The Birds and Me

I hate Winter. Who doesn’t? But I really, really hate it.  I loathe and despise it possibly more than anything else and this is not a good thing considering that I live in Ireland and Winter is seemingly endless here.  The rain, the wind, the cold, the frost, the snow, the hail.  You name it, if it is cold and miserable, we get it. Our Summer is fleeting and disappointing although we should be used to it by now.  We are teased by a few sunny days and the remaining few weeks are overcast and dull and often very cold.

When it is really bad, and there is no predicting when that might be, I can only afford to keep my house heated during the half of each week that my daughter spends with me.  Once she is gone back to her dad’s house I just layer up with clothing, put on two pairs of thick, warm socks and sit on the sofa with the dog on top of me and a duvet on top of both of us while we sit shivering as we watch T.V. I am not mean.  I just don’t have the money to keep the gas running all the time and to keep the stove lighting with solid fuel because it is so expensive to so.  I would say I suffer from ‘S.A.D. Syndrome’ (Seasonal affective disorder) which causes depression in people when the seasons change, usually when it is the change from Autumn to Winter, except that we basically only have two seasons. One, is the Winter which takes up 90% of the year and the other miserable 10% is Summer.

Well anyway, the reason for my very depressing introduction is because as bad as it is, every year, irrespective of the weather or the temperature, there is something that happens without fail that brings me great joy.  Around the end of April, when the days are marginally longer in terms of light, the Swallows who have five nests in one of my sheds,return from sunny South Africa to this godforsaken ice box of a country to re-occupy those same nests and lay their eggs and hatch their chicks.  Now, there have been some years when only two or three of the nests have been used but since they often have two lots of chicks there are always quite a few of them up and flying well before they set off on their 9,500 kilometer journey at three months old.

When the Swallows come, many changes take place in me and around me.  Because this is something that has been happening since I was a small child and I still live in the same house, it is a nostalgic time in the best way.  I have also long had a habit of opening my back door during the day and leaving it open as soon as they arrive.  It is a kind of nutty way of me telling the weather that I don’t care what it does because the Swallows are here and that means it is Summer and Summer means the back door gets left open during the day.  Only a very deranged person has a personal vendetta against the weather to the point that she will let rain pour into the house rather than give in and close the door. Just giving you a quick heads-up on who you’re dealing with here lest you hadn’t already guessed.

Along with the aforementioned madness, I also do my best to spend as much time sitting outside as I can during this brief few weeks of hail-free rain.  Now, since I have been divorced for several years the absence of a strong man on the premises has resulted in my very large back garden turning into a jungle.  This used to bother me but doesn’t anymore because as ungainly as it looks, it has, in it’s wildness, turned into a natural habitat for a wide variety of birds and wildlife.  Most of this is welcome although I have had a couple of surprises that sort of gave me the creeps. For instance, I walked into my yard one morning to find two Stoats trying to knaw their way into my bin eeeeeeyikes! Boy did they move quickly when they saw me.  I guess they were thinking about me what I was thinking about them!

This is one angle of my manicured garden. Oh Look! Is that blue I see in the sky?

But anyway, there is a kind of order to the chaos, or at least there was until this year.  First the Swallows come.  Then the Starlings who nest under my roof tiles.  They are harmless and lovely and do not cause damage so they don’t bother me.  Next comes the Jackdaws who have cunningly found a way to squeeze through the chimney guards so they can nest in my chimneys.  Not good in a house where you light fires most of the year round.  Note to self: Come up with a better way of keeping the Jackdaws out.  Then, all hell breaks loose as all the other birds begin to nest in their chosen spaces and along come the Cuckoos.  Oh yes, how lovely they are until they lay their eggs in another birds nest and when that darling little Cuckoo hatches out with the other chicks, he or she will promptly toss them out of the nest so that the ‘foster mother’ can give all the food and attention to it alone.  Nature is strange to say the least. Generally though it is a lovely time when the garden is full of birdsong and the sound of young chicks calling out and the busyness of nest building and chick feeding and it is more or less the same every year.

Lots of room for all kinds of shenanigans to go on in there wouldn’t you agree?

