The dunnock is small and brown with a grey underbelly and bib, and grey bits around its head. It looks like a sparrow but has a razor-sharp, slate-grey beak for teasing insects out of tight spaces. In some parts it’s called hedge sparrow because it love hedges so much. My dad has dunnocks in his garden because it’s bounded by hedges. They hide in them all day and dart out to the ground feeders or hoover up spilled seed from the hanging feeders or they bathe in one of the baths dotted in the border. But the whole time they’re out of the hedge they’re looking around, nervously. They’re happiest in the hedge, happiest where they can’t be seen. You can look out to Dad’s garden and the whole area beneath the hedge can be littered with dunnocks and you don’t see them because they’re grey and brown and they blend into soil and shadows. A blue or great tit in my garden? Yes. A robin or a blackbird or a collared dove or a woodpigeon? Of course. But a dunnock? I’m surprised. This dunnock can obviously see the shape of things to come, can see the shelter developing. Has vision. Or maybe she’s just really hungry.
I fill the hanging feeders for the house sparrows, who will knock seed to the ground for the dunnock. As I’m doing it a collared dove lands on the trellis, hoping for its own fill of spills. I scatter more seed in the ground feeder, seeing as the doves and the pigeons and the blackbird and now this dunnock are all having to share. Before I go in again I check on my plants. Everything is the same except ‘Jan Fopma’, the clematis, has poked two stems through the soil. I planted her with ‘Frances E. Lester’. Frances and Jan are raring to go and they will look beautiful together, they will provide shelter together, they may one day house my dunnock together.
My former home in London has been rented out for two years, and the garden is now an overgrown woodland. The dog rose is in the sky, the summer jasmine on the bicycle path beyond the back fence. I clip everything back, chop it all up and use the clippings to mulch the ‘woodland floor’. It’s a world away from the paved desert Jules and I bought seven years ago. I dig up self-sown Japanese anemones and dog violets to take back to Brighton.
When I lived here I worked on the communal garden, too. It was hardly a garden, just a closely clipped lawn, a couple of palm trees and a few raised beds with variegated ivy growing up huge trellised walls. We had a small ‘makeover’ budget once, and I was instrumental in getting native wildflower green roofs installed on the car-park vents. I planted trees: an ornamental cherry – not great for wildlife but free, from a neighbour, and the woodpigeons liked the fruit – and some silver birches. I sowed pollinator-friendly ox-eye daisy and red clover, planted Verbena bonariensis and sedums. I took cuttings of my climbers and squeezed them in, tried to make the place greener, more of a habitat rather than an empty space, green only in colour. I hung bird feeders and erected nest boxes, put in a compost bin. It was an uphill struggle. I argued constantly with the gardeners and other residents about what should be planted and how the garden should be managed. We like the bird feeders, they said, but we don’t like the dandelions. We like the palm trees because they remind us of being on holiday (but do you need seven?). We can’t give over the whole place to wildlife, that would be terrible, that would be messy. Why don’t we plant pretty bedding flowers in those ugly green roofs? They wondered why the birds never came. It was like banging my head against a brick wall.
The flats and garden were managed by a management company, to whom we would pay an extortionate service charge each month. Some of this service charge paid for the maintenance of the garden, which consisted annually of: applying a weedkiller and lawn feed in spring, mowing the lawn once a week, bagging up the waste and throwing it into landfill. Occasionally there would be a budget for ‘bedding’: gaudy purple primroses in spring, petunias and pelargoniums in summer, pansies in winter. Nothing to see here, said the garden to the bees.
Each week the gardeners would come and I would watch them carve the place up with their lawn mowers and leaf blowers, bag everything into plastic sacks and take them to the bins. I spent months trying to convince them to compost the waste, not use plastic bags. Eventually, sometimes, they would leave the bags out for me, which I would empty myself into the compost bin, mix with brown material to stop it breaking down anaerobically. Sometimes they would forget and I would fetch them from the bins, the bags already boiling with the energy of decomposing grass clippings.
I offered to take on the garden myself, told the residents they could save service charge money by just buying me a rake and a lawnmower. They didn’t trust me, didn’t think I’d keep it up; they were worried about mess and rats. Each tree that died (due to a lack of water) was replaced with a palm tree, each dandelion drowned in poison. I tried to focus on my small successes: blue and great tits, blackbirds, woodpigeons, bee-friendly flowers. But so many things were destroyed: crocuses planted in the lawn mown just before they flowered; herbaceous perennials trimmed back where they would die, weedkiller, those bloody purple pansies. We don’t want it to look like a jungle, they would say. We can’t have that.
I bump into one of the committee members as I wait to be let into the complex, and she asks me if I’m living in the country now. You like nature, don’t you, she said. She once told me she hated it, loved the bright lights of the city. I take a walk around the communal garden. A new building has shot up behind it and the lawn bears the muddy marks of no longer getting enough sun. The green roofs look good, they’ve had their annual autumn trim, but my ox-eye daisies look like they’ve been nuked and the bee-friendly plants have mostly shrivelled and died. Another silver birch has gone and in its wake is a palm tree, while a straight line of brightly coloured pansies glows like radioactive waste in the foreground. Fruit from my ornamental cherry spills onto the poisoned land; I hope/fear the woodpigeons are making the most of it.
