Pied Wagtail Day

In the good old days the sun shined all day, children played on railway tracks, parents told their kids to count the traffic or to catch butterflies and stick pins through their wings, sweets cost 1d for five, and there were pied wagtails everywhere. This weather is reminding me of my childhood.  Obviously, it never rained in my memory until I became a mooning teenager, writing names of boys I fancied, who would never look at me twice in the condensation on my bedroom window, so my memories of being a child are filled with long hot sunny days, roaming the streets until my friend had to be home for tea at five. We would hang around the park or go for long cycle rides in the countryside or just set up some chairs and canes to compete in our own version of Horse of the Year Show in the garden.  In 1976, which this year reminds me most of, my dad made a sprinkler with a hosepipe and an old Quality Street tin that he had put holes in.  We weren't allowed to use it until after 5pm, when the water inspectors had gone home but then the neighbours would join us and children and adults would run through the spray, squealing with delight.  

Describing this idyll could easily fool you into thinking that things were so much better then. I'm always wary of falling into that trap but there were pied wagtails everywhere and you hardly see any now.  I always liked this bird.  It seemed childlike, full of fun, bobbing it's head and tail up and down as it bounced around the garden, collecting insects.

I was reminded of these birds because I saw two.  I was walking up to the High Street (to buy more bird food) and there was one on a garden fence, giving chirrup-y instructions to his mate on the ground.  "That's it.  Pick it up.  Soooo pretty.  Nice in our nest."  I looked at the other bird who was struggling to pick something up from the ground.

"NO!" I shouted, waving my arms and scaring the birds away.  "Maybe that's why we don't see them any more," I thought.

When I got home I told the Long Suffering Husband. "Hmmm," he said, making me think he wasn't really listening.  

"What I don't understand is if they can put them out, why can't they bring them back in," he said in his most judgy voice, simultaneously failing to sweep away the crumbs from the bread he had just cut.

"People don't realise," I told him. "I bet most of them shared the David Attenborough thing about plastic in the sea on Facebook.  They'd be mortified if they knew."

"Hmmm," he replied, scanning through the Sky listings.

So, a week after Cabbie Day I made it my mission to collect what remained of the brightly coloured pieces of rubber.  There were a few whole balloons still attached to lamp posts but most were in pieces on the floor.  If it had rained they would have washed down the drain and into the belly of some poor unsuspecting turtle.  

Balloons collected after Cabbie Day (£1 for scale)

If I were a pied wagtail, full of childish bounce, I'd probably think it looked like a good nest too.

Starling Day

Today is Starling day.

Starlings are noisy and can never agree whose turn it is to go on the bird feeder.  They square up to each other and squawk, "Come on then, if you think you're hard enough." They are all on the same side and would see off a pigeon in seconds but they just can't help squabbling among themselves.

It was a noisy day to try and sit in the garden reading a book. There was a children's party, that sounded like a thousand kids in a swimming pool, in one neighbour's garden.  The smell of lighter fuel and burning sausages mixed with the foamy beer smell that followed the click and pop of a can being opened, gave away that people were watching football and the starlings were shouting.

I know that people enjoy and get (over)excited about football.  They say things like, "We nearly had that," and blame the professional footballers for missing shots that they would me able to make with their eyes closed.  They count their eggs before they've hatched.  "It's coming home."  It becomes personal.  In fact, there seem to be an awful lot of starlings around.  

The TV commentators, apparently think that people who choose to read a book instead of watching need to get a life.  That makes me uncomfortable because I'm sure you can read a book and like football and I'm sure you can have a life and not like football.  You can also be patriotic and not like football.

Personally, I probably do need to get a life.  I'm not sure that running away from tigers, fighting elephants and watching birds counts but even if I wanted to I couldn't watch football at the moment.  It's just too noisy.  Unfortunately, my brand of bonkers comes with a noise limit.  This proved to be a small problem, as I could hear the game in glorious octophonic sound, with the accompanying shouting. 

