2008 - The Bearded Tit (17 page)

I remember seeing out of the corner of my eye a bird perched openly on a bare tree in the middle of Cambridge city centre and thinking, wow, this is something. Anyone, just anyone, I’m convinced, would have noticed it and thought the same thing. Not a pigeon, no—a kestrel? No, wait, wait, wait. Stop. It’s too chunky. Kestrels have a slim delicacy. A sparrowhawk? No, those markings aren’t ‘sparrowhawk’.

This is a peregrine. The falconer’s falcon. Perhaps, even, the falcon’s falcon. I stared at it. Its body was solid with power, its yellow feet squeezing the branch. The whole
bird
looked like a trap, a deadly trap poised and ready to snap. It returned my stare with full raptor intensity. Did it know? Did it know that I knew?

That I knew it was special, not a kestrel or a sparrowhawk? Did it know that I was a worshipper? That I’d stopped at its feet to pay homage. Did it know that for those few moments I was numb with awe?

No, it didn’t give a shit. As far as I know, it hadn’t even bothered separating me from the gloomy November background. After a few seconds, it flew away. With hardly a flap, it slunk sideways with such indifference to me it seemed like a yawn on wings slanting down into the shrubby shadows.

Was it like that? Whenever I think about it, I feel there was something more. The way it flew away without flying. Perhaps its mastery of the air was such that it didn’t fly. It just let go of the branch it was perched on. It unhooked its golden claws and let go. It stayed where it was and everything else moved: the branch, the tree, the garden, the city, the world just rolled away into the void, leaving falcon alone in the universe, the Master of Space.

O
ur children are beautiful. We want to protect them. We want to protect them so that they will grow up to live happy and productive lives. They will have children. Their children will be beautiful and they will want to protect them so that they will live happy and productive lives.

And so on.

That’s it.

That’s all there is.

Everything else is vanity.

Art, science, music, business, technology, shopping, barbecues, third-division celebrities eating millipedes in the jungle, the Ryder Cup, flying to the moon, robbing a post office at knifepoint and learning the Latin names for birds are just vanity, rococo baubles stuck haphazardly on the urge to have children, to survive, not to die. Now that we have lost God, there is only survival. God could have cured us of our mortality but we spurned Him, we spurned the doctor and he has abandoned us and taken the medicine with him. We are alone in eternity with nothing to do but try to cling desperately on to life with increasingly fragile fingernails. The child is the best way. A child affords you the taste of eternity more than writing a poem, painting a masterpiece or winning a war.

Our children, therefore, will always be beautiful because they are an incarnation of our desire to be immortal; a personification of our eternity; a living symbol of a triumph over death.

And so all children are beautiful. Not just the beautiful ones.

The ugly, the spotty, the gawky, the unlovely, the selfish, the vain, the ginger, the violent, the deformed and the sick. Adored by their parents; they’re adorable. Human activities, the invention of the soul, the worship of the mind, the obedience to the heart, have obscured the message from nature to man. Somewhere scribbled in a jumble of mass and energy is the big, inescapable message, scrawled in gigantic letters on sub-microscopic particles, the message of life: your life won’t last, pass it on.

Human culture and civilization has smudged this message but for the birds it’s much more sharply focused. The breathless fever with which the adult bird attends to its offspring may seem inhumanly mechanical, but the message is the same.

Look at that baby—isn’t she cute?

Ah, look, a baby seal—gorgeous eyes!

Look, a newborn calf- sweet!

Mummy, look, kittens—can I have one?

Wow, baby bunnies, where’s my camera?

But there aren’t many cute baby birds.

Young girls don’t flock around the sparrow’s nest to see her babies. They don’t ‘coo’ and ‘aah’ at the youngsters inside.

Look into a bird’s nest in the spring and recoil at the abomination inside. A troubling and troubled Jurassic shadow. Baby bird: a saggy-skinned, hairy-feathered, translucent trembling bag of shrieks; a dagger-faced abortion; a body like a severed scrotum with a blank, gawping, bug-eyed head.

But beautiful, of course.

See how the parents labour to feed this gaping mutant. See how they fuss over their mini-dinosaur. See how they want to pass life on!

