I’m sitting at the station tearfully watching the train take my eldest children back to their city lives. There’s a loud kerfuffle above me. It’s a crow in an oak tree cawing and clapping its beak. The noise jolts me out of my self pity and demands my attention. We make eye contact, acknowledging each other then we both go our separate ways.
This week has been filled with birds. Sitting outside one evening looking for meteors, there was a shrill noise in the hedge. The noise changed direction, circling the area where we were sat. We listed the night birds that we could think of but they didn’t fit the call we were hearing. What was this bird? We tried downloading an app for the phone "just record the call and we’ll identify it for you", it claimed. It came up with a list of possibilities but nothing definite. How frustrating, what now? Phone a friend!
"It’s a young Tawny Owl or possibly a female looking for a mate" was the immediate response! In the Woodz, there are ravens who nest in the tall pine trees. There’s the buzzard that circles calling its sad cry to its young. There’s a cheeky little wren who roosts in the roof of the yurt. I know all of their calls. My grandmother knew so many bird songs. She didn’t have the internet or David Attenborough when she was young. She did, however, have access to a garden and spent many hours walking in the country side, she had an interest in birds, she had books, people who would have known the calls around her to ask and she may well have been taught some of them at school. I’m going to take a leaf from her book and make a concerted effort to pay more attention to the birds around me, to learn more of their calls and to make sure I pass that knowledge on to the next generation of Wyld Thyngz.