Keeping a sharp watch on the Parlement of Foules
Tn these warm lazy August days I have been watching my birds. I use the proprietary term because they do appear to enjoy my Somerset garden
and make the fullest possible use of it. The house martins have built two large nests in the eaves, just outside my bedroom window, and flutter about busily, a sizeable colony of them. How many? Difficult to say. Oscar Wilde observed, 'One should count one's chickens before they're hatched, because afterwards they dart about so confusingly it's impossible.' But I would say there are about 25. Yesterday a dozen sat together in statuesque amity on the telephone wire. But as a rule they are in ceaseless motion. They do not come down on to the lawn to forage but feed in the air. With their small beaks and gigantic mouths they gobble up unsuspecting insects and drifting spiders, all on the fluttering wing. It's not my idea of how to enjoy a meal, but who knows what goes on in the head of a small bird that weighs little more than half an ounce?
The swifts, I think, have already gone — to Morocco, probably. I like to think of them beginning their wintering in luxurious fashion in Marrakesh, nesting in the tower of the big mosque or, more fashionably still, in the Mamounia Hotel, within easy reach of the excitements of the Place Djemaa el Fna. At least that's what it used to be called when I was an impecunious subaltern in Gibraltar (before I got my well-paid captaincy) but with a taste for grandeur. I used to rely on the Yankee air force to fly me to sybaritic weekends in Churchill's favourite March resort. However, swifts see things differently. Luxurious resting places are not for them. Indeed they are, quite literally, restless. Their claws are tiny with all four toes pointing forward. This means they can just about hang on to a rough surface but can't actually perch on a tree or wire. They seem to spend their entire lives in the air, where they are extremely efficient in twisting and turning to engulf flies they have spotted. Of course, they have to come down to earth to nest, usually in holes in a cliff or old building, and line these brief homes with feathers. But that is their only exception to lives spent in flight — like the old Pan American One, which went endlessly round and round the world, changing crews and occasionally engines and aircraft, but never coming to a final stop. When a swift chick is born, grows and becomes capable of flight, it ceases to be a fledgling. Thereafter it never settles again until it is old enough to nest. This may be two or three years, and all the time it is fluttering and gliding and swooping, feeding itself and sleeping in the air. I find this quite incredible, but all the bird books agree it is so.
If the swifts have gone, the 'chattering swallows' as Mrs Browning calls them are still here. They nest in one of the old stables, now used only for storing garden machinery and ladders. They get in and out through a little top-light open only two inches, and it is an unending pleasure to me, watching them, between six and seven in the evening, whizz through this narrow aperture at top speed, never a feather touching wood. Their flight control is marvellous, and if I were a designer of aircraft I would study them intently for their secrets. Indeed they are a joy at all times, dipping and swooping, gliding, fluttering, zooming, doing solitary dances in the air on their wingtips, then joining with another in a pas de deux full of grace and elegance. Is all this balletic, terpsichorean activity for pleasure or for exercise? Or is there some devious economic purpose in it all? Unlike swifts, swallows can perch and love to do so. There is a certain roof-edge near their shed which they have marked out for congregational territory, and there they converse and politicise. When I see a group thus resting, I dash inside for my sketch pad, for I love to draw their long, sleek, shining lines, with deeply forked tail and outer streamers which give them a length of seven or eight inches to match their grand wingspan of well over a foot.
They will be leaving here next month for their immense journey to winter in South Africa. I imagine them swooping down over the harbour in Cape Town to perch in the exotic garden of the Nelson Hotel, or drifting over the old naval base in Simonstown — celebrated in a sinister story by Kipling — or even visiting Robben Island, the Alcatraz of the old Boer regime. Good luck to these daring long-distance travellers! Meanwhile they are still here, teaching their young to fly, snatching up the brown breadcrumbs and seeds I put out on their cottage-roofed bird table, and making life dangerous for the wasps and dragonflies.
In addition to these three I can identify and watch intelligently, there are hosts of mostly smaller creatures of the avian rank and file. There is, at the edge of the lawn, a ten-foot bush of a curious kind which my knowledgeable neighbours cannot identify. To me it is the bird bush, for all these creatures, especially the tiny ones like wrens and pipits, love its dense thickets. During daylight they are in and out of it all the time, sometimes a score at once. What is the secret fascination? Nourishment, security, shade, solace? Do its leaves have medicinal properties? This big bush is the birds' town hall, their acropolis, where their essential communal business is daily transacted. It is tempting to think that, for birds, all days are the same, monotonous and routine except, of course, migration time. But I think their days are different, varied by seasonal and weather changes which, however imperceptible to us, have momentous import in their tiny, fragile existence. Their lives pass so swiftly — no time to be bored, so much to learn and do. A wren may last only two seasons. A house martin may live to five, usually less, and the same for a swallow. A swift may survive to ten — a long life for a small bird. Yet, oddly enough, parrots, which are not so very much bigger, survive their owners and are bequeathed in wills. In Australia, in the Seventies, I met a parrot said to be over 100; when its cloth was taken off, its full and friendly greeting was, 'Get out of it, you blithering idiot!'
I get the impression that, for small birds, the day is never long enough for all they have to do. And there are interruptions. Every day, regular as clockwork, two buzzards mount their mid-morning patrol over my house, looking for elevenses. These raptors delight me, moving about their business with great deliberation, taking full advantage of wind and air currents, sometimes turning into the wind and so suspended motionless while they peer down looking for their prey. They exude calm, unlike the small birds which go deadly quiet, hidden the second the buzzards appear. Sometimes this pair perch on the wires which bisect the field below us. There they sit and think, planning the rest of their day, determining routes, supply lines and the like. They are the great powers — I call them Bush and Blair — superpowers indeed. Once they go, swinging easily upward into the welcoming currents, the small birds emerge and begin their frenzied activities. Why don't they sit and think for a bit? As it is, they dash about and twitter endlessly, like members of the UN General Assembly. Nor are they harmless. They have eaten all the lettuces.
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