Eight encounters with birds (and their like)
1. Let’s start with a Saturday. I’m standing in the dim light of the covered carpark down by the quay in Exeter, trying to pay for parking with a non-existent signal and no change. I hear coins clinking behind me and I turn to share my predicament. A crow in a black top hat is shuffling through his money in readiness. Well, not a real live crow, but a young man dressed in a fluttery, feathery black top and tails, eyes painted black. The Morris dancers are in town, I think.
2. Later that morning, I’m waiting for my takeaway coffee to be served in a cute café beneath the arches on the waterside, when an older man walks in wearing a trilby hat, stuffed with the most marvellous tall feathers. The café spotlights catch the iridescence. Raven, pheasant, magpie, jay. The image is striking and confirms my assumption that the Morris dancers must be around somewhere, flocking for a performance to the Saturday visitors. I walk past him on my way out, where he sits at a table, hat cocked, brow intent, knitting.
3. I drove to Exeter that Saturday morning from my home in West Devon. The most direct route is straight across Dartmoor, a long twisting A-road with fewer cars than cattle and horses. The road passes through the prison-town of Princetown, the small market village of Moretonhampstead, and eastern red-soiled villages of Doccombe and Dunsford, deep in the river valley flowing east to the city of Exeter. That morning, the lines of the moor were flat against the white-grey sky. The radio show was inviting callers for their unusual stories and encounters with birds. One story stalled the pace of the show: a dying female pheasant encountered by a walker in the wood, whose eyes beseeched them to hold her a while. When they went to put her down in a quiet spot in the undergrowth, again the eyes called them to stay awhile. They ended up taking the pheasant for a walk, cradled in their arms, whilst the bird took great interest in the sights and sounds of the woodland. When the walker returned to the same spot some time later and laid the bird down, she closed her eyes and died. The story catches in my throat. Back in my car, a lone rook catches my eye, pecking at the edge where tarmac meets moorland. Species meets species. Life crosses the void.
4. In the poetry workshop I was driving to, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett (who wrote the exquisite The Grassling) asked us all to reflect on the past month of January, its high points and low ones, our positive encounters with nature and the less than positive ones too. One young woman recounted a beautiful tale of passing a dead wren in the lane by her house and watching each day on her daily walk as it decayed a little more. I imagine its tiny ribcage, its vacant black eye, its futile beak, maroon tipping into grey.
5. Back home, I go to our back doors and open them to the morning. We face north, barely fifty metres from the village centre, but we are poised above the village and the church at bird level. The valley is bowl-like and stretches west towards the Tavy river, hidden beyond the fields, that flows into the geographical, genetic, and historical boundary between the ancient lands of Devon and Cornwall - the Tamar. From our deck, I can see a communication mast atop Kit Hill, to the north-west of the Tamar near the old mining town of Gunnislake. In the nearer distance, two old beech trees shiver and shake with rooks, black silhouettes like quotation marks, perching in pairs against the dull morning sky. The sky brightens behind me to the east. I turn around to watch for movement in the two large trees (one ash, one sycamore) that stand atop the morning horizon, towering above our houses. A rook flies over from west to east, from beech to ash, and calls out in greeting to this strange creature below.
6. Fieldfare has stayed with us all winter (see my last post for his story). The window cill is now his breakfast table, a crusted mass of discarded apple pulp. He’s an extremely messy eater but I forgive him. I haven’t heard him these past few days, I hope he hasn’t left us just yet.
7. Last week, I woke to an artwork of parallel claw marks on our deck, white with hoar frost. The marks traced the tussles of blackbirds, skidding for seed scattered by my husband. On the most recent delivery of the large sacks of birdseed that my husband orders, the delivery man tells us that he delivers a lot of seed to homes in this village. “You can tell what kind of village it is,” he remarks, “people like birds here.” We do, and our valley rewards us.
8. On the icy November day that we found our house back in 2014, the world was monochrome but the trees and rocks around us resounded with birdsong, like a spring morning. Just imagine this place in spring, I thought.