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Birdsong fills the dour skies

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

York Robin

– York, December 2012

Having travelled up north today, one thing is clear – it’s a grey day in England. The fields are flooded, rivers have broken their banks, swamping hedgerows like spurious borders between water-bound states. Perhaps it’s a vision of the future. In York it’s much the same as we walk the walls. These giant slabs of stone encase the city’s heart, having done so for centuries. My footwear is unsuitable, leather boots with worn, grip-less soles. My companion is even more ill-suited in her heeled boots, though somehow she doesn’t slip as I do. Perhaps it’s the familiarity of the native. I fail to pick up placenames or any other manmade pointers, often quick to admire the old structures of men, we sometimes overlook nature’s work entirely. Instead of history, I’m drawn to the algae-green branches of lime trees and the peeling bark of mature sycamores, the small chunks of tree skin leaving ripples, as if they’ve disappeared into the flesh of the thing itself.

The walls break up and we have to climb the slender stairwells again to continue. I’m struck by how many people say hi, how many smile and seek eye contact. The sheer banks below show the early leaves of nettles and cow parsley, some plants are flowering, a large pink mallow the most striking. Have they evolved to find winter cover in the wall’s company? A flock of starlings spread between plane trees, ticking and whistling. I insist we wait and listen. Their roundabout call is a joyful sound.

We descend again and find the River Ouse has flooded the walkways, sandy rivulets reclaiming stone. A white swan mingles with a gang of Canada geese to feed on the bank opposite. Under the bridge a dog defecates, its owner pointedly collecting it with a little plastic bag. A fire and rescue dinghy glides past, a crew member waving as I take their picture. We return to the street above and cross the bridge. Mud from the river has coloured the tarmac of a car park.

Back on the wall we watch two hooded teenagers hide their bikes in the black walkway of a terraced housing estate. They are wary of leaving their belongings out in the open. Down below a strip of no-mans-land offers up the remains of a bike immortalised in long grass, like the inhabitants of Pompeii to molten rock. Up ahead we squeeze out of the way of oncoming walkers and stop to admire a scene of sparrows flocking to a garden bird feeder. It reminds my friend of her time in Spain, ‘a happy sound’, and we watch their grey shapes darting between food and the shelter of the gutter. Their calls explode into single shrieking notes. A juvenile sparrowhawk crashes into the feeder from over the fence, what seemed to be ample shielding from the outside world. The hawk is unmistakable with its dark brown barred wings. It falls out of sight, presumably pinning its prey to the patio, or in the shrub below the feeder. We wait for news. A good few minutes later the shrieking – unceasing during this time – heightens further. The sparrowhawk makes its getaway over the fence and cars parked in the street beyond, the shadow of a sparrow in its talons.

The bells of York Minster sound over the ornamental gardens, their spacious mown lawns and the first beech trees of our time up here. Robins sing from all sides, one is silhouetted in a branch close to our ears, its blackened bill working as it counters the dour skies and echoing bell toll with its shimmering wildsong.

The beast takes to the air

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Arthur's Seat

– Edinburgh, Scotland, November 2012

From behind one of Edinburgh’s characteristically grey stone buildings comes the indomitable and once volcanic summit of Arthur’s Seat. As if some chunk of another planet had landed here in the heart of a city of world heritage status, the change in terrain is sudden. For all the undoubted beauty of Edinburgh’s old architecture, this lump of wild, unapologetic land is a welcome relief from the rain-drenched busts of cathedrals and church towers. A housing estate has been built on the brink of Holyrood Park, the broad wingspan of a female sparrowhawk appears from a ring of beech, birch and ash woodland marking the way in. A magpie gives chase to the hawk, goldfinch skip across the scene, their merry, glistening calls overheard.

Crows are skating the zenith of Arthur’s Seat, but not merely one kind. Tens of jackdaws are in flight, some barging one another, competing for spots in the flock. At an opening in the landscape the Firth of Forth appears. Two students are painting the scene onto canvases attached to easels. Their demeanour is one of calm, of contentment in observing and being observed: there are plenty of tourists taking to the steps up to the top, stopping to admire the young artists as they come and go. A young woman is sitting on the grass beside them, her hood drawn over her head. She eats morsels of food from an orange carrier bag.

Carrion crows toe the tarmac and paving looping around the old volcano, a road we ignore in trying to reach Duddingston Loch. Instead we follow a path covered with foliose lichens, erupting in small boulders and swathes of prickly gorse. I forgot how easily the needles pass through denim. It appears to be a trail home to a community of jackdaws and white-tailed bunny rabbits. At our feet are the defiant pink and purple flowers of viper’s bugloss, half wilted. Our path leads to a dead end of gorse and a precipice: Duddingston Loch can be seen clearly from here, a white swan moving on the surface of the water.

We turn back, trying not to tread into burrows, slipping on the greasy moss and grass. A flock of jackdaws float overhead. We stop to view the city, the Pentland Hills to the south, a ski slope visible like a mistake. Below us there’s Prestonfield golf course, a solitary golfer dragging his gear across a line of ornamental cherry trees swept to the west by years of pressure from air rushing across from the coast. From the crags of Arthur’s Seat comes the guttural kronk of a raven, scattering the jackdaws like leaves, with one feisty ‘daw attempting to lead a mob in revolt. We return back along the road and encounter the dispute once more, the raven sheltering in the dim fissures of rock, almost invisible, but for its rupturing calls, its black, glossy beard exploding as it calls out. Soon enough another raven arrives and the retired beast takes to the air, its digital wingtips and diamond shaped tail reaching out into the chill wind.

