Beautiful sight
local avifauna, the landscape and the other wildlife nearby. I am learning about the area and its birds and then sharing that with my daughter – so she is also learning, and therefore, I am giving something back to her.
Finally, we are connecting – on many levels, both as people and with the area around us.
What have we seen? Spring migration has been wonderful around here, and as I write, we are not long home from our morning walk, where we saw almost 50 species of birds, including a local inland Wheatear. At the start of April, we heard a singing Firecrest in a nearby copse; and for most of April, a Ring Ouzel has been feeding on a well-manicured garden. We have found several pairs of Grey Wagtails breeding close to home, and three Lesser Whitethroat territories – it has been truly remarkable to discover what has been around.
The undoubted highlight was actually at home. I went down the alley that leads to our garage, to have a look at the sky for a bit, on the afternoon of 10 April. On our garage roof and then present all afternoon, feeding along our fence line and some adjacent industrial plots, was a beautiful Black Redstart!
It has been tough at times, though. After the daily walk, that is all for the day, and as there is always work to be done, I often do not get outside any more, unless it is to play. The irony is that I am outside more than I normally would be during work times, but it is hyper-focused on a small window of time, with the main priority being exercise and fresh air for both me and our daughter. Therefore, I cannot just stop and look at birds all the time, as I would on my own. It has also, as I mentioned, been very tough to work in shifts at home and provide engaging and fun things for our daughter to do; not to mention not being able to see other people – especially family.
On the plus side, our garden birds have been a great source of entertainment. If we did not already know the characters and their personalities – we do now!
We keep the feeders stocked-up and although the visitors are the same most days, as I have written about before, that consistency and stability of knowing they are there still, is incredibly comforting. With the slower pace of life that we are all living in currently, the time and space to observe our garden visitors has been welcome. It has also given another angle of amusement for our daughter, who has learnt to say sparrow, Blackbird, woodpecker and pigeon, during lockdown.
Writing this now, the buzz of coming across the local Wheatear this morning still lingers. It is not just the consistency of birds that is so magical, but also that element of surprise they can bring; especially when birding away from your usual sites, with no choice but to remain in the ‘corona bubble’ we are all forced to stay in. I had hoped I would see a Wheatear on our walks – they pass through the area at the start of May every year – but it was still a wondrous thing, to actually connect with it.
This whole, unprecedented time has dramatically reinforced the ideas that I wrote about in Bird Therapy. There is so much joy to be found in the everyday – the Blackbird with the little panel of white in its wing feathers that comes up to the French doors; the House Sparrows chirping away in your gutters. These are things we usually overlook, that pass us by in the freneticism of modern life.
Lockdown has helped us to lock ourselves back down to the basics and fundamentals of birdwatching again, like going back to the heady days in which we first began to take notice. A light in all this darkness.