emergence of bumblebees and butterflies, arrivals and departures of migratory birds, first cuckoo calls and so on.
"For those prepared to take the long view, and of settled disposition," I suggested, "a chronicle of local phenology, maintained over the next few decades, could turn out to be a fascinating piece of natural history."
Spring was, in fact, already starting earlier and autumn later. A study last year, using NASA satellite data, found Europe has added another 18 days to the growing season and is markedly greener than 20 years ago. On the most cautious climate scenario, the Royal Irish Academy Committee on Climate Change expects spring to advance by two weeks by mid-century and winter to delay by the same amount. Dry summers with hot Augusts, like that of 1995, seem likely to come around once every three or four years.
All of this, of course, will mark a "typical" year of the medium-term future, distilled from annual averages of years, many of which will present quite different extremes, as in the sodden spring and early summer of 2002.
That rain will fall in bigger lumps seems to me the only certainty.
But phenology, which once had a distinctly Victorian ring about it, has, indeed, been given fresh purpose and scientific value. In the UK it builds on a chronicle of records that began 250 years ago. A network of amateur observers, organised through the Woodland Trust (www.phenology.org.uk), feeds into a national database at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
In Ireland, too, the Native Woodland Trust (www.nativewoodtrust.ie) has joined in the network, using, for the moment, the UK forms. Would-be recorders can e-mail Jim Lawlor at phenology@nativewoodtrust.ie or write to him at Stoneybrook, Kilteel, Co Kildare.
The link to the UK database gives a wider sense of nature in these islands, along with continuing access to one's personal file of records.
Quite separately, the Irish Peatland Conservation Council is now handing out recording sheets for its "Hop To It" national survey of frogs (go to www.ipcc.ie). This will draw schoolchildren in particular to watch for the first frogspawn in local ditches, ponds and streams as well as on the bog itself.
The phenology network has always worn a scientific hat. Without it, we might never have known that, in a "normal" year, spring unrolls northwards across these islands, flower by flower, at a pace of roughly two miles per hour.
What will it profit us to watch for first blossom in the wood anemone, the blackthorn, the lesser celandine, or to note the date of the first buzz of a bumblebee? Are we really so keen to "study climate change and its effect on the environment" and "to demonstrate how it is affecting our wildlife habitats", as the Woodland Trust encourages? Will any of it persuade the human world to stop pumping out CO2?
Undoubtedly not. To watch nature in that objectifying mood will, indeed, remind us constantly how acutely disappointing men are. To watch nature slowly adapting to change, surviving the odds, reordering its species and ecosystems, will connect with Gaia in ways deeper even than loving glances through a window.