Somewhere between a cuckoo and a high speed train

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

Mid-Colne valley

– Broadwater Lake, Harefield, May 2012

A chill wind moves across Broadwater Lake. Black-headed gulls are screaming from rafts built for the common terns which arrive here from their African wintering grounds. It is pleasing to be greeted by one of the newly emigrated. It swoops past, coming closer each time, raising aloft and diving into an arc that brings it back down to the surface of the water and away. The sky is alive with swifts feeding. When the suns does come out clouds of midges move like slow bands of rain after me and on the River Colne I see mayflies touching the water. There’s plenty of food if you’re feathered.

The track separates the Colne on the western side and the lake in the east. The river is separated again by a thick bank of nettles and cow parsley, that common umbellifer that signals spring. There are interjections from vibrant red campion flowers amongst the spread of green, probably indicators of the woodland that was here long before the lakes were dug for gravel and, when finished with, filled by rainwater to create today’s scene. The trees along the river are bursting with song, almost all with the fluid voice of the garden warbler, a bird so plain it’s unmistakable. It has a shy, modest look about it, as if too retiring to boast about its aural beauty. They’re in the bramble too, and it’s a song to silence the prick of the thorns.

On the other side of the river masses of dogwood cover the willow scrub. In the reedbeds struggling to establish along the bank of Broadwater Lake a sedge warbler is singing. It has a white eyestripe and differing palette of browns to mark it out from other plain-looking birds like the reed warbler. Its song is outstanding. I pick out the calls of a blue tit, great tit, goldfinch, greenfinch and the fink! of a chaffinch. This sedge warbler is a masterful mimic.

But there is one song which stands out most, and I hear it around the bend, further up from the lake. The cuckoo. It draws the breath.

A new bout of warm sunshine offers a male orange tip the chance to forage along the track, a pair of Canada geese are ushering twenty-four golden young away and into the Colne. It has the uncanny resemblance to teachers flocking fluorescent infants onto public transport. The geese wack in my direction as they go down river.

Cuck-oo, cuck-oo!

In the distant northern corner of the lake hundreds upon hundreds of house martins are skimming the surface, and from here it appears synchronised. I strafe the glasses from left to right and they are constant. Swifts are treating me like an obstacle, I’m sure I nearly took a hit from a dark and floppy hirundine.

The cuckoo is calling.

I pass back the way we came, again meeting the Canada geese, regarding me once more as a predator. A pair of reed bunting are busy between the scrub along the Colne, passing across to the edge of the lake, the black-headed male clinging to a willow stem, a stick in his bill like a dancer with a rose between his teeth. This bird is building a nest, the female appearing in the bush next door. They disappear into the thin stock of reeds at the edge of the lake.

As I head off in search along the track the cuckoo calls at its clearest, the sun free of cloud, piping. The bird calls from across the Colne, surely from a perch, we scan the trees and find the grey head and neck of the male but it’s bothered and takes to the air. It’s satisfying, so satisfying to see the bird my ancestors took for granted.

I continue along the track, buoyed with the sense that all is right with the world, that England is okay – if this bird has returned again then we must have something to be happy about. Of course, the calling cuckoo is only confirmation, whereas the sight of it is something else. This bird’s voice has become so much a part of our connection with birds, nature, wildlife, time, the world, whatever, that it’s become part of our language, even becoming a word to define mental ill health. It made it into a part of our mechanical world where other species haven’t, the sound of an hour passing and a new beginning. A world without the cuckoo is unthinkable to most. To see the bird calling is a privilege, and then you know it isn’t the gardener playing a trick, the old family clock, or a child portraying ‘madness’.

I’m in a daze. Two birds are squabbling overhead, I’m sure they’re sparrowhawks, but then I’m not. It’s two male cuckoos fighting over territory.

***

Outside the reserve and back on the main road my ears are ringing with the sound of birds – a blackbird somewhere along the way has recorded its fluid melodies into the fundament between my ears. A buzzard passes over the Colne in perfect silence, head twisting, two crows pursue it.

I climb to a pub on the hill over on the other side of the lake, to see the view of the mid-Colne valley and to get a sense of perspective. The weather is fluctuating, the wind is flung out and a few specks of rain touch the windscreens of parked cars, the sun breathes fire into the once dark globules of ornamental copper beech trees on the hill opposite and across the lake. The sunshine stays, the valley gleaming. Its beauty comes like a puncture. The swifts cover the expanse, wheezing and sailing across the vista. In the ragged hedge of hawthorn and field maple just in front of me a whitethroat appears, offering a few tentative renditions of its gravelly warble. A man walking a very slow and floppy-eared dog has spied me.

‘We see red kites very often, almost every day,’ he says. It’s his day off. He turns to take in the view of the valley, his thoughts turning to the proposal to build High Speed 2, a high speed trainline, through neighbouring Korda Lake and across the Colne. ‘It’s a nightmare,’ he says. ‘Hopefully they put it underground.’

The sky is an azure blue with discarded cloud, the sun intense. Broadwater Lake is a space of trembling, sparkling water. This was once a gravel quarry but now is a place which, in this moment, with swifts, warblers and the indefatigable cuckoo, retains a sense of the Arcadian paradise with which we paint our memories of the English countryside. With the threat of upheaval from HS2 it’s unclear how long that will remain.