I thought England had lost.  There were two shouts of delight and four angry groans.  The bird feeder was swamped and someone shouted, "Starling, you're a f***in' w***er!"  I had to agree but the starlings couldn't decide which one of them they were talking about.

Angry Robin

My GP suggested I try writing stuff down.
"I'm writing about birds," I told her, "But that's quite common isn't it?"
She looked at me quizzically and decided, instead, to tell me about how hard talking about death is for doctors.

What she may not know is that all throughout history there has been a link with birds and bereavement.  People who are bereaved suddenly notice birds where none had been before and somehow recognise their departed loved ones in them. 

In a fascinating but alarmingly racist, book Ernest Ingersoll (1932 Birds in legend, fable and folklore) describes incidences where people link birds to death in some way from every country and culture in the world. (It is comforting when you find out you are not mad but just tapping into universal ancient wisdom).

Birds are often seen as omens or harbingers of death but also bringers of wisdom.  We often say, "a little bird told me."
Izzy Judd, wrote, in her memoir about her IVF treatment and the loss of a baby, "We found a pigeon had flown into the window of our conservatory and died.  By the strangest coincidence I'd seen exactly the same thing.......on the day my mother's sister died." Birds flying into the house or down a chimney are seen as a sign of death in almost every culture in the world.

Birds are thought to act as psychopomps (don't you just love that word?) , carrying the spirit of a dead person to the next life or to heaven.  The Romans would release an eagle at the death of an Emperor to carry his soul to heaven and in Japan and China Cranes are believed to carry the souls of those who have achieved mortality to heaven.  (Odd that in our culture storks bring them back).  There are also universal tales of the spirit of a dead loved one arriving in a bird to impart an important message.

I have been wondering why this should be.  What is it about birds that makes us link them to death? Christopher Moreman in his paper 'Relationship between birds and spirits' (2014) argues that "birds embody the quintessential archetype for the transcendence of fear of death and it's resulting selfishness." "A quinti-what? you say." This is why Christopher is an academic and I write blogs.  He defines an archetype as something that is shared by all humans, like the ability to make music,  use language and smile. (I was taught archetypes were developed by Jung to explain his idea of twelve personality types and the collective unconscious but maybe I wasn't listening properly)  He is arguing that all humans fear death and that we have a shared affinity to birds when confronted with it, which stops us "falling into a void of despair at one's impending extinction."

Whilst I agree that we don't like to talk about or think about death, I'm not sure it is always about facing one's own mortality.  My current madness is not, in any way, linked to a thought that I may die even if it does all stem from a lack of communication around death.

I think that bereavement leaves you in a state where you are stuck in your head and that walking, gardening, breathing and looking at nature helps to ground you.  Obviously that doesn't necessarily explain birds but there are an awful lot of them around that we don't normally notice. 

But.....

What if.....

What if it isn't some weird construct developed by all humans to help them cope with dying and bereavement?  What if it's all true?

We can't talk about death because we don't know and we never will.  Nobody will ever develop a mathematical formula to give the definitive answer to the question, "What happens after we die?"  By the time there is any definitive proof, or otherwise, of something next we won't be able to tell anyone.

I was listening to the radio this morning, as they were discussing near death experiences and saying how there is a universal description of a passage or tunnel with light at the end, through which they are guided by other spirits, often loved ones.  There is also an acceptance that once they cross the boarder they can never return to their body.  I thought that if spirits can get into the tunnel to guide the dying then maybe they could get into birds to guide the living through death.

If they can then my Dad chose a robin. 

A few days before Mum died, when my sister and I were out of our depth, alone and frightened she walked the dog down the lane asking for a sign.  A noisy robin appeared on the fence and followed her home.  He popped into the garden at regular intervals, refusing meal worms in favour of lemon drizzle cake.  It was almost as though he was saying, "It's alright.  I'm here."  On Sunday, a bird, that looked like the same robin visited my garden.  He sat on the fence, shouting.  That robin was furious.  All evening he kept up.  We searched the garden in vain for cats and laughed, wondering what could be making him so cross. Then my sister sent me a photo of a baby bird in a shoe box.

