Learning the Birds

Blackbird, Robin, Wren | Small noticings and sickness | A fox on a road to nowhere

This week I am ill and my adventures are close to home. I drag myself out at the end of the day for a very slow circuit of the block. It is that time when the day should have ended but night has not yet come and the light is golden, and all the birds on all the residential streets are singing, a great chorus of them, all at once, loud enough to feel I am in a forest.

The next day I go a little further. I find leaves on a creeper as big as my hand, like waxed side plates, covering the brickwork, waving gently as the cars pass by. The ceanothus is bursting blue, specks scattered on the pavement below, and everywhere the scent of viburnum floats, heady, thick. The wisteria on the corner house is out, hanging in heavy bunches, and I remember taking wisteria breaks at work one time, when everyone else took cigarette breaks. The fresh growth on a pine hedge is starting to come in, the new needles lime green, soft and pliable. Up above me, a bird is singing. Whistling, a rippling sound, a small body on a leafless tree, outline only against the pale sky.

I sign up to the wildlife trust challenge to learn ten bird’s songs in ten days so that I can listen to the wild from my sofa. Day 1 is the blackbird. I am not good at bird song; I worry I do not have the ear. But it is nonsense, of course, I was not born incapable of learning bird song, I just have to take the time to learn and to be wrong a lot. There is always so much I long to do, all at once, but I want to have time to follow my curiosity. I listened to

Penny Wincer

’s podcast interview with Tamu Thomas recently, and Tamu said something that struck me; ‘I want to be a well rested woman. I don’t know any.’ I want this too, but I don’t know yet how to do that, and do all the things that excite me at the same time. It is a work in progress and birdsong is a start.

I do know blackbird, the warbling notes, the musicality of it all. The email I get on Day 1 describes it as ‘short, fluty verses that seem to stop abruptly.’ There is something lovely about that description. Blackbirds abound in folklore, from being baked in a pie, to being omens of the otherworld, to the blackbird that is said to have appeared to St Benedict as the devil in disguise, yet they are always here and I do not feel wary of them. If anything, I am drawn to them.

Day 2 is the wren, the ball like bird pictured with its beak wide, something humorous in it. Described as ‘a high pitched series of whistles with a rolling rattle towards the end.’ The descriptions give words to sounds that I am only just starting to separate. They give me things to listen to, to focus on. Words are in large part how I understand the world. There are almost always words in my head and these words for sounds that are beautiful but strange to me, which I am awkward to identify, uncertain of, they help me hold to something.

Day 3 is the robin. The one bird that sings all winter. Unmistakeable, tied to Christmas, they appear in the folktale ‘Babes in the woods’ - after the children starve to death the robins cover their bodies with leaves forming a shroud. Their song is described as ‘clear and beautiful’, ‘rippling notes and whistles’. I take these words with me on my next walk.

This time I go further still. I follow a track through a small patch of woodland between the road and the heath. It is paved, as if it was once a road itself, but it leads nowhere - twisty tracks through the trees lead to it at one dead end, and the other ends in a bank with a car park beyond it. I check the heathland and see two women on a bench there, and so I feel alright about taking this track through the wood. Somehow the paved part, the half-civilised-but-not-really-ness of it, makes me more anxious walking here. It is an in-between place, a thing straddling two worlds, belonging to neither. But it is also a long tunnel with only trees overhead and the shadows of the branches play over the grey tarmac, dancing with spots of light. There is actual honesty (a name I love - not just honesty, ‘actual’ honesty) growing, purple flowers spots of brightness amongst the green, and garlic mustard and a crab-apple tree, the blossom almost given way now to unfurling leaves. I follow the path, expecting all the bird song, but it is quieter here. They are quieter here than they were on the streets around my house. I had thought that more trees, less houses would have meant more song, but that its not what I hear. I follow the track, listening, straining to identify what song I can. Whistles, peeps, flutes of falling sound, then, for a moment, silence. The wind rustles the rubbery new leaves and ahead, a fox trots out. It pauses in the centre of the tarmac, looks at me for a moment, unabashed, then turns and trots ahead down the road to nowhere, leading the way.