Cranes at dawn: April mornings on the Tyrelis boardwalk

Plank 1

Leaving the city in the dark

In the middle of April the sun comes up over Šiauliai a little before half past six, and on a clear morning the sky starts to pale a good while earlier. We aim to be on the first boards by half past five. That means bikes out of the stairwell at five, lights on, and a quiet ride past the garages and the allotments while the city behind us is still mostly dark. Whoever lives furthest out usually arrives last, carrying the thermos, and is forgiven for it every single time.

The ride matters more than it sounds. By the time we lock the bikes at the start of the boardwalk our ears have adjusted to the quiet, and the first thing we always notice is how much noise the bog makes before anything can be seen. Snipe are drumming somewhere over the wetter hollows, a thin wind moves in the pines, and, if we are lucky and the air is still, there is a sound like someone blowing bubbles through a straw into a bucket. That is the black grouse.

Plank 2

What the cranes sound like from the planks

Cranes come back to the bogs around Šiauliai in March, often while there is still snow lying in the ditches, and by April most pairs have settled on a territory. The call everyone knows is the loud bugling overhead, but the one we listen for at dawn is the duet: two birds calling in answer to each other, one voice higher than the other, so tightly timed that it sounds like a single animal with two throats.

We do not go looking for them. Cranes nest on the ground in the wettest and least visited parts of the bog, and a sitting bird that is flushed leaves its eggs to cool. The whole point of a boardwalk is that it keeps people on a line the birds have learned to tolerate, and we treat that line as a promise. If a pair is standing near the planks, we stop, keep our voices down and let them walk off in their own time rather than pressing on for a better look.

Plank 3

Black grouse, snipe and the rest of the dawn chorus

The black grouse display in the open middle of the bog, where the pines thin out to scattered, stunted trees no taller than a person. The males gather at first light and make two sounds: a long bubbling coo that rolls on for minutes, and a sudden sneezing hiss, a bit like a cat meeting a dog. From the boardwalk they are usually dark specks with a flash of white under the tail, and binoculars help a great deal.

Around them the bog fills up with smaller voices as the light grows. Meadow pipits parachute down singing, tree pipits start up from the tops of the last pines, and wood sandpipers yodel over the pools once they arrive at the end of the month. A cuckoo usually joins in from the forest fringe in the last days of April. None of this is rare, but it is loud, and the mix of open sky, wet moss and a dozen songs at once is the reason we keep setting alarms for a quarter to five.

• A bubbling coo that rolls on for minutes: black grouse, out on the open bog
• A short, harsh hiss, repeated: the same black grouse, showing off
• A hollow, wavering hum from high up: snipe drumming with their tail feathers
• Two bugling voices in tight answer: a crane pair duetting
• A trill that falls with a bird dropping out of the sky: meadow pipit

Plank 4

How to stand still on a boardwalk

The hardest part of a dawn walk is not getting up. It is stopping. Four people on narrow planks make more noise than they think: boots on wet wood, zips, the thermos lid, a whispered question that is not quite a whisper. We have learned to walk for ten minutes and stop for five, and we agree before setting off where the stops will be. The places where the boardwalk widens are best for this, because nobody has to stand in anyone's way while we listen.

Standing still in April also means getting cold. The clear sky that gives the best sound gives a hard frost as well, and even at the end of the month the planks can be white at dawn. We wear more than seems sensible when leaving the flat, a hat that covers the ears without muffling them, and gloves thin enough to hold binoculars. Anyone who has stood for twenty minutes on an open bog at minus three in April knows that the wind does not read the calendar.

Plank 5

What goes in the notebook

Back at the bikes, usually around half past seven, someone takes the notebook out of its bag and we fill in the morning before we forget it. The columns have not changed since the first spring: time on the boards, temperature, wind, cranes heard, cranes seen, grouse, anything new for the year, and one line about the light. That last column began as a joke and has become the one we read back most often, because it is the one that brings the morning back.

Over four springs the notebook has shown us a few things we would not have guessed. The first crane duet we hear at Tyrelis has come a little earlier in each year we have kept notes, though four years is nowhere near enough to call that a pattern. Still mornings after a frost are always the loudest. And the ride home through Šiauliai at eight, among people cycling to work, never stops feeling like coming back from somewhere much further away than it is.