The first green.

The first green is the earliest sign of spring, a faint wash of colour that appears at the edges of the fields before anything else has moved. It is the thin, pale shoot through the soil, the first grass greening at the base of a south-facing bank, the small brave beginnings that come while the world still looks brown. And it matters because it announces more than itself. Where the first green appears, the storks are near.

The earliest signs

The first green is easy to miss, and that is part of its charm. It comes quietly, a softening of colour at the edge of the thaw, the earliest shoots pushing up through the still-cold earth. It does not announce itself the way the blossom will, with scent and show. It simply begins, a faint tint in the grey-brown land, and only the people who watch closely catch it at the very start. The rest of the world catches up later.

What the green means

For a stork, the first green is not a decoration but a signal. It means the ground is thawing, the insects are stirring, the long frozen season is loosening its grip. A stork will not fly north into a dead, brown land. It waits for the green, for the first proof that the feeding will be good, and then it comes. The first green and the first stork belong to the same story, two chapters of the same return.

The greening fields

The green does not stay faint for long. Within a week or two it spreads, and the fields take on the soft colour of early spring, the colour that seems to glow a little even under a grey sky. This is the colour of the season the storks return to, the greening country that will feed them through the long summer. To watch a field turn green is to watch the table being laid for the birds, a little at a time, in shades of pale green.

The bird in the green

And then, into the green, comes the bird. There is no moment more satisfying in the whole year than the sight of a white stork standing in a field of first green, the pale shoots rising around its long red legs. It is the meeting of the two great signs of spring, the colour and the wing, the season's two promises fulfilled at once. The first green announced the stork, and now the stork confirms the green, and the year is well and truly begun.

Watching for it

So watch for the first green this year, and take it seriously. It is not just the beginning of the growing season; it is the first word of the sentence that ends with the stork's return. The shoot through the soil, the greening bank, the faint wash of colour in the field, these are the messengers that come before the bird. Read them, and you will not be surprised when the white shape appears over the greening land. You will have been expecting it all along.