Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

I recently dreamt that I was kneeling in the fawns enclosure, positioning leafy branches as the young, curious Deer inspected both the foliage and myself, when I suddenly sensed that we were being watched. Looking towards the wall of wire fencing at the end of the enclosure—the one that backs onto the woods into which, one day, the fawns will be released—my blood ran cold as I saw, staring through the thicket, a large and piercing pair of amber eyes. I am often plagued by dreams, at this time of year, which speak to my fears for the animals we must release, to my heightened awareness of the danger, and predation, and potential suffering that exists on the other side of their relinquishment. And perhaps nevermore so than now, as we release each one into a world that is on fire.

It rained here, last week, for about half an hour. And it wasn’t enough, and it won’t make a dent in the waning rivers or bone-dry earth, but for those thirty minutes we hung out of windows like children, and we sighed a hundred sighs alongside every other drought-weary being lucky enough to have been caught in the downpour. For all my study, and all my practice, I do not know how to grieve what is happening, or how to doula this kind of dying—so amorphous the shape of it, so vast the scale. To love this life, to love the wild, is to love each of the countless beings to whom life and the wild belong. But, how to grieve the loss from inside an ongoing disaster with no clear or single trajectory? If someone we love has been hit by a car we do not stop; we act. But, what if at the same time another being we love has a car hurtling towards them? And another is on life-support? And another one just died? In which direction should we walk when every few seconds some fresh devastation insists itself due North?

As the end of baby season perches on the horizon, the number of releases climbs steadily. I had fourteen Birds in the car with me, last week—mostly Jackdaws, a few Thrushes, yet more Blackbirds and a Jay—all split between various carriers. When Jackdaws are young they (like my love) have bright, pale blue eyes, the colour of blue lace agate. As babies they scream to be fed—and I do mean scream. Their particular “feed me!” squawks can reach 90 decibels and they sound like something from a horror film. When I have my head and torso inside a bay containing two or more baby Jackdaws demanding to be fed, it is akin to being inside a struck bell and it is impossible to form a thought. You could ask me my name while I was inside, and I genuinely wouldn’t know it. On the drive home the Jackdaws became very chatty, which prompted everyone else to join in. It made for quite the cacophony inside an inclosed space and, once home, they set off into the wild, but not before settling on various branches and finishing their conversation. As with any release, a gossamer thread of my love and attention remains attached to each of them. By the end of the season a hundred of these threads extend upward, as though I am puppeteered by the sky. It will be unique, then, when the time comes, to have six four-legged beings toward whom my mind will orient insistently over the coming months and years.

The fawns have now reached the age where, after breakfast, they get the zoomies and they run at speed in loops. The collective noise of their twenty-four hooves sounds like a distant thunder. One of them, Michael, is unlike the rest in that, due to a benign genetic mutation, his coat is entirely chocolate brown, as opposed to the classic light tan with dappled white spots that the others wear. Michael is a sweet, gentle boy. His eyes are like globes of obsidian glass that reflect the object of his awareness—I feel as though I’d never really seen myself until I saw my reflection in them. There is a gravity to him that pulls me out of time, and he doesn’t hold my attention so much as he gives it permission to rest. Watching him feels like looking out to sea, there’s a sense of expansiveness to it—one that I dearly hope is reflective of his future, although, on the other side of that wire fence lie a thousand paths of potential. There is a world in which, a decade away, he is a formidable roaring stag, branching crown of bone propping up the entire sky as he roars steam into the Winters morning air. There is world in which he, on the day of his release, sees a car for the first time, freezes, and never sees a single Winter—and between those two worlds lie a thousand more, branching like his antlers one day will, or won’t. It seems to me, that the only response equal to the weight of this terrible not-knowing—whether Michael’s fate, or the Birds, or this madness and fire-riddled world’s—is a fierce, immovable, unrelenting, and unreasonable love. Offered without condition or restraint, while staring straight into the amber eyes of every car and every wildfire that sits on the other side of that fence.

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Yours in aimless flight…

If you’re curious as to the sound that baby Jackdaws make, there’s a wonderful example HERE (I highly suggest that you turn your volume down!!)