I leave my former home and walk through the park, past gardens I used to love that have now been paved over. A car park butts up against severed back yards, weed-suppressant membrane and stones cover earth along its edge. The garden where a large, gnarled elder grew is now beneath paving stones, and there’s another further up, where a London plane tree grew. I watch a digger carve up a patch of brownfield land, where buddleia and willowherb served butterflies in summer, where foxes played beyond Do Not Enter gates, where house sparrows nested. Luxury flats soon, no doubt. Maybe a sprayed-green communal garden with gaudy purple pansies if they’re lucky.
What are we doing to our land? I think of everything I’ve achieved in the postage-stamp garden I brought back from beneath paving stones. That could be any patch of land, anywhere. There could be a network of native shrubs and trees, long grass, wildflowers, in gardens and balconies up and down the country. Some of our wildlife could survive here. It’s not too late.
In Hove the blackbird sits on the trellis, shuffled up, grumpy-looking, annoyed that I’ve disturbed him. He’s not singing – he does that from the top of the Leyland cypress three doors down – but perhaps he’s roosting here, or trying to. It seems such an exposed spot for a night-time roost. But as twilight fades to black he will gradually blend in with his surroundings, I suppose. Perhaps the house sparrows don’t like to share the holly.
The blackbird is new; a young gun, I think, a male born last year trying out a new territory. My camera traps catch him poking around on the ground, and he serenades me at dusk and dawn, his flutey whistles and rasps the town crier singing March for all to hear. Mostly he’s a chorus of one, occasionally joined by chirping sparrows and clacking gulls. I wait, patiently, for the day I’m woken by the dunnock and the blackbird together – what an event that will be.
He doesn’t have a mate yet and I don’t hold much hope for him finding one. I’ve seen it before, in London, a young male establishing my garden as part of his territory but failing to woo a female. It was winter, a female started coming in and then this male, full of hot air he was, spent the whole time chasing the female out of the garden, competing with her for food. They were so horrible to each other that I named them Sid and
Nancy. And then, just as spring began to break the female disappeared – a winter migrant, of course. Here perhaps from Scandinavia or Russia for our milder weather, she would have set up home in my garden, eaten my seeds and berries, bathed in my bath, and then flown home again in search of a mate who was nice to her.
When Nancy left, Sid became bolder and more full of hot air. His territory seemed to take in the silver birch on the other side of the cycle path at the end of the garden plus the bit of train track that ran between two stations. He would serenade us with loud squawks from a TV aerial on top of a block of flats on the adjacent road, chase off rival males with as much gusto as he denied food to Nancy. Once, I stood at the back window and watched two male blackbirds compete for a female. I hoped so much that the more successful male was Sid, but it wasn’t to be; his rival and the female flew off into the sunset together, leaving Sid to lick his wounds in my honeysuckle.
He spent that summer in my London garden, ferreting around my pots for vine weevil grubs, practising his song from the corner behind the cherry tree. He sang from his rooftop TV aerial and scanned his kingdom from the lip of the railway bridge. He was a feisty bird and a terror, but I was so in love with him.
Like Nancy, one day he disappeared. I wondered if he’d moved territories or found a mate elsewhere but he most likely died. His patch took in a road, a cycle path and a railway – plenty to be lost in. But he could also have come to deliberate harm; I heard neighbours complaining that he woke them at 4 a.m. every day. Perhaps they took an air rifle to him.
So this new blackbird in Hove, this young gun, is welcome to sit grumpily on my fence, serenade me with spring, knock all of the soil out of my pots in search for grubs if he wants to. I’m glad to have another bird in the garden, I’m glad it’s part of a wider territory. But I won’t hold out hope, yet, for the patter of tiny blackbird feet.
It’s lovely, though, to have birds in the garden, to be woken by a blackbird – there wasn’t one last year. Really, now, it’s the garden’s first spring. Last March it was still mud and stones, the climbing roses still their bare-root selves, the decking still in piles, the rubbish I’d not taken through the flat. Now when I lean against the wall and drink tea, or crouch down in my corner, I feel the garden has grown into something independent of me. It has a life and rules of its own – leaves and shoots poking through the soil, plants seeded in from elsewhere. I have given it life and it has taken it with relish. It can only grow and get better.
The winter tits and goldfinches have gone, dispersed back to breeding territories, no doubt. The robin, too, which I’ve seen for two consecutive winters but never in spring and summer. The camera traps are still picking up foxes, which is wonderful, and my dunnock, of course, which continues to hang out around the edges. Leaves are unfurling, buds are bursting.
Peregrine falcons are nesting on the seafront. They’re at Sussex Heights, a twenty-four-storey block of flats between Regency Square and Churchill shopping centre. They’ve been nesting there since 1998, only once, in 2002, choosing the West Pier instead.
Sussex Heights is 102 metres high and has some of the best views of Brighton and the sea. Celebrities have lived here. Some of its flats are owned by DJs, their parties renowned across the city. I’ve never been to a Sussex Heights party but I know people who have. Wild, they say, crazy. Best parties in Brighton. Peregrines on the roof.
