Woodpigeons have a soft, puffed-up appearance, like animated pillows. There is none of the sleekness of the feral pigeon, or the elegance of a collared dove. On a casual glance they seem to be mild-mannered and a little bumbling, a quintessentially Mr Micawberish bird. I can imagine falling asleep with my head on the breast of a giant woodpigeon. But beneath those soft, easily detachable feathers lies a heart filled with passionate feeling.

As I look out of my kitchen window, I see two woodpigeons on my seed feeder, one on each side. The feeder is at least half-full, but even so, the birds are spending more of their time attacking one another than feeding, pecking at one another viciously, first on one side of the plastic tube, then on the other.

Although the birds look identical to us, they can definitely tell one another apart. Sometimes, two birds will feed together in perfect harmony, other times there will be great discord, like today. The whole tree is shaking and I fully expect the feeder to drop off and crash to the ground.

When we first got our (now disintegrating) bird table, I was astonished by the assertiveness of the woodpigeons. When two landed together, they would stand up as tall as they possibly could, and glare at one another. If this didn’t sort out the matter, they would  flick the other bird with their wings, each blow lightning-fast, with an audible ‘click’. Each bird reminded me of a would-be duellist, striking his opponent around the face with a glove. If that didn’t work, the pigeons would fall to pecking one another, until one of them would, eventually, give up and fly away.

The only time I saw the woodpigeons bested was when the starlings and their fledglings emerged.

The pigeon would begin by pecking at any starling that approached too closely, but as more and more birds rained down like hail, sometimes landing on the pigeon’s back, he would become more and more agitated, wheeling round and round until there was more seed on the floor than on the table. It seems that numbers trump size, for the woodpigeon was a giant compared to the starlings and yet he was left flailing around impotently until, with what looked like a kind of despair, he retired to the whitebeam tree to wait them out.

Yet, there is a more joyful, tender side to the woodpigeon.

While I was in Prague for business last week, I watched a male woodpigeon flying in a most peculiar way. With slow wingbeats he soared into the sky and then allowed himself to drop, before raising himself again and then falling through the air. At the top of the loop he would occasionally indulge in a wingclap. It was as if he was riding an invisible rollercoaster. Then, another bird appeared, and he started to fly more directly after her. When she landed on one of the poles that supported the wires for the trams ( her subsequent behaviour made me feel sure that she was female) he settled down beside her, cooing and turning back and forth, and sidling closer and closer to her. She seemed to be in two minds: she allowed him to preen her neck, closing her eyes, and started to crouch down, but as soon as he tried to mount her she flew away, as if panicked by her own wantonness. He followed her as she flew fast and low towards Petrin Hill, until they disappeared against the trees.

Some people call woodpigeons ‘greedy’ and try to dissuade them from their birdtables and feeders. To this, I can only say ‘have you seen the size of the creature?’ Of course woodpigeons eat a lot. They are big birds. They need a lot of seed to keep them going, and this seed is not always available, so they have to make the most of every opportunity.

When I was living in Islington I once found a woodpigeon collapsed in front of our flat. When I picked it up, I could feel how thin it was, with no flesh at all on that soft breast, and its toes twisted and convoluted like a Celtic knot. I put it in a box and headed off to our local vet, a kind man who didn’t turn up his nose at helping urban pigeons and foxes and squirrels. While I was waiting to see him, there was a sudden scratching from the box, and the woodpigeon died. I felt terrible. Had the shock of being captured been too much for it? The vet lifted it out, parted the feathers, looked at the feet.

‘It’s died of starvation’, he said, ‘and it also has a terrible case of bumblefoot – I’m sure it could hardly walk’.

So, I never begrudge the pigeons their sunflower seeds. I enjoy spying on their private lives and their dramas. Just because they are common, familiar birds doesn’t mean that I know or understand them. Like so many creatures that live alongside us, they have complex behaviours that we might never be able to interpret fully. Feeding them gives me the opportunity to get to know them better.

I saw the first one last Sunday, silhouetted against a storm-cloud. It looked austere, purposeful, as it scythed through the air in a long arc. Then, another bird appeared and the two of them flew through impossible turns and twists, shrieking all the way. There seemed to be such a heady joy in it, a complete physical mastery that animals have naturally, and that we so rarely attain.