And below you can watch some of the Jackdaws I brought home heading off into the wild. God speed, my loves:

And if you’re interested in re-relating to what it means to die, you are invited into:

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

I have, for many years, often awoken in the middle of the night, always near 3am, and always in the fiercest grip of dread. I would lie in the pitch black, heart racing, trying to negotiate with the equally dark and insistent thoughts that plagued my mind. I often wondered whether I, or our home, was perhaps haunted. Or whether malevolence itself had some need of me, and so would come to visit in the witching hour. Anyway, it recently transpired that I’m hypoglycaemic and my blood sugar has been crashing in the middle of the night. And so for all my dark imaginings I was, in fact, more in need of a snack than an exorcism. It is a strange thing, to be so much at the will of a human body, and, perhaps even more so, to have only a meaning-making mind as the tool by which to interpret its signals—a mind that has to take its own sanity mostly on faith, with only the sea of other humans to weigh itself against. And no real clue whether they are a reliable measure, either.

Years ago, I was fostering a baby Goldfinch who, of an evening as the light began to fade, would flutter awkwardly to her favourite perch, ruffle her little body, tuck her head beneath a wing and promptly fall asleep. After a few minutes of slow, deep breathing she would, into the underside of her wing, start to sing. The sleep-singing of this tiny being was one of the most wondrous things I’d ever witnessed. It would, in the fleeting pocket of time in which it was contained, render me peaceful. Render me sane. I cannot summon grace, however hard I try. All I can do is organise my life in such a way that it becomes something of an invitation to it. This, in large part, is why much of my time is spent with members of other species, or with dying members of my own.

I once sat with a man near the end of his life who, following a stroke, had been left unable to speak. He tended to communicate with smiles, frowns, hand squeezes and a variety of hums; the pitch of each dictating their meaning. It’s extraordinary what can be communicated through humming alone, when needs must, and we gradually developed a language based as much in sense as in sound. He’d begun to spend most of the day sleeping, but would still wake from time to time for a sip of water, or to point to a framed photograph he wanted closer. One afternoon, as he slept, I was looking at the back of his hand as it rested in mine—marvelling at how the near-translucent, time-loved skin draped over tendon and bone like fabric—when suddenly, he gasped. His eyes and mouth opened widely and a look of sheer surprised delight spread across his face as he looked at the ceiling, and said, clear as a bell, “Oh! Oh how amazing!”. A single tear rolled from the corner of his eye down towards his hairline. I couldn’t help but look toward the ceiling myself, just in case, nor could I help but mirror the smile he was left with, even after he’d closed his eyes and fallen back into whatever state it was from which he had burst forth. Those four words were his last. He died a couple of days later, and while I don’t know what he saw, I know I saw him see it, and I know the wonder of the sight made its way through him, into me. Human perception is, after all, an instrument of survival. We did not evolve in order to see the world exactly as it is, we evolved to stay alive. So perhaps it makes sense that when we are dying, when staying alive is no longer the task at hand, perception starts to open to more of the world than it would usually allow in.

At home, Little Wing has somehow managed to ingratiate herself into a ready-made family of Blackbirds; an adult male, adult female, and their two juveniles, both the same age as her. We’d not once seen these Birds in the garden before. It is as though she’s conjured them. At the rescue centre, two of the Deer fawns died in close succession. Life fills my heart to bursting, and then puts on football boots and stamps on it. I notice a pull in myself, here, to try to explain why an animal for whom I’ve cared may have died, to defend myself, as though I might somehow be culpable. This, surely, the meaning-making mind and its refusal to sit with the simple isness of a thing. It is quite the rollercoaster, to drive, of an early morning past the mangled, barely recognisable body of a young Deer on the side of the road and, not an hour later, to hold a small posy of Roses, picked from the garden at dawn, as a group of fawns—alien and angelic—gently tug at the petals. There is something of the entirety of life in it. Would the fawns have seemed less exquisite, were it not for the sight of the mutilated Deer? I don’t know. Probably not. But I do feel all the more beholden to the gods for the current safety of each one. Sanity, I suspect, is relational—mislaid when I mistake myself for the centre, and returned upon remembering that I am but a strand in a cosmic latticework. Mercifully, the remembering tends to be done for me: by Birds, and by the dying, and by fawns being fed Roses in the early morning light.

