One hundred yards from our front door is a rookery. It sits at this end of the local golf course, and their large high rise housing estate of nests is located amongst the Scots pines. You get used to them, their occasional squabbles with the local neds - the seagulls, their alarms when the buzzard flies too near, and the daily exit near dusk when they go wherever rooks go to roost.
Rooks are amongst the best problem solvers. And what about this, rooks have been trained to pick up litter in a theme park in France! They have an unerring instinct for calculating weight bearing twigs. I've never seen one land on a twig and have to hop to another because it broke. From my study window they gather for what looks like a game of chicken, will this twig hold two of us?
My love of birds goes back to earliest days in Ayrshire, and my knowledge of them gleaned from my father, several older farm workers, Ladybird Books, I Spy Birds, The Observer's Book of Birds and The Observer Book of Bird's Eggs. Later I graduated to The AA Book of British Birds, and from there to whatever I could get my hands on at whatever library I joined. The satisfaction I've had identifying birds by sight, flight or call, down the years of my life has been one of the gentler joys and one of the great legacies of growing up on farms.
So when I have my camera, I look for birds. I don't have a sophisticated camera; it has limited zoom and no filters; it is now 10 years old; I'm reluctant to replace it for one that will almost certainly do better. But there are plenty brilliant photos which other people can take and put out there online. I'm looking for that moment when man and bird are far enough away to respect each others' space and near enough for a good look at each other. This blue tit came into the garden the day after lock down, a harbinger of hope, a fragile, flitting presence like a tiny angel with its own tentative annunciation, "All shall be well...I hope!"
Birds do that. They fly in and out of our lives, and if we take time to notice them, and pay attention to the gift they are, they can become therapy on wings. Throughout these weeks we have seen the usual suspects, but also the coal tit, black cap, red kite, skylark, yellowhammer, and wren. No photographs of these, just the memory, and the satisfaction of the brief encounter.
I have a Folio Society Volume of John Clare's Bird Poems, complete with woodcuts. He wrote in records, poems and journals the details of 147 species of British wild birds, and wrote the first full descriptions of 65 birds found in Northamptonshire alone. Clare was a farm labourer, an observer, a careful note taker and record keeper, his knowledge of the countryside, habitats and habits of British wildlife quite astonishing.
He suffered from severe mental illness, and much of his later life is sadly marred by increasingly severe mental ill health. Yet despite such long periods of illness, in the combination of minute and persistent observation, and poetic imagination and feel for words, he has given some of the most lyrical and accurate descriptions of birds and their nests anywhere in the English language.
On one of our walks we were under observation ourselves. High enough up to be safe, it looked down with complacent unconcern, bird watching from the bird's perspective. We decided not to risk walking beneath this super-kilo wood pigeon. But that sky, framing a sumo class pigeon, once again took me outside my own head to look at what is there all the time. It is ironic, and to my own loss, when I make so little time to notice, enjoy and simply celebrate life as gift too easily taken for granted.
Jesus did tell us to "Look at the birds of the air..." And that was in the context of human worry and anxious concern about tomorrow. "Your Heavenly Father knows, " Jesus said. Bird watching as open air therapy, self-care, ekstasis - being taken out of one's own head!
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