They’re beautiful birds. Large, blue-grey on top with their breast and the underside of their wings like the perfect knitted jumper – thick cream collar with cream and white bars beneath, giving way to longer cream and grey striped wing and tail feathers, matching cream and grey striped trousers, bright orange feet. The face is black-grey with a moustache that bleeds into the cream collar, the eyes huge and searching, the hooked beak black and yellow. And the shape of them, oh the shape of them. Angled wings, splayed tail, the way, when they hover over prey, their feet hang like roosting bats.
The fastest animal in the world, the peregrine falcon can reach speeds of 200 miles per hour, hurtling through the sky in a terrifying swoop to ambush their prey. I’ve never seen one do this but I saw one take on a buzzard once and the buzzard lost. Traditionally they nest in more rural locations, on cliffs and mountains near a river or coast. They eat medium-sized birds such as pigeons, ducks and grouse. And therein lies their problem: in the last century they have been persecuted because they ate into the profits of grouse shoots or pigeon races. They had their eggs stolen for collecting or falconry. Pesticides in the food chain added to their woe and in the 1960s, the same decade their Brighton home was built, the peregrine falcon nearly died out. Yet around that time they started adapting their habitat, as if they knew that rural life wouldn’t get them anywhere. They took to nesting in more urban areas, on church and cathedral spires, the first of London’s skyscrapers. There are thirty nesting pairs in London now, others in cities across the country. And here, in a bespoke nest box on a 1960s block of party flats on Brighton seafront.
They’re safer here. Safer in our tower blocks and cathedral spires, safer where the parties are, where they mostly go unnoticed but where those who notice them welcome them because they’re beautiful and they eat pigeons. Outside the city they still face persecution from grouse-moor owners and pigeon fanciers. Their eggs are still at risk from collectors and falconers. Those that fledge from our cities come unstuck if they venture back into rural areas to breed. They’re evolving to stay in our cities. They belong in our cities. It’s thought there are more than 1,400 breeding pairs in the UK now, the highest numbers for fifty years.
Their nest box is lined with gravel and set up with cameras so people like me can watch them while we work and write our books. Nothing much is happening yet, no eggs but a nesting pair. They bring each other pigeons. I take binoculars to the seafront to watch them and take detours on my runs and glance up. But there’s nothing to see, not yet, they’re just beginning. Life is just beginning.
I dream I’m in bed at Driftwood, in 1989, the birds singing so loudly I’m terrified they’ll come in. They must be on the gutter, these birds, singing away in the darkness, on the roof or in the eaves. They’re so loud. I feel like they’re in the room. They’re shouting, not singing. Shouting and threatening to come in, to fly around my room like the starling that came down the chimney a few weeks ago, the starling I thought was a crow. I like birds, but not when they’re flapping around my bedroom. Not when I’m eight years old.
Granny comes in. Are you awake? Granny! She perches on the end of the bed, her green dressing-gown wrapped around her. Curlers in. I don’t recognise her like this. I’ve seen her only fully clothed, Sunday dress or old blouse and trousers suitable for gardening. Pinny for cooking, flour or grease streaked across it. She looks old. Can you hear them? The birds? I tell her I don’t like it. I’m tired and they woke me up. Are they coming in, I ask. No, darling, she says. They’re just singing. They sing a lot in spring. The males defend their territory, their nest with its female and eggs. Every tweet is a rallying cry that they’re still alive and they will not be cuckolded. Here I am Here I am Here I am Here I am. That’s all they’re doing, there’s no need to worry. She speaks with a lilt, like a bird. I don’t like it, I repeat. Can you make it stop? She asks if I would like a cup of tea and I say yes, even though it’s dark and no one should drink tea in the dark unless you’re getting up early to go on holiday and this doesn’t feel like a holiday. I ask her not to be too long. Don’t leave me with the birds, Granny.
She returns with tea. Opens the curtains and we watch the sun rise behind the houses opposite, a fire above the chimneys. The blackbird sings first, she tells me, then the robin and then the wren – there, do you hear it? The wren is deafening, terrifying. I never want to see a wren. And there, she says, the chaffinch, and can you hear the chiffchaff now? It comes from Africa, like the swallows and the cuckoo. It flies here every spring, to have a family. I sip tea as my head fills with song and knowledge that I don’t quite believe, wis
hing I could just go to sleep again, wishing this wasn’t happening. My granny knows the birds because she’s old. Old people like birds. I don’t know why she’s bothering to teach me.
The great tits start as traffic begins to roar, and the magic, or the madness, is lost. Granny lets me sleep in for a while as she has a bath, takes her curlers out. We eat breakfast with Sheba, watch sparrows and tits battle for bacon rind and stale bread on the bird table. I watch them, silently. Granny asks me if I’m OK. I’m OK. Do you want to feed the birds? No, I don’t think so. What shall we do today? I don’t know, Granny. I look down at my lap. She clears the breakfast things and we walk the dog along the lanes, me suspicious of every bird in every tree. Later she calls Mum, who comes to pick me up two days earlier than planned.
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Page 13