And in these ugly bundles, the message is written in ruthless capitals. The strongest, largest chick gets another message from deep within its maze of molecules. It learns that it is the strongest, largest chick and it learns what that means. In a contest for food and survival, it has an advantage. It looks around at the competition. Its brother and sisters. Weaker by an hour maybe, lighter by a milligram. That’s enough. No longer family, but enemy. A few stabs and the fight is over. And then, no longer dead brother, but food. Free food. More advantage. More chance of passing down my genes to eternity.

And so the surviving chick fledges. To the human eye, a pathetic no-man’s land between baby and adult, between dependence and freedom, between nest and sky. Bigger than the adult but still helpless. In human terms, an adolescent. A student. A second-year undergraduate, maybe. Awkward, uncool, knowing everything and nothing at the same time, cocky and prepared to take some risks; prepared to learn to fly by learning to fall. It ruffles its feathers on the rim of the nest, stretches its puny wings, and flaps. This is its life for a few weeks now: stretching and flapping, punctuated with pitiful yelps for food.

Then one day, its flaps, its strength and the wind combine to free it from the nest and it glides a few feet till it reaches another branch—if it’s skilful; or lucky. More likely it hits a wall; or the ground, where it will sit motionless and panting till the urge to fly hits again. But this a dangerous time. There is a banner in the sky: a huge advert written in fireworks, brass bands and tickertape, foghorns and mortars, perceptible only to animals, announcing that there is a fledgling on the ground, in the open. Cat, dog, fox, weasel, crow, magpie, kestrel, sparrowhawk, peregrine and gull will be on the scene in seconds. For the baby bird, it is down to luck or skill as somewhere the dice are being shaken for the biggest game of chance available.

So often you see them. March, April and May. In the gutter. Nuzzled by passing, dogs and cats to assess their edibility. Pecked half-heartedly by crows. A little feathery pouch that once contained a lifetime’s potential and now contains maggots. Ready for the earth; never ready enough for the sky. A long way from home. A sodden bundle that leapt, too soon, off the ledge into the unknown.

Is it a sad truth that for the sake of the species a child has to die?

Is dying all part of growing up?

It seemed to me that I had fledged successfully but that part of me had died leaving the nest.

But it was a long, long time ago…

And, I think, on a different planet.

I
somehow dragged my body out of the bookshop and manhandled myself back to college. Oblivious to aggressive words and gestures as I bumped my way through the crowded streets; oblivious, too, to Branfield, soaking wet, wearing just his underpants and some pond-weed, trudging back to his room; oblivious even to Kramer’s sympathetic offer of chicken soup.

JJ went on a honeymoon and never returned to the shop. Kramer’s lugubrious but vague predictions were right; though he claimed, of course, that it gave him nothing but anguish to be right yet again.

It wouldn’t have happened nowadays. Mobile phones would have made this episode in my life, so huge then, so tiny now, an impossibility. But mobile phones had not been invented and neither had ‘closure’.

In those days instead of closure I had to make do with confusion and bewilderment. And tears. In a little over three months, I’d discovered what I most wanted in the world: what seemed like the only thing I’d ever wanted and the only thing I would ever want. And not only that, but I had actually attained it. For just a few hours. Then I’d lost it.

I’d also rather oddly attained a deep knowledge, a keen interest and a strange affection for birds. The knowledge seemed bizarre and meaningless now. It was as if I had been burgled. I had been robbed of all my possessions, of everything that was dear to me, but the burglars had left behind the
Bumper Book of British Birds
, fully illustrated with colour photos and a note saying, ‘Enjoy!’

The problem with birds, though, is that they are public. They’re there. Visible. In the sky. In your face. Loud. Brightly coloured. Ever-present. In all weathers, all seasons. But that’s the joy of birds too! But no good if you don’t want reminding of a loss.

Animals are private. Mammals are boring. They are quiet and secretive. If it were not for cars driving too fast late at night down country roads, I do not think anyone would know we had wild animals in Britain. They mainly operate at night and spend all day in burrows, lairs, setts, forms, earths. I mean, what a ludicrously long list of names for the rank holes where animals spend most of their time. Animals are generally brown or browny grey. They lurk, they smell, they snuffle furtively in dank places. Yes, I know, the badger, of course, has a brightly streaked black and white face, but it only comes out at night and you rarely see it except when it’s dead on the roads in the morning. For a long time I thought badgers were only dead badgers. Rabbits, hares and hedgehogs are mainly known for their flat, splotchy appearance on our roads. Despite their predilection for playing Russian roulette by the side of our motorways, crows, rooks and jackdaws rarely end up as road-kill.

