Year on the Wing: Four Seasons in a Life with Birds [NOOK Book]

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Introduction

Flying

...these were the first words We spread to lure the birds that nested in our day...
LOUIS MACNEICE

The first bird I can remember watching flew through the garden of the house where I was born.

It is summer and I have just had my third birthday. I am pulling my red wooden train on its string; the train driver with his blue cap is swaying a little, because the grass beneath is bumpy. We are in the back part of the big garden of Acresfield, a Victorian house divided into apartments, on the outskirts of Liverpool. I am steering carefully because we are going along a thin strip between furrows of turned soil where the old man who lives in the apartment above us grows his vegetables. I must concentrate to make sure that the driver, who has a column of blue painted wood instead of legs, doesn't wobble too much, topple over, and roll from the train. Then I hear shouting and I look toward the noise: far across the wide lawn beyond the vegetable patch, the old man is leaning out an open window and waving his arms like a bear.

A year or so later when I meet Mr. McGregor in The Tale of Peter Rabbit I know him already. The man at the window seems too far away to be real, and I feel his voice must be loud and angry though it grows thin and falls toward the lawn. But he is shouting at me, and I don't like it. It is too much. I have to drop the string, abandon the driver and train, and flee, looking for my mother, heading for a greenhouse at the edge of the vegetables. I follow the path around a water barrel and keep going toward a wide black space of dark ahead of me across a gravel drive, the opening of the garden shed.

From behind me, over my head as I move toward the dark, flies a bird. It pulls up and into the dusty rectangle of the open doorway and disappears inside. It is showing me the way; I follow it.

In the sunshine, the space of the open door seems to be hung with a black curtain. I walk through it, and the air cools and the noises dim. The throat-catching smell of warm creosote comes. Everything is still. My eyes like the bandage of the dark.

Then, with a suddenness that makes me gasp, the swallow is there and then gone, diving down and out through the door space back into the bright. It calls once as it leaves, its buzzing twitter like an electrical spark. I look up through the murk and can see on a crossbeam a little mud pie with tiny sticks of straw poking from it. I forget my train and the shouting.

A nest.

That afternoon my father takes me back to the shed and lifts me on his shoulders so I can peer into the nest. Again, as we step into the dark, the swallow slips over us — so close I can feel the air rub against me. On my father's shoulders, I raise my arms toward the nest, slowing and softening my reach as I feel for the bumpy balls of mud and the prickly stems. There are no young birds or eggs yet. I can't see into the cup but let my fingers creep over its rim, feeling the smoothed lip and the feathers that line the tiny bowl. It is warm.

Some days later, I go back to the shed but find it empty and see on the hard ribbed concrete floor a square mess of baby swallow, a miniature hooked beak, downy balding feathers, raised but useless open wings, dead half-meat beneath the thin bat-skin.

I remember just these two scenes — one of calm and one of horror. I don't see the birds fledge any young; I have no concept of their departure. I cannot remember seeing them again. But I became a bird-watcher that summer. The swallows, their flight, their music, their stopped moments perched on wires or incubating their eggs, their nest, all this was somehow laid deep inside me, like iron in my blood, so that all swallows since the first one have joined that bird appearing above me and flying on ahead.

I have watched more than forty swallow springs and forty swallow autumns since those first swallows and their nest in the shed. All that time I have lived my life under birds and I cannot remember a single birdless day. Ever since then I have felt birds' rhythms answering mine, like a heartbeat or a stride, like a cuckoo's cuckoo. They come and go, they fly and land, they sing and call, they breed and die. Now, and then again. Locally they can get lost, go wrong, or be late, but birds fit the world; they are apt and at home. What they do and how they do it, the same over and over, gives their lives alongside ours an expression or a pattern in the air that can seem like art or ritual, as if they are deeper in the world than us, more joined to it, as we might dream it only. We have broken from nature, fallen from the earth, put ourselves beyond it, but nature, ever forgiving, comes towards us, makes repairs to the damage we have done. The swallow returns and builds a nest. Birds begin and end beyond us, out of reach and outside our thought, and we see them doing things apparently without feeling or thinking, but — and because of this — they make us think and feel.

I try to do both in these pages. This book is written from a life with birds but follows a single year of them, from one summer to the next; it begins with nests and eggs and chicks on the sea cliffs of the Shetland Islands in Scotland and it ends, a year later, with nests, eggs, and chicks in the holes of an oak wood on Exmoor in southwest England. I wrote it over such a year but I put into it many summers, many swallows.

I saw everything that happens in the chapters that follow — there are common birds as well as rarities and spectacles and remote terrain — but most of what is really my birdwatching isn't spelt out here, though it lies at the heart of this book. It is a birdwatching best explained by invoking the birds I am hardly aware of watching — the birds that are all around me, seen but not really noticed, there only in the corner of my eye, the pigeons and sparrows of the city. My day lists of birds usually stop with those species plus a gull or two. In some senses this book is about trying to make myself look at the pigeons, to go beyond simply noting them, to look at these birds (and so all birds) and see them as if for the first time but with eyes informed by years of seeing, to capture life looking at life.

As a teenager I was hard-core and obsessed, but I am not a professional bird-man now. I am not very sharp in the field. I misidentify birds and get bored and eat my packed lunch at half past ten in the morning. I do not want to fly, I am scared of heights, my palms sweat before every take-off. I am allergic to feathers too, and sleep under polyester rather than goose down. In other words, my birds are mostly the same as everyone else 's, my basic birdwatching no different from that of most watchers of birds. But I fell in with birds early and I fell in deeply, and ever since then I have kept a kind of company that has taken me beyond birdwatching, back somehow to the pigeons and sparrows and that swallow at Acresfield, forward somehow to impossibly shared lives.

Copyright © 2009 by Tim Dee