There is a prayer, of sorts, that I’ve come to offer silently to any and all beings in their leaving:

Dear departing soul—whether ushered by time, or illness, or violence, whether riding on breeze or in storm—may the version of reality into which you now walk greet you with startling familiarity. May you be gentled by the love which has known you, and may the cosmos gather you, greedily, back in; delighted by you in Death as it was delighted by you in life. May you be granted any peace, or adventure, or reunion for which you have longed, and may you know what it means to love and be loved across the vast and barely there space that sits between the here and the beyond.

The vast and barely there space that sits between the here and the beyond.

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Yours in aimless flight…

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

A couple of weeks ago, I brought some Blackbirds and a Mistle Thrush home for release. The Thrush led the way, darting eagerly from the carrier right as I opened it, immediately getting to work foraging through leaves and chomping tiny insects. The others were more hesitant, but each eventually made their way out and began to explore. David and I watched them a while as they found their feet—and their wings—before leaving some food and water for them and heading back into the house. At 4am I could hear the Thrush singing, and at 6am, upon opening the back door, I was met by a familiar face. One of the Blackbirds from the day before had made her way from the woods, up the garden, and was stood looking positively unsure as to what she should be doing. I gave her some worms and sat cross-legged with her as she ate, taking her in, noting the single, small white feather that sits in amongst the chestnut brown on her left wing. After a while she bobbed over to the roses, and began tossing around leaves beneath them. When a Magpie came she startled and flew into a nearby Hazel bush. I spoke to the Head of Wildlife at the centre, and we both agreed that, rather than me bringing her back in, she should be given the chance to find her footing in this strange new world. And so now, Little Wing has breakfast and dinner, and a bath, next to the Blackberry bush by the back door, and, during the day, she explores. Gradually venturing further and further afield. Having myself spent many years being utterly confused by freedom, I feel a sense of kinship with Little Wing. On the days where we see less of her I temper my worry by orienting toward the trust I have in the will and the wisdom of the wild that runs through her. At just eight weeks old, she has taken up her burden of responsibility, and while my fears for her still chatter away like Goldfinches, there is peace in the faith that I have in her. Last week, David saw her and another Blackbird nibbling each other’s beaks. Yesterday, she stood up to a Robin who was trying to eat her mealworms. Slowly she pushes the edges of freedom, and soon she will make it her own.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Over the years, I have experienced the distinct joy of witnessing various little Birds emerge from their shells. A pinprick of a hole marking intention, cracks forming, the first breach of the beak, and the gradual appearance of damp feather and pink skin. It is, as with any birth, a long and arduous process. I’ve often tried to imagine how it must be for the hatchling themselves; to reach the point of growth where the thing that formed to protect them has simply become too small, and, in order to live, one must fight their way out of it. It would seem that life favours this pattern, one where an integral step in the growth of a living thing is its meeting the hard edge of its own armour, and either suffering the struggle of the breakthrough, or ceasing to participate in the endless unfurling upon which life insists. Perhaps, then, I do have some vague understanding of the hatchling’s experience. Whenever I have found myself pressed up against some seemingly immovable force preventing my continued becoming—whether grief, resistance, addiction, or fear—and I have fought my way out, through the hard shell of the thing, I too have surfaced soft, raw, and unsteady, but eager to be fed by the world, and to orient towards my place in it.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

