Dear Readers, I am currently reading Joe Harkness’s ‘Bird Therapy’, which describes how the author found birdwatching to be a solace following a breakdown. I am finding it inspirational, because it not only tells the author’s story (which is fascinating), but is also full of lots of practical advice. Harkness has structured the book around the ‘five ways to wellbeing’ which have been endorsed by the mental health charity MInd. They are: to connect, to take notice, to give, to keep learning and to be active. The author points out that these five things are intrinsic to birdwatching, and it also felt like a helpful way for me to think about my relationship to my blog.

I have long thought that contact with nature is deeply healing: one problem with the way that most of us live these days is that we are lonely and disconnected from the world around us in a way that even our grandparents weren’t. Before I started this blog, I couldn’t have named more than half a dozen of the ‘weeds’ that grow in the garden. Trees were a mystery. The great benefit of Bugwoman the Blog is that it has been an incentive to actually go out and use my senses, and one thing that has delighted me to excess is that I have learned to identify the calls of some of the birds that surround me. There is a meditative quality to sitting in the garden and just listening that is deeply calming, and there is something exciting about hearing a bird that I haven’t heard before. I thought that, today, I would share with you a few of the experiences that have raised my spirits over the past few years. Do let me know what birdsong has meant to you!

It was a wet Easter Friday morning in 2015, and I was trudging around Coldfall Wood, my head full of worries. Already Mum and Dad were unwell, and I felt thoroughly weighed down. It took a good half an hour before I noticed the birdsong. It was a virtuoso performance, with each refrain being repeated several times, urgently. I could hear another bird answering some distance away. Finally, I managed to actually spot the bird. It was the first song thrush that I had ever noticed, and I was entranced. I stood and listened with rain pouring off my kagoule, all alone in the wood, and for a few moments everything stopped. A few years later a songthrush visited me in the garden, but it is that song in the wood that I remember – I know that I marched out of the woods with my heart lifted.

The song thrush was a new bird to me, but the robin is ubiquitous. Yet, I feel as if I have spent the first fifty years of my life paying no attention what so ever to the bird’s song. In Coldfall Wood, in spring, you pass from one songster’s territory to another, without ever being out of earshot of that tumble of melody. Furthermore, robins sing with such gusto and confidence that they will carry on even while you stand underneath ‘their’ tree. Although robins sing all year, they are never so vocal as in spring. I filmed the one below in March, when the year had already turned towards the sun, although we humans might not have noticed.

A sound that I always find exciting is not really a song – it’s the soft ‘tseep’ contact call of a flock of long-tailed tits as they clamber like miniature monkeys through a shrub. If you’ve never heard it (and it’s one of those sounds that you need to ‘tune in’ to ) you can have a listen here. Once I hear it, though, I have to stop and look around. My very best experience of these birds was in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, when I unexpectedly came upon this little group. Newly fledged ‘bumbarrels’! If there is a more adorable bird in the UK I have yet to meet it.

And finally, there is the song that tells me that, for many birds, the hard work of the year is almost over. Every May, there is a morning when I am woken up by the feeding calls of dozens of fledged starlings, all waiting for their poor patient parents to feed them. The first time I heard it, I had to rush to the window to see what on earth was going on, what with all the wheezing and squealing. I love the way that the birds come every year, and I wonder if the local starlings remember that there is always food here. That sense of continuity, of the wheel of the seasons still turning, is reassuring, especially in these tumultuous times.

But I couldn’t leave this subject without mentioning the healing effects of birdsong, even when the birds are not present. Long-time readers of this blog might remember that my mother was hospitalised at Christmas when she came to visit me in London back in 2016. The Whittington Hospital in North London saved her life, and she lived for another two years, during which time she celebrated her sixtieth wedding anniversary to my dad. Here is what I wrote about it at the time.

‘It used to be that hospital wards were full of flowers, the stink of lilies and gently decomposing chrysanthemums rising above the smell of antiseptic and hospital cooking. But now, all plants are banned ‘for hygiene reasons’. Probably the nurses are so overworked that they don’t have time to cope with browning foliage and wilting poinsettias. But I can’t help thinking that something alive and beautiful is as important for healing as drips and antibiotics. Mum’s bunker looked completely sterile. But I had underestimated her.

At Christmas dinner, I had handed out some crackers that I’d bought from a wildlife charity. Each one contained a card that, when opened, released a snippet of bird song. The game was to guess which bird was singing – nightingale, blue tit, wren? Mum had put the cards in her bag. When the very important Consultant and his two trainees came along to see how she was doing, she produced one of the cards and pushed it into the Big Man’s hand.

