Ring necked parakeets on my bird feeders
Acquaintances often tend to refer to me as a birdwatcher or a birder. On my allotment I’ve heard that I’m known by fellow plot holders as ‘the Birdman’ due to my feeding the birds all winter; though in my defence, unlike my namesake, ‘the Birdman of Alcatraz’, I’m not a convicted murderer (only a convicted environmental activist).
Don’t get me wrong – I do love birds, but it’s rather that I’m a nature lover, at home in the living world, whether it’s birds, newts, foxes, water beetles, borage, trees, wind, rocks or streams. I’m in love with the whole of which we are an inseparable element.
I know I’ve always had intimations of this outlook, but I remember it being vividly brought home to me, forty plus years ago. I’d been out on one of my favourite winter hikes on the windswept marshes of the Thames estuary. I was thrilled to watch a peregrine falcon riding the wind, soaring and hunting; a wild being who struck me as being both an expression of the wind and an expression of the wild marshes. I realised that the peregrine is the winter marshes; the marshes would not be complete without the falcon and nor would the falcon be complete without the marshes. That revelation has never left me. Our minds habitually separate reality into discrete entities; parsing out components in our strange dissecting Western manner, unwittingly making it difficult for us to experience a deeper ecological reality..
Today, walking locally, I’m listening to a reed warbler in a stand of urban reeds fringing a small pool; chattering, melodious runs of song phrases, while the bird remains invisible within the reeds; newly arrived from Africa, he’s a herald of Spring. Again, it’s one experience: the reed warbler is part of the Spring reeds, and the reeds find their full expression in the reed warbler (a well named species in this case). Just as the skylark is open rough grassland, and the blackbird is mellow Spring evenings, and the cuckoo is the essence of Spring itself.
We human beings are visual creatures; we rely on our binocular vision, sensitive to any movement in the visual field, and secondarily we rely on our hearing. Birds are a good match for us, since the same senses are paramount for our feathered friends as well – which means that we tend to notice birds, aided by the fact that we are both largely active in the daytime.
Our relationship with birds goes back a long way. Anthropologist David Abram has noted how many hunting and gathering cultures have always held birds in esteem as emissaries from a more expansive field of intelligence; seeing them as winged messengers. The dawn chorus of birds could be perceived by indigenous people as being feathered harbingers of the radiant sun rising. Also, our fascination with birds must have something to do with our envy of their gift of flight. Birds are interwoven in our history, whether it is through poetry, music or for being indispensable in hunting and survival. From their elevated vantage point, birds notice what is going on below. They issue warning calls to all the woodland denizens about danger and the alarm calls are different for different types of predator. All vital for tribal trackers and hunters. Like the rest of the wild community, I also rely on the calls of birds to alert me to a fox or an owl, or another human in the woods, or a raptor high above.
Twitchers drawn to watch a rare vagrant bird
The main UK bird charity, the RSPB, boasts of being ‘a million voices for nature’ and in fact there are now 1.2 million members. Contrast this number with the roughly 2000 members of the Mammal Society, and you will see my point about birds. Of course, although we ourselves are fellow mammals, most mammals are largely nocturnal, relying more on scent – poorly developed in humans – so we don’t see too many of them.
As I said, I’m not really a bird watcher and am regularly surprised when I sometimes find that I don’t have as much in common with birders as I would have imagined. When I’m out in the field, I chat with birders and often their focus is on obtaining a sighting of this or that particular bird and they can sometimes appear to me to be relatively uninterested in the wider living world. For myself, I’m in love with the whole gestalt, which very much includes birds, but as an entangled part of the whole exuberance of flowers, trees, invertebrates, wind, reflections on the water and whiffs of blossom or rotting leaves.
Then, further along the spectrum of birders are twitchers, those dedicated bird watchers who travel the length of the country at the report of a rare vagrant bird, just to see that bird and record it on their year list or life list of birds spotted.
I don’t mean to criticise all these good folk, since each to his or her own, and it’s surely a big plus that more people get outdoors and are involved with nature in some way and of their own choosing; and it clearly brings many birders much enjoyment.
Yet for me, I’d personally rather leave alone the poor vagrant bird blown across the Atlantic by freak winds, to be dumped in an unfamiliar foreign environment, hungry and bedraggled. Nevertheless, I am very interested in less common and rare birds when they are a natural and integral part of that habitat e.g to see stone curlews on dry heathland or hen harriers quartering bleak northern moors.
I’m reminded of Nan Shepherd’s writing of her life spent roaming the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland In her classic, The Living Mountain. Most mountaineers tend to be focussed on attaining the summits and Nan Shepherd relates how as a young woman, she too always made for the summits. Yet over time she learned how to go into the hills aimlessly, “merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him.” As she said, “To aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain.”
You can probably see the parallels I’m drawing between a birder’s achievement of spotting that rare bird or a mountaineer’s satisfaction in conquering a peak, versus the simple profound joy of being at one with the living world around us.
My Robin friend assisting with seed modules
I find much meaning and connection in my relationships with everyday natural scenarios. I talk to my local pair of Robins at my allotment. They turn out to greet me when I arrive and they follow me closely as I weed on my plot, darting in to take exposed insects and worms. They are so used to me that they get in the way of my trowel as I weed. I am a surrogate for the ancestral wild boars which the robin likely evolved alongside with, to take advantage of the pigs rootling about and disturbing the soil. The robins clearly want food but I notice that they also appear to find safety and trust in my company: nesting right at eye level on the side of my garden shed and bathing in my small pond especially when I am right there doing any pond maintenance; they are so trusting that they turn their backs to me as they bathe. When they don’t have babies to feed, one of the robins will often sit right next to me at eye height with no interest in food, and we just hang out, communing together, especially on late summer evenings.
I have to say that being involved in the lives of these common garden birds is to me, more meaningful than spotting any rarity. And as I said above, for me it’s not just birds. I’m just as fascinated by the smooth newts in my pond – the males like tiny dragons with erect crests rippling under the surface of the water. I’m also always amazed by the way bright yellow spotted mullein moth caterpillars miraculously appear on the wild mullein on my plot, when there are no other mullein plants anywhere around.
Not seeking for any special experiences while being completely present, opens us up to the mysterious entangled nature of our existence, entwined as we are with our fellow beings. A sense of wonder and awe tends to naturally make itself known and with it we can feel that there really is a miraculous quality to being alive.
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Abert Einstein
Mullein Moth caterpillar
