Some Birds I Met

This is the ninth of the mid-weekly posts sent to all those on the Birds list. If birds aren’t your thing, and all you want is the weekly Six Things emails, you can unsubscribe from these posts by going to the manage your subscription page. But do have a read anyway – you might find that birds are, after all, your thing. And if they are especially your thing, you can upgrade for £4 a month to access the second half of these emails.

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EVENT KLAXON

On 21st March I’ll be giving an online talk to the Central London RSPB group. The subject is one that’s long fascinated me: Birdsong and Music. It’s free for members, but non-members can join for a small donation. Tickets here.

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Robin

I sat on a bench. Light breeze, low hum, distant helicopter. A London moment.

From the surrounding trees, a flurry, as of bird through foliage. A robin emerged, assessed me, approached. Close it came, and closer still. Almost too close, as if to share a private thought.

Whoa, buddy. Ever hear of a thing called personal space?

I could have reached out and grabbed it, held its tiny warm body in my hand, felt the rapid pulse of its heart against my skin.

I did not do this. Instead, I waited.

The robin waited.

I waited.

The robin waited.

We were in a Pinter play, the robin and I, each moment, beat and pause heavy with meaning, both participants apparently content to allow the silence to settle.

The bird yielded first.

It was a tiny sound, no more than a squiggle bouncing around in its throat. Not for public consumption. Subsong, they call it. I prefer ’small robin trapped in a box’.

What was it saying? Was it Attenborough-ising to itself?

‘This elderly male human, exhausted by what to many might seem a relatively short walk, has stopped for a rest. It will sit for a while, smugly asserting its imaginary right to another’s territory, and completely unaware of the deep visceral loathing I feel towards it.’

Or was it talking to me?

‘Where’s my food? You lot usually bring food. Fuxake, you had one sodding job.’

After a few seconds it trailed away into silence, and the standoff continued.

It gave me fully two minutes of its day, that robin. A short time of unexpected intimacy, a privileged glimpse into the life of an alien being.

Then it flew down, cocked its head, and jabbed at the ground with a sharp movement. From the soft earth it extracted a worm and downed it – still wriggling – in one fluid, brutal movement.

It glanced towards me – did I imagine the crafty wink? – then flew back up into the tree and out of my life.

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Cuckoo

The Cuckoo Project is an excellent thing. For thirteen years the British Trust for Ornithology have been satellite tracking cuckoos on their annual migration to and from Africa. There are currently eight tagged birds whose whereabouts are known – Bluey, Cuach Cores, Cuach Torc, George, Joe, KP, Sayaan and Trent – and they’re all either on their way back, or about to be on their way back, to Britain.

I look at the map, each marker on it a bird taking its own path into the unknown, and if my imagination’s working well enough I can picture them flying high through the night, following a genetic instruction to keep going on and on until they’ve arrived, and then I think about my childhood, when their sound was merely an assumed part of spring, and I think about the miserable fact that the majority of children today have not only not heard a cuckoo but will often have little idea of what one is, and then I have to have a bit of a sit-down for a few minutes to recover.

You can read more about the project here, and you can donate or sponsor a cuckoo here.

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Thanks for reading. That might well be quite enough bird talk for you. If it isn’t, paying subscribers get another bird encounter.