‘Open that’, she said.

He looked at her askance, and opened the card. The sound of a song thrush in full-throat filled the bare room, flooding the place with the sound of woodland wildness.

The consultant’s face changed. He closed the card and opened it again. He turned to the two trainees.

‘I know you want to go home’, he said to them, ‘But listen to this!’

And he ‘played’ the song again, before closing the card and handing it back to Mum with a bow’

Dear Readers, the Memorial service for my Mum is taking place this Saturday (2nd February) at 11 a.m. at St Andrews Church in Milborne St Andrew.  I will write a little more about this soon, but in the meantime I just wanted to say thank you for the kindness and support that you have shown to me during this awful time. It has been such a comfort.

Dear Readers, every year it seems to be the same. I settle down to record the birds in my garden for the Big Garden Birdwatch (which is in its fortieth year this year), and all the unusual critters disappear. But data is data, and so I am only mildly irritated when one of the two feral pigeons who use the garden turns up and claims the ‘bird table’ for 30 minutes. I have named this one ‘Gladys’, for reasons that I find it difficult to explain. She is a very elegant bird (and may indeed be a male, though I have spotted her being courted by another pigeon so I am hedging my bets). She is, however, something of a dog in a manger. When she has eaten her fill she just sits there, and sees off all comers. Yes, even the starlings.

I have a great fondness for pigeons, as regular readers will know, but I only have an hour to get my beak count up, so I wish she’d get a move on. For those of you who don’t know about the Big Garden Birdwatch, you watch the birds in your garden, or in a local park, for an hour and record the maximum number of each species that you see. It is always on the last weekend in January, so over the years a lot of data has been collected. It highlights the relative gains and losses in Britain’s gardens, and has recorded the sad decline in species such as the house sparrow, starling and, particularly, the greenfinch. It will be interesting to see what trends this year’s Birdwatch reveals.

At the moment a flock of four chaffinches are regular visitors, and what a delight they are. At least Gladys doesn’t dissuade them.

It is a particularly blustery day, and the birds that turn up in the garden seem to be blown in by the wind. I am always moved by how resilient they are, and how energetic. Gladys hasn’t moved, but there are a few other visitors. A great tit appears, and some blue tits are zipping in and out of the hedge. The coal tit who always visits the suet feeder decides not to put in an appearance until one minute after the Birdwatch is finished.

As it is such a quiet time for birds, I have plenty of time to reflect on how my garden was neglected last year. Regular readers will know that my mother died towards the end of last year following a long period of ill health, and that my father was diagnosed with dementia which has gotten increasingly serious. As I look out at the pond (which should have been cleared in autumn) and some of the shrubs (which could have done with a prune) and as I notice the bramble that has advanced over the back fence and is now rooting next to the shed, I realise that there is plenty to do as soon as the weather warms up a little, and that I am rather looking forward to getting things back into order. I find myself drifting off into a reverie about what to do first and how to improve things, and I realise that when all else fails, there is always gardening. It is one of those projects that never ends, and which is all the better for it.

And then I notice a tiny movement in the bittersweet vine, and get a fleeting glimpse of a male blackcap rooting around amongst the berries. It’s too short a visit to get a photo, but it does give me the pleasure of manually adding a species to the list of ‘normal’ garden species on the Birdwatch form. I love how intensely black the cap of this bird is, like soot, and I have also spotted an attractive redheaded female blackcap, so maybe there is a pair. I saw a blackcap during last year’s Birdwatch too, so it gives me great pleasure to see the species again.

The regular goldfinches turn up amid a flurry of chime-like calls. I love the chequerboard pattern on their wings. Resident goldfinches are supplemented by visitors from Scandinavia in the winter. They are always such a pleasure to have in the garden. They are reputed to love nyger seed, but in my garden they  always head straight for the sunflower hearts, which I suspect are easier to eat than all those tiddly little black seeds. What I love most, though, is when I see goldfinches feeding on teasel or thistle. I might give teasel another go this year.

It does seem to be a bumper year for blackbirds, though. There is at least one pair, and a few random males, who are seen off by the resident male if they get too close to the female but are otherwise pretty much tolerated. I believe that all this will change soon when breeding gets going: blackbirds breed early, so it probably won’t be much longer, though the current cold spell will have slowed things up.