When I was young, I would sometimes walk to the churchyard and lay on the grass next to my mother’s grave. The boundaries between self, ground, bone, now, and then, all become rather permeable in certain places, and this was one of them. At times I’d have the vague sense of someone watching me from a distance, and I wonder whether perhaps it was me, here, in the future. Once, an elderly man (who, in hindsight was probably in his fifties) came and asked me if I was alright. I sat up, answering that I was, and he asked if he might sit with me a while. I obliged him, and he went on to share that his daughter was buried in the churchyard, having died many years ago, as a baby. We sat together quietly in our longing, beneath a sky scored by the dark bodies of a hundred Swifts. Their cries, like wind navigating narrow gaps, became the keening that neither I nor this gentleman were afforded. And now, it is June, and the Swifts have again returned—though fewer, and fewer, with every passing year. The sky no longer filled, only dappled—how it, too, must long for what it’s lost.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Last week, the Roses conspired to all bloom in unison, like a choir. The Mayflies, ever true to their name, are bobbing up and down like orchestral music—until a Sparrow swoops, snapping a note from the air to deliver it, still humming, to her brood. The Birds are frantic with young-tending, territorial disputes and melodic declarations of their aliveness. I, as ever, am in the grip of dissonance, marvelling at the crescendo of late-Spring from inside a body unconvinced by the idea of holding itself together. My contradictions clash, like Magpies and Crows, midair. Sometimes I am a boulder—grounded and steady—while the sea, wild and raging, thrashes, frenzied, around me. Sometimes, I am the sea. The concept of being a coherent individual with a consistent set of thoughts and behaviours feels as foreign to me as the concept of being a Stick Insect.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

When I was little, I kept a shoebox of precious things beneath my bed. Inside was a broken scallop shell, half a small, blue eggshell (which I now know to be a Starling’s), a Pheasant’s feather, a Crow’s feather, a variety of nondescript leaves and stones, and a postcard of Picasso’s The Swimmer. My mother had sent me the postcard from Paris while she was attempting to see all the art she wanted to see before she died. On the flip side of the postcard, she asked what I thought the image might have been when I first saw it, and shared that it reminded her of Matisse’s blue dancer. I was three, at the time. To this day I am grateful for how much respect was woven into her love for me. It is a thread that I try to continue through my own love, such as in trusting that even the most vulnerable of hatchling Birds possesses an innate wisdom and knowledge of the world; the kind of which I could only dream.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Sitting at a red light, the other day, I watched as a white van pulled out, suddenly, from a side road, in front of an oncoming car. The driver of the car slammed on its brakes and hit the horn. The man driving the van stopped, in the middle of the road, blocking the car, and began screaming at the woman driving it. I was on the other side of the road, facing the direction she was coming from, so I could see her face, which wore a mix of confusion, indignation and fear. The latter of which grew considerably when the man opened his door and began marching towards her. I find that in situations which suddenly become serious, a rare quiet descends. It is clinical in tone and, as my vision fixes and narrows, a plan will emerge, lightning fast. If her door isn’t locked and he drags her from the car take the keys from the ignition, get the wrench from the boot, and if necessary, aim for his knees. Thankfully, her door was locked, and she had the wherewithal to manoeuvre around him as he pounded on her window, before she left him, alone and unhinged, raging in the middle of the road. I had beside me on the passenger seat a fledgling Blackbird who had died just minutes before. She’d been attacked by a Magpie, and had a small but deep wound in her neck. So deep, in fact, that the blood coming from it had been the most extraordinary violet colour. Like an Iris, or a Petunia. The light turned green, and I carried on my way, there but for the grace…