This year was different.  For a start we had a dreadful snow storm in March which is much later than we ever have heavy snow and it is the only reason I can think of as to why the Swallows did not arrive on time.  They were about three weeks late getting here and when they did there was only about four adults and from what I can tell, only two of the nests are being used by them.  Then a really unusual thing happened which was the arrival of wrens in the garden for the first time ever but what was really strange was that they took up residence in one of the smaller swallow’s nests. Go figure.  Lazy wrens? I can hear tiny tweets coming from that nest now so it was a good house choice so far for the wrens.  Must find out who their agent is.

Next came the fighting.  I have never before seen so many birds going for each other and giving it their best shot.  My daughter and I were astonished to see a female blackbird take on a cuckoo on the roof of the house.  The cuckoo was a little bigger and meaner but the blackbird just kept taking shots at her until she finally got her to back off to the edge of the roof and when there was nowhere left to go the cuckoo finally gave up.  There were feathers flying.  Also, as a result of my ‘open door’ policy, there is a chaffinch who has been using a basin with water in it as a bird bath just outside the door and when she is finished, instead of flying away, she flies into my hallway and the dog goes berserk.  Since she is a smallish dog and the bird flies from one door top to another she is quite safe from the dog who foolishly hurls herself against the doors to try and reach the bird. At first I thought the finch must have been pretty scared with all the to-do and barking and flapping about but she keeps coming back and now I think she is enjoying it and likes taunting the dog.  Either that or she is a very, very stupid bird.

Yesterday, I was leaving in the car to go to the shop and just as I reversed out I saw a Mistle Thrush sitting very still in the grass so I stopped the car to look at her as it was very strange to see a bird sitting in the grass like that.  She never moved a muscle so I presumed there was something the matter with her and I got out of the car to have a closer look.  I walked over beside her and at first wasn’t even sure if it was alive as it was so still but then I saw an eye move and when I went to the other side the other eye moved just a little.  I was a bit upset because as it was Sunday and there was no Vet’s clinic open to bring her to. (This bit sounds really crazy but just in case you didn’t know, when a Vet takes their oath it includes that they will treat all animals in need of help including wild animals that may have been injured.  Sometimes the animal will need to be euthanised but my vet has saved birds for me, a hedgehog and several dogs that I found on the road.  He has had to put some to sleep of course but better that than a long and painful death.) I suppose there are some who would argue that I should let nature take it’s course but nature made me too so if I can help an animal who is suffering I always will.

I am not a religious or holy person and am not given to saying prayers but I decided that the best thing to do would be to go to town as I had planned and see if the bird was still there when I got home which I did but all the way home in the car I was praying and praying to nobody in particular and to anyone who might hear me that she would be gone.  I am so silly that there were tears in my eyes because I was worried about what I would do with her if she was in a bad way.  As I turned into my driveway my eyes searched the patch of grass where she had been but I could not see her.  I parked the car and looked everywhere around where she had been sitting but there wasn’t a sign of her and I was so relieved for both of us – and the dog! Then I heard the most beautiful singing and I looked up to the tallest branch of the tallest tree and there she was, or if it wasn’t her it was her twin, and I felt so happy inside and all because of a little bird.  I think that when the bird was sitting in a frozen pose in the grass it was either out of fear or some kind of self protection like ‘playing dead’ and I should check if birds can do that.

Well, speaking of playing dead, I have a more serious situation on the opposite side of my house which looks out on to the drive and a long row of very, very tall, evergreen trees lining the driveway on one side.  These trees are rich with bird life and as I have a large patio door that looks out on to the trees this is another vantage point for observing what’s happening outdoors.  Much to my horror I appear to have a suicidal blackbird – adult female, on my hands.  I know it is not entirely unusual for birds to fly into glass windows because of the reflection but it is in my house since the windows have not been cleaned in a gazillion years so why, oh why has this beautiful bird taken to throwing herself against the glass with the most awful ‘thudding’ noise every hour or so.  I’m sure if we could just talk about it she would feel better but I don’t speak blackbird.  I am convinced it has to do with a man.  She is clearly suffering from deep, man induced, depression to the point where she is trying to slam herself to death. I am really sorry for her but I would love if she would find a shiny window somewhere else as it is starting to really freak me out.

There have been three sunny days so Summer, as we know it, must be nearing an end although technically (are you listening to me weather?) it does not finish until the end of July so my door remains open until then.  I will bring more news if there is any to bring about the birdies.