Finally, Gladys gets bored, and everyone else gets a look in. I count 17 starlings in the lilac bush, waiting to see who will be brave enough to feed first. I imagine that having a range of personalities in a population of animals is a great advantage – sometimes fortune will favour the bold, and at other times it’s wiser to hang back. During last years Big Garden Birdwatch, I was visited by a sparrowhawk, and at that time discretion was definitely the better part of valour. This year, though, all was peaceful, and this starling had a couple of minutes of peace before the inevitable onslaught.

I did manage to record one species that I hadn’t been able to ‘catch’ in previous years. I took a look at the cherry tree that overhangs the garden (and so is fine for recording purposes as far as I’m concerned), and there was a song thrush in it. I found an empty snail shell on the path this morning, so I am very hopeful that the bird is eating my molluscs, though it could just be coincidence. Here is a photo from last year. Could it be the same individual, I wonder?

And so, the hour draws to a close, and I am not unhappy with my tally. As is always the way, a dunnock and a wren pop up five minutes later and a more unusual group of visitors, some long-tailed tits, swarm the whitebeam a quarter of an hour later. There is something so soothing about just sitting and looking out of the window, and all in the name of science. I enjoyed it so much that I shall be keeping my eyes open for other ‘citizen science’ projects this year. Do let me know if you are involved in any such shenanigans!

And to close, here is one of the photos that I’m most proud of in all my years of being Bugwoman – some fledgling  long-tailed tits spotted in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery. It’s too early for the birds that I saw today to be breeding just yet, but I am hopeful for later in the year. These are the most adorable bundles of fuzz, and I was so glad to be in the right place at the right time for once. It’s always good to take the time to really look, whether it’s during a walk or in my own garden. I honestly never know who is going to turn up.

 

Dear Readers, once I returned to London after having a very subdued Christmas with my Dad, I felt a desperate need to reconnect with both my physical self and the world around me. I have found that grieving involves both a closing down and an opening up – I spend a lot of time with my memories, but I am also vulnerable to the world around me, as if all the emotional bludgeoning of the past few years had tenderised me like a steak.

For example, I was travelling on the tube the other day when a woman got on with a small, elderly dog. He was a grizzled creature, slightly wobbly on his legs, his eyes bulging in their socket, his tongue lolling out as he peered around the carriage. And then he staggered over to me and looked up with an expression of such trust and hope that I started to cry all over his innocent head. Fortunately there are many deranged people on the Northern Line, and so my outburst went unnoticed and unremarked, except by the dog,  who tried to lick my tears and wagged his tail so vigorously that he fell over.

And so, the next day,  I went to Hampstead Heath for a brisk walk and there, on the boating pond, I saw a cormorant and realised that I had never really seen one before.

Look at that extraordinary frosting on the bird’s head, the red chin! My camera was at the limit of its magnification, but the bird is blue-eyed. In North Norway the bird is considered to be the incarnation of souls lost at sea, whose bodies have never been recovered.  Their Latin genus name, Phalacrocorax, is said to mean ‘bald raven’ and the name ‘cormorant’ may be a direct contraction of the Latin ‘corvus marinus, or ‘sea raven’. There’s something about black-plumaged birds, whether crows or cormorants,  that awakens the Gothic imagination, and for many people the birds represent the spirits of the departed. Plus, as Adam Nicholson remarks in his wonderful book  ‘The Seabird’s Cry‘ , the bird is invoked in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ as the very incarnation of Satan:

‘Up he flew, and on the Tree of Life

The middle tree, and highest there that grew,

Sat like a cormorant; yet not true life

Thereby regained, but sat devising Death

to them who liv’d.’

Cormorants are regarded by many anglers as direct competition, and in spite of the bird’s protected status it is often illegally killed. This is, as so often, a pointless exercise: if a prime fishing site becomes vacant, other cormorants will move in. Plus, for such a big bird the cormorant’s daily food requirements are quite modest, with each creature requiring less than a kilo of fish. The birds are exquisitely designed to hunt fish underwater, and have jaws which they can dislocate to eat much bigger fish than you’d think, but they spend much of their time perched up, drying their wings and surveying their kingdom with a haughty air. In summer, with babies to feed, the birds catch all the fish that they can but in winter they hunt more strategically, waiting for larger, more torpedo-shaped fish, so as to not waste valuable energy that could be used to keep themselves warm.

The UK has a resident cormorant population of about 9,000 pairs, who live mostly in coastal regions, and who are extremely faithful to their nest sites, building up their nests with twigs year after year. However, in the winter their numbers are swollen by a further 41,000 birds who spend the cold weather on rivers, lakes and reservoirs. There is a huge cormorant nesting site on one of the islands in Walthamstow Wetlands, however, so to see the dinosaur-like nestlings of this remarkable bird, it’s worth bringing your binoculars to north-east London.

