There’s a bird feeder, a half coconut filled with suet, hung by string from a nail on a post in the garden. You can see it from the dining table. I watch the great tits land in the rose arch next to it and warily look around with comically fast movements of their almost mechanical swivel heads. Then each makes the short hop to the coconut and pecks a few beakfuls. Cats are rare, the birds’ caution surprising. There are three tits this evening. I sit on after dinner, staring into space, sometimes out into the green of the garden, sometimes down at the grain of the table. The events of the day wash through me, over and over. When I next look up, there is a bird a shade bigger than a pigeon on the step beneath the rose arch. But it is no pigeon. It is so much surer of itself, of its power. It glares around the garden. Even its tail has dominion in it, long and square. And between its thin yellow legs, beneath its claws, lies a decapitated great tit.
The war reporter comes out in me. I fetch my camera, and try to get close enough to the window to photograph it. But even though I am cautious, somehow it senses me beyond the glass separating us. In a moment, it picks up its prey and with a flap is gone on a gliding diagonal.
The sparrowhawk is just doing what a sparrowhawk does. I refuse to read anything into it. Earlier out on a run I saw two greenfinches darting into a hedgerow, fantastically nimble for such heavy-looking small birds. A flutter of greenfinch, you might say, if you were thinking collectively of them. Far out into the common, I heard a cuckoo. And this morning, a pure white dove was perched atop a Victorian school building, the kind that has separate entrances marked for girls and boys. Which bird then should I take as the owner of this magpie-free day?
No one bird could stand for us. We are all the birds and all the collective names for them. We swoop to untold highs and then so low that the ground grazes our feathery chests. We are a trip of dotterel and a skein of geese, a spring of teal and a fall of woodcock. We are soft, hard, canny, innocent, delicate, strong, graceful, watchful, fearful, melodious, deceitful, sociable, unsociable, loyal, ruthless, caring, ecstatic, savage, and beautiful. We are all of these things, and so much more.