If you are ever looking for suggestions of something to give to a person who is grieving after nursing their loved one through a complicated death then probably a very sick baby bird would not be the best choice. That person would do their best.  Amazing carers always do.  They would give it a bath and pick over twenty huge mites off it, grind up meal worms in the coffee grinder, feed it water through a pipette, sit up with it all night, cut a bra in half for it to sleep in, google the best way to care for it and all of those things will feel familiar, along with the impending sense of doom that nothing they do will keep this little bird alive.

The robin was still on my fence, shouting.  I listened more carefully.
"I've always hated that woman," he chirruped.
"I know," I told him, "but I never did understand why before."

The baby swift was taken to a wildlife hospital and the robin has gone back to his own garden, singing sweetly, maintaining a watchful presence and hoping for lemon drizzle cake.

Pigeons, Doves, Bobs and other annoying birds.

On Thursday, it was a Jay day.
"Did you see that bird?" I said to the over-excited estate agent, who walked into my mum's garden with his clipboard. "I think it was a Jay."
"It's a beautiful garden," he gushed.
"Yes, yes but did you see the bird?" I asked. "I don't think it was a normal magpie. There was a flash of blue. It might have been a Jay. They are quite shy birds, often stay in the woodlands.  It's probably quite special to have a Jay in the garden.  I'm sure there's something about ancestral wisdom with Jays."
Sighing, the agent realised that he would have to talk about birds to have any kind of meaningful conversation with the mad woman he had just made cry.
"The problem with feeding birds," he said, "is the pigeons. I hate pigeons, they're really annoying."
I thought that they weren't the only ones but I said nothing.
Jay days are difficult and a bit elephanty and so I'm going to write about pigeons instead.

Every day is pigeon day. The agent was right.  If you feed the birds you get the pigeons and they sit on the fence, pooping on your nice sun loungers, bobbing their heads to impress the females, having noisy, flappy sex if their bobbing has done the trick, and annoying the dog.

We don't get the Rock/Feral Pigeons that you see in London, spying on the world from their strategic positions on top of the statues and buildings. Our pigeons don't have the two-tone green and purple breast that looks like an oil slick around Southend pier on a sunny day. We don't hear the burbling coo of secrets passing between them. Oh no.  Our pigeons are noisy. 

The Long Suffering Husband has been woken by the birds at 3.30 for the last few mornings and he's had enough. It would be alright, he thinks, if it was just the little birds. Twittering tits and squabbling starlings he could cope with but the pigeons take the biscuit.  Actually, they don't just take the biscuit they take the whole packet.

I wanted to know what type bothered him the most but he was confused. He just thought there was one type of pigeon.  I explained how we didn't get the London Pigeons but how we had two other types of pigeon birds and they sounded different.

The wood pigeon is the fatter of the two, is dark grey with a white ring around it's neck and possibly a little green tinge on it's breast.  It has an orange beak and more beady eyes. It's coo is softer.

The Collared Dove is a light grey, slim line variety, with blacker eyes, a thin black collar and, surprisingly, a football hooligan voice.

"So, did it say, 'Who is Bob Austin?'  or did it shout, 'Who are you? Bob Austin?'" I asked the LSH.
He just laughed.
"It's how you tell the difference," I said.
"Yes, but who is Bob Austin?" the LSH wanted to know.

It was my Dad that told me the difference between the two bird calls and he would often do this odd thing of wandering around the house randomly saying, "BobAustin," when I was small.  I think he just liked the way the sound of it bounced out of his mouth.

"He was the bus conductor," I replied and then told the LSH about how, when my parents were first married and dirt poor, Dad had often run out of money on a Thursday before he was paid and how a nice bus conductor used to let him on, knowing that Dad would pay double the next day. 

"You made that up," accused the LSH.
"Did I?" I winked.