And, yes, the fox is an impressive animal with its dashing, orangey coat. But the fox would much rather not be seen by humans for all manner of reasons. If you see a mammal by day: a vole, a weasel, a rat etc, it is invariably scuttling away from you at great speed. It’s in the nature of these creatures to get away from you as quickly as possible. Except to the viewer with elaborate and expensive infra-red cameras and a flask of strong coffee, these creatures are never the spectacle that birds are.

A visit to the zoo I think will confirm that, apes and monkeys apart, the furry, snuffly, stinking, hairy, browny-grey mammals are the dullest inmates, often indistinguishable from the fetid pile of straw they live in.

Outside the zoo, in day-to-day life, in the city, in the country, in the mountains, by the sea, there are only the birds. You can’t avoid birds. And for me now, every one of them was going to be a painful reminder of the one and only girl ever.

A stinging memory of JJ would always be there: in the daily, everyday, inevitable cooing of pigeons; the insistent alarm of the evening blackbird; the unworldly, electric-blue streak of a kingfisher; the cruciform kestrel frozen in mid-air by the motorway’s edge; the tinkling bells of long-tailed tits dancing through shrubbery; the loud and lucid two-tones of a chiffchaff; the exotic yellowy-green bounce of a woodpecker as it cackles off to an invisible tree-trunk; the handsome and colourful jay, searching for acorns with its life mate; the drowsy, sweltering, midsummer song of the yellowhammer; the ghostly barn owl quartering the silence of twilight farmland; the plaintive oystercatcher scattering its musical tears over the bleak marshes; the huge, slate-grey grace of a heron taking off from the reeds; the constant flitting, flicking, bouncing yellow of a wagtail down by the monochrome weir; the tame but feisty robin, sometimes posing for a Christmas card on a snow-capped gatepost, sometimes defending its territory right to the red-breasted death; the black and white strobing of a lapwing’s acrobatics; the lightning blur of blood and feathers in the jet-stream of a sparrowhawk; the broad, slow-motion majesty of a marsh harrier; extravagantly coloured and sociable goldfinches, tumbling over the wasteland looking for seeds; clouds of starlings above the twilight streets; a skylark singing invisibly from the hidden heights of heaven; the tiny flame-headed goldcrest, tingling from the tall pines; a boldly perched thrush revelling in its rich repertoire of music, repeating its flutey hits over and over; the black and white serenity of an avocet gracefully sweeping through the tidal pools; a microscopic wren shattering the dawn with its gigantic song; the scornful seaside laughter of herring gulls and black-headed gulls; greenfinches, beautifully coloured and wheezing unmistakably; house sparrows chattering energetically along the eaves and gutters; swallows bringing summer from the south on their fragile wings; the snap of a flycatcher darting from its perch to grab a passing insect; jackdaws roosting and shredding the dusk with axe-like calls; the magnificent blue and orange of the upside-down nuthatch, guest of honour at the bird-feeder; a cormorant drying its wings on a dead tree, a disturbing snapshot of prehistory; a buzzard soaring and god-like on its broad feather-fingered wings; the treecreeper, tree-trunk brown and busy as a mouse, flying from tree to tree revealing a breast of snow; moorhens, close up, dark olive velvet, tiptoeing over the lily pads on their pale-green legs; the pink, blue, black, white, brown, olive chaffinch spluttering the arrival of spring; the nagging, non-stop call of the brashly coloured great tit; and, of course, swifts; the birds for whom flight was invented; another of JJ’s favourites and the definition of summer: swifts, screaming in a sapphire sky.

Flapping Around A Lot

T
wenty-five years’ worth of dark, bright, deep, shallow, murky and quirky water had sloshed under the bridge between the day I first laid eyes on the JJ and the day when I found myself on stage in a civic hall in Cheltenham addressing a room full of ‘twitchers’—serious birdwatchers. I was taking part in a ‘forum’ discussing a recent bird book. I felt that I was out of my depth and that somehow I was an interloper who shouldn’t really be involved in matters ‘bird’. I think the audience sensed this and more questions than I expected were directed at me. A middle-aged man in the fifth row put his hand up.