When I visit my family home in Worcestershire I like to start the day with a walk around the fields behind my house. Today was a damp and dreary day, but I stomped out across the muddied and wet fields nonetheless, with fairly low expectations of what I might see.

I was pleasantly surprised, seeing great tits and blue tits flitting about in the bushes lining the fields. I also saw a jay in the distance, alerted to it by its screech as it flew from the ground back into the relative safety of a group of fir trees.

Stephen Moss describes this period as the strange limbo between winter and spring. The land has exhaled an icy blast across the countryside, and now it is silently breathing in again before it releases the lush green breath of spring.

A mixed flock of redwings and fieldfares were still to be found feeding in a small group of trees next to a small pool on the corner of a field. They’ve been there all winter, but now they’re feeding as they prepare to fly back to Scandinavia. These winter visitors were joined by a nearby song thrush, blasting away its repetitive song. The song thrush is easy to recognise by song alone because it repeats one riff three or four times and then moves onto the next, repeats that and then moves on again, and so on. I imagined I could see the exact spot where this one was in a bush, by pinpointing where the song was coming from. But really, this bird, with a soft brown back and mottled yellow underbelly, was buried deep in the thicket, invisible despite being distinctly audible.

Finally, as I paused to take in the view further along the bridleway that weaves its way between the fields, I heard a familiar, abridged sound. I stopped and waited to hear it again, to see if I was mistaken or if I was indeed right. Yes! It was the unmistakable “little bit of bread and no cheese” call of the yellowhammer. This was my first yellowhammer of 2013, and I even spotted it, perched in the top of a tree. It was far too dull and dark to pick out its mixed bright yellows and browns, but the call is unmistakable.

A walk in the rain on a grey Sunday morning brought pleasant surprises and more life than I expected. Later today I’ll be celebrating my Grandad’s 80th birthday in the pub just around the corner. I want to dedicate this post to him – he has walked the Malvern Hills his whole life and his dedication to this place helped to teach me my love of the countryside.