To take a break from the chaos Donald Trump is causing around the world, and with the sounds of Brexit-reality-deniers ringing in my ears (“Isn’t it good we’ve avoided the worst of the tariffs?”!) I decided to do a spot of birdwatching.
I’m no twitcher, but I find walking in the countryside relaxing and I’ve tried to learn to identify a few birds because it’s nice to understand the things around you – and even more so when those things are part of nature, rather than economic disasters caused by narcissistic, foreign potentates.
Which is how I found myself strolling beside the River Don in Hexthorpe, South Yorkshire, one evening. About halfway along my walk I came across a dead tree and stood watching it for about 10 minutes. And no, I don’t smoke, and I hadn’t even got the phone out to start doom-scrolling. Instead I’d gone full WH Davies, “What is this life if, full of care…”
While I stood there watching, the tree was visited by five different bird species: a blue tit, a robin, six long-tailed tits, a willow warbler, and a tree creeper.
At one point, five goldfinches flitted between the branches of the trees around me, but they didn’t land on “my” tree.
Most of the birds didn’t hang around for long, and apart from the long-tailed tits they weren’t all there together. The robin chased the long-tailed tits away, or at least they scarpered when it arrived. Obeying in advance, perhaps?
My personal favourite is the tree creeper. They’re easy to identify, with their bright white underneath and the distinctive way they scuttle up trees, and while there are actually a fair number of them in the UK, you don’t see them very often, which means finding one feels oddly like an achievement instead of what it really is: random good luck.
It was only on the walk back to the car that the outside world intruded again… it occurred to me that most of the birds on my tree were probably natives.
While there was a Lithuanian blue tit discovered in Kent in 2015, most blue tits stick close to home throughout their lives. They tend to live within 12 miles of the nest they hatched in. Robins are even stricter homebodies. Most don’t go further than five miles from the spot where they are born, and they have been known to fight to the death to protect a territory.
But at least one of the birds I watched was availing itself of avian freedom of movement: the willow warbler winters in sub-Saharan Africa, meaning the bird in my tree, smaller than a sparrow, had just completed a journey of about 3,000 miles!
If they can have freedom of movement, I thought, why can’t I?
And with every step back towards the car and the “real” world, the thoughts just piled back up; was one of the long-tailed tits a little Nigel Farage, trying to rile up the others in defence of an imagined lost purity of the home tree?
If anything, though, the bigger threat seemed to be the robin. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more troubled I was by the robin. Loud, pushing others around, curiously popular with a certain segment of the population, and a vaguely familiar-looking orange-y colour that I couldn’t quite place.
By the time I’d reached the car it felt like any good the walk had done me had evaporated. Perhaps I need to find a new hobby.
But still, I reckon with the world seemingly going mad around us, it’s all the more important that we make time for the simpler things in life. And I don’t mean the robin. Or his human equivalent.
Michael Lancashire is a freelance writer and author