Swifts are the last of their family to arrive from the south, and the first to leave. By the end of July, they will be gone, unlike the laggard swallows and martins who will be around for weeks. When I lived in Chadwell Heath, out in the distant reaches of Greater London, they nested under the eaves of the 1930’s houses, returning to the same place every year. When it was humid, they would roll through the garden just a metre or so above the lawn, a rumble-tumble gang of squealing hooligans scooping up the mosquitoes that were rising from the ground.

On cooler days I would lie on my back and watch them as they swirled and circled hundreds of metres above my head. Once I studied them for so long that the whole world became inverted, as if I was looking into the sea and gazing on tiny fish rather than looking up. The effect was so disorientating that I had to hang on to the grass for fear of falling into the sky.

Although the swifts were masterful, they had reckoned without my fat, fluffy cat. Bonnie looked as if butter wouldn’t melt, but one day I came into the kitchen without my glasses on, to see something wholly unexpected in her food dish. I squinted, crouched down. There was a live swift, panting.

What to do? I picked it up. Close up a swift is a scimitar of charcoal-brown feathers, a gaping mouth, bottomless black eyes. I turned it over, to see that it has almost no legs, just little feet for hanging on to the nest that they build from mud. No bird spends more of its time in the air than the swift – only the albatross, with its months of oceanic exploration, comes close. Swifts mate on the wing, and even sleep in the air like so many bobbing boats.

I wondered if I could launch the swift again. I took it outside. It was a bright day, and I could hear the other swifts screaming. Would this bird hear them, try to join them? Did I have the guts to just throw it into the air, knowing that if it didn’t fly it would crash to the ground, maybe injure itself even more?

I didn’t have the courage. To this day, I don’t know if that would have been the right thing to do. I put the bird in a box, looked in the phone box, eventually found a bird sanctuary run by a woman in Walthamstow, of all places. Her tone on the phone didn’t give me comfort or hope. She briskly informed that these birds need to eat insects more or less continually, and that they do notoriously badly in captivity. Nonetheless, she was willing to try. For reasons that I can’t now remember, I couldn’t take the bird to her, so I called a taxi, explained my mission, paid him, put an envelope with some money for the sanctuary in with the bird.

The cat rubbed herself around my legs, miaowed.

‘Bugger off’, I said, even as I spooned food into the bowl that had held the swift an hour previously. I understand about the hunting instincts of cats, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. How we reconcile ourselves to the fact that our beloved cats kill birds and mammals and frogs by the hundreds every year is an individual matter, but I am glad that my current rescue cat shows no inclination to go outside.

I never knew what happened to the swift, beyond the fact of its arriving safely at the sanctuary. Part of me didn’t want to know. If I didn’t know for sure, I could look up at the swifts cutting through the air with fierce wings, and imagine that my swift was one of them, barrel-rolling through an airy sea of pollen grains and parachuting spiders, uttering its battle-cry with berserker delight.

A few years later, I met my husband-to-be, and I sold the house. We were packed up ready to move and all the documents had been signed,  but the company who were supposed to be helping us to move let us down. We were marooned, in a house that was no longer ours, but with no way to move on. The new owners were in the garden, hacking down the shrubs that I’d grown for the birds and the bees to make the space more ‘child-friendly’. I wanted to go, but when we finally found removal men who would come and rescue us, it was 5 p.m. and the move would have to wait till the next day.  The new owners were kind enough to let us stay over for one last night. We sat on their bench, in what was now their garden, amidst the debris of the pyracantha and the buddleia and the cotoneaster, and as evening fell the swifts rolled in, dozens of them, rolling and squealing, so fast and frenzied that they seemed like one continuous stream of swifthood. And so I said goodbye to my house in the company of these sky-cutters, and their bravado lifted my heart until I was ready for my new adventure, too.

I woke up on Monday morning to a familar sound:

For me, this is an indication that spring has finally started for real. The starlings of East Finchley have fledged, and emerged from their nests in the hollow trees of Coldfall Wood, and under the eaves of the Victorian houses on the High Road. The babies are ‘parked’ in the trees while the adults find food for them. As they get a little older, they realise that there is something edible on the bird table, and so they join their parents so that they don’t have to wait.

Sometimes, the racket is unbelievable. I have counted fifty starlings in my hawthorn tree, and for a week or so it’s difficult to sleep in past first light. The babies treat the garden as a playground. Some decide to bathe in the pond:

Last year, a fledgling drowned in the pond, so I’ve added a branch to make sure that they can stay safe. But the young starlings are so naive.

An alarm call will sound, because a cat has sneaked in under the hedge, or a sparrowhawk has been spotted, but some of the babies will stay where they are, blinking and looking around without any indication of nervousness.