Why, though, do the birds spend so long with their wings outspread? Other water birds who dive, such as tufted ducks and gannets, have no need to do this, and indeed some species of cormorant don’t do it either, particularly the wonderfully named Antarctic Blue-Eyed Shag (Phalacrocorax atriceps bransfielden). There has been much heated debate on the subject in the scientific community, but the conclusion as far as I could see seemed to be that the plumage of cormorants is not as water-repellent as that of some other birds and so, in suitable climates, they need to dry out their feathers before they are able to fly. For our friend the Antarctic Blue-Eyed Shag, however, hanging around revealing your wingpits would have the added effect of lowering body temperature due to exposure to the icy blasts of the Antarctic wind, and would not help significantly with the speed of drying, and so the bird sensibly keeps its wings shut. Animal behaviour is often much more nuanced and cued to context than we understand, unless we take the time to really look.

If this posture looks a little familiar, it may be because the cormorant is the model for Liverpool’s emblem, the Liver Bird.

There are actually two Liver birds on the Liver building, but they face away from one another. One was designed to watch the sea (‘our prosperity’) and one to watch the city (‘our people’). The legend goes that if that two birds actually mated and flew away, it would mean the end of Liverpool, and that’s why they are chained to their perches. The birds are officially known as Bella and Bertie, and they are eighteen feet long, ten feet high and each carry a sprig of laver seaweed in their beaks (a pun on ‘Liver’).

In the interests of illuminating a trap for the unwary, I should point out that the ‘Liver’ in ‘Liver birds’ rhymes with ‘fiver’, whereas in ‘Liverpool’ it rhymes with ‘hither’. Go figure.

And for any folks ‘of a certain age’, who could forget the weekly antics of The Liver Birds on BBC1, as they tottered around Liverpool in their Afghan coats, mini skirts and knee-length white patent boots, looking for love and trying to cope with the vagaries of work and their social lives? Like so many British comedies of the period, it was very much about class. Beryl, played by Polly James, was the ‘common’ working-class one,  and Nerys Hughes played Sandra, who was the more softly-spoken, refined one.

The programme ran for 9 series, from 1969 right through to the end of the seventies, and it was a fixture in our household. We watched agog with our dinner plates on our laps (we didn’t really have room for a dining table). If we were lucky, Mum would have made ‘spammy hedgehogs’. This was a pile of mashed potato with spam ‘quills’ and tomato ketchup for eyes. Sometimes we would have eggy sunflowers, which was a fried egg surrounded by chip ‘petals’. My Mum was such a creative person that even a cheap dinner would be transformed into a masterpiece.

But I digress, as usual.

I would like to leave you with a poem by Ted Hughes. I know a lot of Hughes’s poems, and admire the way that he can conjure a creature with a few lines, but I didn’t associate him with humour. However,  I find this hilarious. It speaks to me of how humans, adaptable as we are, are actually the clumsiest, most ill-adapted animals on the planet. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did…

A Cormorant by Ted Hughes

Here before me, snake-head.
My waders weigh seven pounds.

My Barbour jacket, mainly necessary
For its pockets, is proof

Against the sky at my back. My bag
Sags with lures and hunter’s medicine enough

For a year in the Pleistocene.
My hat, of use only

If this May relapses into March,
Embarrasses me, and my net, long as myself,

Optimistic, awkward, infatuated
With every twig-snag and fence-barb

Will slowly ruin the day. I paddle
Precariously on slimed shale,

And infiltrate twenty yards
Of gluey and magnetized spider-gleam

Into the elbowing dense jostle-traffic
Of the river’s tunnel, and pray

With futuristic, archaic under-breath
So that some fish, telepathically overpowered,

Will attach its incomprehension
To the bauble I offer to space in general.

The cormorant eyes me, beak uptilted,
Body-snake low — sea-serpentish.

He’s thinking: “Will that stump
Stay a stump just while I dive?” He dives.

He sheds everything from his tail end
Except fish-action, becomes fish,

Disappears from bird,
Dissolving himself

Into fish, so dissolving fish naturally
Into himself. Re-emerges, gorged,

Himself as he was, and escapes me.
Leaves me high and dry in my space-armour,

A deep-sea diver in two inches of water.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Chowells, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1894728

Photo Two by CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1240339

Photo Three By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41896196