MAGICAL month of May, the most colourful time of the year.

Blossom is at its radiant best; birdsong reaches a crescendo in the middle of the month; fledglings are hatching and shrilly demanding to be fed while dragonflies and damselflies (pictured) and the first butterflies are on the wing.

Frothy cascades of hawthorn blossom pervade the air with their delightful heady scent.

Mainly white but sometimes pink they flower above an under storey of Queen Anne’s lace while at ground level, golden dandelions, lawn daisies and alkanet are a delight to the eye.

In shady spots, violets, stitchwort, and alkanet bloom among a host of wild flowers, many covered in bubbly cuckoo spit.

I love lilac. In my parents' garden grew a white lilac tree that I liked to climb as a boy and watch a constant stream of white butterflies flutter through the garden.

If I sat in that tree now I guarantee that I would be fortunate to see one or at best two whites flying through, let alone dozens.

Mayflies flicker weakly from the river’s surface to begin their short lives, made even shorter as many are snapped up by swifts, swallows and martins before they can even reach the safety of the bank.

We had a typical very brief chilly interlude in mid-May known as a ‘Buchan’s cold spell’, named after Alexander Buchan, a Scottish meteorologist who predicted such cool periods at certain times of the year.

But there is something missing. Has any reader heard a cuckoo this year?