Last year, I was drinking some tea when I saw a scruffy jay fly past the kitchen window, holding what seemed to be an old book with its pages fallen open. Grabbing my binoculars, I saw that it had a young starling by the wingtip. The jay landed on the flat roof of the shed. The parent birds mobbed it, shrieking and flapping, but it was unfazed, ducking and peering around while the fledgling dangled, shrieking, from its beak. After a few minutes the jay dropped the struggling bird, held it down with a scaly foot, and stabbed it twice, three times with its bill. I winced. I knew that jays were opportunistic, intelligent birds, but I had never seen anything like this. As the jay started to pluck the youngster, the parents flew back to the bird table and collected more mealworms. They must have had another baby close by, maybe hidden in the bushes, and now all their efforts would be concentrated on those who are still alive. Nature is nothing if not pragmatic.

This year, I haven’t noticed any fatalities. I have seen the sparrowhawk twice, each time accompanied by a phalanx of adult starlings, shrieking at it open-billed. The sparrowhawk relies on surprise, so it is not dangerous once it has been spotted.

In a few weeks’ time, it will all be over for another year. The fledglings will be nearly grown, and able to feed for themselves. The noise, and mess will die down, and I will no longer need to top the birdtable up three times a day. But I will miss them. These gregarious, feisty, garrulous birds seem like quintessential Londoners to me.

I remember that, about twenty years ago, there was a massive starling  roost on the island in the middle of St James’s Park. I sat on a bench once with my mother, and we watched the birds flying in from all corners of London. They swirled and roiled in like smoke, the plumes joining together and splitting apart until they finally all settled down. This, along with the great roost in Leicester Square, disappeared years ago, after the spectacle was deemed not to be worth all the noise and mess. These days, I think you need to go to Brighton to watch anything similarly impressive, as the starlings roost under the West Pier. Our urge to tidy and to contain seems to me to make the world a smaller, less interesting place.

 

I’m sure that any bird-lover will empathise with my reaction when I came back from a few days with my parents to see this scene of carnage in the garden. I often fear that, by providing food, I am luring some creatures into danger. I position the feeders and birdtable so that it isn’t easy for birds to be ambushed, but clearly something serious has happened here.

The feathers are just by the edge of the pond, so I imagine that the bird was attempting to drink when something made a grab for it. However, there is no corpse. I crouch down to have a closer look, and see if I can piece events together.

First, I want to see if I can identify which kind of bird these feathers belong to. It’s clearly a largish bird, probably some kind of pigeon. I find a small clump of soft feathers, tinged with a pinkish blush. The colour tells me that they belong to a woodpigeon. The nature of the feathers, their soft fluffiness, tells me that they are from the breast. There are a lot of them.

Mixed amongst the breast feathers, which come very easily out of the flesh, are the flight feathers, which don’t.

Woodpigeons have a black stripe at the end of the tail, and black primary feathers in the wing.

I imagine the bird flying up in a panic, its assailant jumping up at it and sweeping at it with a hooked claw.

So, my initial assumption was that a woodpigeon had been surprised by a cat. Judging by the volume of feathers, it was quite a fight. There is no blood, so maybe the bird got away, or maybe it was simply carried away to be tortured and eaten elsewhere. There is, however, one other possible explanation.

Just before Christmas, I opened the kitchen door to find a sparrowhawk glaring at me with great psychotic orange eyes. It had its talons embedded in a dead woodpigeon. I shut the door, and it turned back to its task of plucking its prey, tearing out the soft feathers of the breast which fell back on to the patio like snowflakes. I ran upstairs to get my husband and we both goggled at this strange visitor until, with more irritation than fear, it clutched the corpse of the woodpigeon with the talons of one foot and, with two or three strong downstrokes of its dappled wings, swerved over the garden fence and off, to eat its prey in peace.

Was this enormous pile of feathers a sign that this enigmatic bird had returned, and plucked its prey on the stones by the pond?

Of course, I will never know. But although the end result for the woodpigeon is the same, my heart lifts when I think that maybe it died to feed a wild hunter, rather than fell victim to someone’s bored pet. As the bluebottles buzz over the feathers and the soft breast fluff blows away into the wallflowers, it humbles me to think of the drama that is happening every day in my tiny back garden, the lives lost, the stomachs filled, the territories fought over and the babies born. If I lived to be five hundred, I would never be short of something to write about.