I’m aware I don’t write here as much as I would like. That might be because it can feel like a Busman’s holiday with all the thinking and writing I do in my head and on my laptop. Occasionally I am prompted to formally get something down, to open up on my time as a PhD researcher as I ponder my thoughts and processes.
This Spring sees me entering into the final year of my PhD (yay) and am feverishly writing and still analysing data (bite me, it’s my process). Today I’m listening to participants of the one-to-one interviews I undertook in Spring 2020, in the first few months of COVID-19 lockdown and reflecting on my own connection to nature and how that has changed in the last few years. No spoilers but it won’t surprise any of you that people reported how magnificent the birds were during lockdown. When the roads were quieter, and the birdsong seemed louder. At the time I remember thinking ‘how are people just hearing this, I’m always tuning into the birds?’, but I understand now that it was the absence of something, the silence that accompanied the birdsong, which may have made it feel like the birds were celebrating life over lockdown, and this is what resonated with many.
For me, undertaking the mammoth task which is a PhD, I have still felt a little locked down at times; tied to my desk as people move about and interact as they did pre-COVID-19. Happily, I still have the birds that visit my garden. They lighten my day and inspire me (sometimes to poetry), and they have been a constant even with the additional noise of cars, lorries, and aeroplanes. From my desk I can see Sparrows bouncing around. I can hear their calls, their incessant beeping, that has become the soundtrack to my working day. And there are others that visit, the usual suspects, such as Wood Pigeons, Blackbirds, and Robins, as well as the occasional flash of colour from a tiny Blue Tit and for the moment a female Blackcap… all welcome and contributing to my songbird playlist. So it was with a startled demeanour turning to abject horror when my little urban garden, four metres square at a guess, welcomed in a Sparrowhawk. She was beautiful but she was brutal and took one of the female Sparrows, heartbreakingly using my table as a plucking post for about 30 minutes. Initially I think there was confusion on the part of the usual visitors. I spotted two pairs of Blackbirds watching from the Hazel and one Pigeon from the fence, it seemed in disbelief at what was going on. However, once the smell of death began to pervade the garden (and I swear I smelt it when I cleaned up after the kill), they left and the silence that followed the rest of the day and into the evening was palpable. Imagine lockdown without the birds. That joy which so many of us leant into gone, and yet we continue to build and urbanise their spaces; I expect changes to agriculture is why this Sparrowhawk is hunting in a town as opposed to their natural habitat of rural open fields and forests.
Yes, nature is beautiful and brutal. It is her way. We can choose another.
Action: What can we do? I follow Hannah Bourne-Taylor and her quest to get Swift nests integrated into new builds. Please follow, support, and sign her petition.