Six Birds I encountered recently
Bird 1 – Wood pigeon
Agitation above. More than just the usual everyday rustlings of birds going about their business, this is a proper fracas – leaves and branches shaking and clattering. I stop, look up, wonder what’s causing it. Is it a squirrel trying to get out of a straitjacket?
It is not.
Wood pigeons aren’t subtle birds. Big, plump, ubiquitous. You might see one breaking cover, wings whistling and slapping against the surrounding foliage; or strutting around under the garden feeder, hoovering up the mess left behind by other, more profligate birds; or, frankly, pretty much anywhere, their distinctive silhouette barging the air aside as they rush from one place to another on a secret wood pigeon mission.
Their ubiquity does them no favours. Either reviled (talk to a farmer), taken for granted (even the shortest walk yields at least one sighting – ‘oh, yeah, wood pigeon, whatever’), or lumped in with their leaner feral cousins, their attractions often go unnoticed.
In the interests of finding pleasure in the commonplace (and don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the tree-based brouhaha with which I opened), here are just three things to love about wood pigeons.
That white collar, stroke of a half-charged paintbrush
That iridescence on the neck
Mad eye
The little display flight they do, rising to crest the wave, float up, wing clap at the top, float down. Lovely stuff.
Ok, that was four things. Sue me.
Anyway, this wood pigeon – the one that isn’t a squirrel – is, as I say, in a state of agitation. I can just about glimpse it as it thrashes away in the heights of the tree. Well enough to identify it, anyway. But mostly I can feel its distress – signals emitted at a frequency we barely register, but somehow recognise as troubled.
What it’s distressed about isn’t immediately obvious.
And then Bird 2 bursts out of the foliage about a foot lower down, and all becomes clear.
Bird 2 – Carrion crow
Black dart spearing out of the foliage, leaving in its wake a cloud of pigeon wrath. As it flies overhead I see the scrap of white in its beak, a viscous globule trailing behind it. The wood pigeon’s despair and fury are explained.
The crow doesn’t waste any time. It finds a patch of grass nearby and sets about its work. It’s lost some of the egg’s innards en route, and now makes short work of the rest, holding the shell down with its foot and pecking busily at the last remains of the pigeon that would never be.
At one point it looks towards me with a defiant air.
‘Yes, I’m eating a pigeon egg. What of it? I’m a crow. IT’S WHAT WE DO.’
A fair point, persuasively made.
For a while it looks as if its lack of opposable digits will hamper its efforts. It fiddles, it fumbles, it prods the broken egg around the grass. But it just can’t break it up into manageable pieces. Then, with a visible ‘ah, fuck it’ demeanour, it clamps the remaining fragment in its beak, flings back its head, and down goes the shell in one ugly movement.
Do not mess with crows.
Bird 3 – Chiffchaff
It’s gone quiet. The mid-spring peak, birdsong electrifying the air, has faded in the memory, and now the summer lull is upon us. Peace reigns. A pleasant, somnolent peace, welcome after recent wind and rain. A tranquil woodland scene, disturbed only by occasional peeps and creaks and the gentle susurration of wind in the leav—
CHIFF
CHAFF
CHIFF
CHAFF
CHIFF
CHAFF
CHIFF
CHAFF
CHIFF
CHAFF
CHIFF
CHAFF
Oh for fuck’s sake.
There’s a short story in this somewhere. The Last Chiffchaff. Doggedly holding on into July, giving its insistent song, like (as described by the excellent Melissa Harrison) a toddler with a glockenspiel.
Some context.
Chiffchaff singing in early March – YES HELLO SPRING SPRING SPRING
Chiffchaff singing in early July – give it up mate, it’s over.
Pure anthropomorphism, I know, but where the March song has a jaunty freshness, the July version is tinged with jaded ennui. It’s as if the bird is locked into a cycle from which it can’t escape, doomed to repeat its monotonous song until the time comes to make the journey south again.
Chiff. Chaff. Chiff. Chaff. Chiff. Chaff.
And so the long day wears on.
Bird 4 – Green woodpecker
A restless night under canvas. The white noise of rain on tent should soothe. Instead, it enervates.
I drift in and out of consciousness. Weird, disturbed dreams. The boundary between real and imagined is blurred. Odd sounds, odder images.
A harsh yelp of mocking laughter. Either in my head or somewhere outside. Difficult to tell. It jolts me awake, in any case, and I spend a few seconds in a state of mild panic. And then my conscious mind clicks in and reassures me.
It’s just a green woodpecker.
‘Just’ a green woodpecker it may be, but for a semi-conscious sleep-deprived camper it’s a sound to send chills down the spine.
No more sleep till dawn.
Bird 5 – Skylark
A coastal walk.
Genuine, chiffchaff-free, tranquility. Butterflies flit, grasses sway, the view across the water hits the parts a green woodpecker’s song can’t. A general feeling of benevolent wossname prevails.
Oh my creamy England of years gone by etc etc. You can almost hear the Vaughan Williams starting up.
And as if tuning into the vibe, a distant squirruping from on high. Higher than high and then up again.
No use looking for it, but I do anyway, raising the binoculars and scanning the cerulean void blue sky more in hope than expectation.
By some miracle, I find it. A wriggling, squiggling scrap of a thing, giving its ceaseless song to anyone or anything that cares to listen.
I do. I care to listen.
Bird 6 – ?
Down to the bay, the sound of the sea intensifying. Three goldfinches chirple merrily from a bush. A disconsolate herring gull lopes gamely over the foaming wash. Other than that, nothing to report.
Wait.
What.
That.
WHAT?
That sound. That ‘whee-uu’.
What of it?
I DON’T KNOW. THAT’S THE POINT.
I mean…
THERE IT IS AGAIN.
Whee-uu.
I go through the database of sounds in my head, trying to differentiate this whee-uu from all the whee-ips, whoo-ups and wheo-ee-ops.
Nope. Nope. Not that. Nope. Nope. Definitely not that. Never that.
So what is it?
I want it to be a rarity, and somewhere deep in the back of my mind it rings the faintest of bells. Something unlikely but not beyond the realms of possibility. But my database is deficient, I don’t have the experience or knowledge, and I’m fully aware that the likelihood of it being a rarity is slim. That’s what ‘rare’ means.
But still. Might it possibly be?
I’ll probably never know.
The little display flight of a wood pigeon puts me in mind of an 8 year old boy cresting a small humpback bridge on a bike and sticking his legs out to get the maximum flying freedom as the boy and the bicycle soar downwards.
"I do. I care to listen."
Those two short sentences of yours are why I care to read your words and why I now listen. Thank you.