A sign of hope in bleak times
Spare a thought for the millions of migrant birds now making their way down to Africa from Northern Europe. They fight their way over deserts, mountains, seas, and thousands of humans in Europe trying to catch and eat them. My son who lives in Portugal, in the cork oak forests of the Alentejo south of Lisbon, came across one such unhappy traveller outside his little farmhouse. The bird, no bigger than a sparrow, was lying on the ground. He thought it was dead, and he picked it up. He took a photo of it with his mobile and then wondered what to do. It appeared to have no injury. Sometimes birds hit windows thinking the reflections are the actual sky, but this bird was not near any window.
After a while the bird moved and opened its beak. He dipped a twig into some water in the kitchen and gave it a drop to drink. Slowly it recovered and opened its eyes, when he took another photo. Several more drops later and the bird flew from his hand happily away to continue its journey south.
He wasn’t sure what it was and sent the pictures on to our computer screen. It was a redstart, and could have come from a forest in Sussex where it had bred this summer. I see three or four every autumn drinking from the dew-pond I built in
1976 for birds in the middle of Kingley Vale Nature Reserve near Chichester. One pair actually bred there in the 1970s.
The male bird’s song was as shrill and lonely as the skirl of a highland shepherd’s pipes. It carried for a quarter of a mile, a most unexpected song that was far louder than the robin’s. There was no other water available for them in that big dry valley, and so it can be for birds all the way down for thousands of miles to Africa in dry years.
Redstarts are related to robins and are in the thrush family, but they have bright orange tails as well as chests. And their throats are black, all of which startling combination of colours makes you look twice in admiration.
The birds have a special resonance for me having seen my first one when as a child I was in a car in London travelling through the blitzed buildings just after the war. Rubble was still in piles beside the roads, much of it under waving acres of rose-bay willowherb that had made bricks blossom into dark pink flowers.
Perched on a house beam splintered and straight as a gibbet, was a small bird with a chest as black as the soot in the bomb-burst chimney. The car stopped and we heard it singing a requiem to all that chaos. It was close enough to see the ashen cap on its head. I was told that it was a black redstart, a very close relative of the common redstart. It was one of many that found the new landscape of the dead to its liking.
Much of London and other cities then were like the jumbled clitter of scree slopes on frost-torn mountain slopes, or rocky shores smashed into pieces by the everlasting pounding of the waves. Within five years most of the cities had been reclaimed and risen up again into straight lines.
The redstarts had briefly shown how the planet could be made beautiful again if ever that would be needed in another age. I remember feeling comforted by that brave new bird and its promise of a better world. All life can be salvaged and renewed giving hope in even the bleakest times.