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Years ago, on a gloomy November morning ceilinged by low-hanging cloud, I met Sunshine for the first time. I’d started volunteering at an animal sanctuary, and had been tasked with tending to the Rabbits which lived around the edge of the little park that she occupied and, as I worked, Sunshine watched from her straw throne inside the central coop. I’d never met a Turkey, before. I’d seen plenty but never known one by name, and certainly never loved one. In hindsight I can see how three-dimensional life had been, up until then. I was nervous of her, at first. The Birds I’d known prior could each fit in a single hand, and Sunshine was the size of a stocky toddler, but with wings and a rock solid beak. She made sounds I didn’t understand and she possessed a primordiality so unfamiliar to me that I erroneously filed it as volatile. In the afternoon, a member of staff came into the park and Sunshine made some raucous proclamations, to which the woman responded by going and sitting cross-legged opposite her. My stomach tightened at the proximity of this woman’s eyes to Sunshine’s formidable beak. I assumed she knew what she was doing, but also couldn’t help but wince at the thought of the damage this Bird could potentially do, and so when Sunshine, in response to having her chest stroked and softly being asked how she was, began to purr, I felt more than a little ashamed at having reduced her, in my mind, to pure reaction. I went over to the pair, asking if I could sit, and the woman enthusiastically suggested I bring some dry feed to offer, and I soon found myself kneeling at Sunshine’s feet, offering my cupped hands full of seeds towards her. The speed at which she snapped her head to and from my hands made me jump and pull back. “It’s ok, she’s really precise, she won’t hurt you,” said this most patient woman, “Watch, she’ll pick out all the sunflower seeds first”. And so, extending my hands once again, I watched as Sunshine snatched individual sunflower seeds from a mix which to my own eye was a blur of similarity, with the exactitude of a striking Cobra. Shortly after, she began swiping her head left and right, reorganising the mix to reveal her second favourite, the dried corn. When she’d finished, there was nothing but husked oats left in my hands. “She’s not interested in those,” I was told, “but the chickens will have them”. I felt a sudden deference towards this Bird, a deep admiration for a creature whose sovereignty saw her accept, with great discernment and skill, what she knew was right for her, and simply leave the rest. Over the course of that long Winter, I watched and participated in the forensic care offered to Sunshine. Like any being who has seen their fair share of Winters, she finds the colder months difficult and her arthritis sees her slow down, significantly. How sweet, then, the dance that sees her slowing answered with rising attunement and greater ministry. There were times in those months when Sunshine insisted on being outdoors, and so three or four of us would kneel in near freezing mud, two of us lifting her either side, as at least one other positioned blankets beneath and around her. All of us apologising for the inconvenience, each thanking her for her patience. Would that the well-earned senescence of every being be treated with such tenderness. Would that the road toward Death only ever be paved in kindness.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Joyously, the Cherry Blossom is here, seeming to offer up well wishes for the newly nesting Birds. An occasional gust of wind makes confetti of her blooms. The celebratory nature of the season—heralding new life, the creative act infused through the day—makes only more stark the insanity of the needless destruction that plays out against it. I wonder when, or if, we as a species might finally rejoin nature in her regenerative ways; when, or if, we might remember how to listen to the world.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

It may come as a surprise to exactly no one, that I love baby Magpies. It goes without saying, of course, that I love all Birds, of all ages, the world over—but the soft descending trill of a baby Magpie sends a weakening through my body. They chirrup, and something in my cells recognises them, as though kin. We become tuning forks resonating across the unbridgeable distance between species. Perhaps this is a kind of love. I once helped care for a baby Magpie, who was about six days old when we met. I named him Jasper, in honour of the green jasper feathers he would one day grow, and he was the laziest Magpie I’d ever known. Typically, at his age, the mere hint of the day’s first feed would prompt an enthusiastic, elongated neck and cavernous gaping beak, but this fellow needed to be coaxed with forehead strokes and gentle words of encouragement. He worried me, at first, until it became clear that he was simply not a morning Bird and that, as far as he was concerned, showing any enthusiasm before 8am was embarrassing.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds. And it is dedicated to the poet , who left this earthly life and became starbound on January 31st.

When I was about ten, a local falconer brought his Harris Hawk to my primary school. She was an exceptional Bird, regal, curious, and confident in a way that entranced my younger self. She had never been wild, though the wild still clearly lived within her as she and the falconer spent much time hunting together. The pair shared a language spoken in glances, head tilts and the occasional whisper. At that time in my life, I felt distinctly out of place. I found a diary entry from then, where I’d spoken to feeling like a package which had been delivered to the wrong address and was waiting to be returned, but in seeing this Bird, and in sensing the complexity and intelligence which existed within the interplay between she and her falconer, I caught a spark of something strangely familiar. Following a talk about falconry and Birds of prey, my small class was given the opportunity to have our photographs taken with this majestic Bird. Some kids declined completely, others agreed but only if the falconer was holding her, and a few decided they would brave holding her themselves. I—terrified, but besotted—was one of the latter, and so joined the end of the queue in the hopes of calming myself before reaching her. Ahead of me, child after child had the heavy duty leather glove upon which she sat placed on their hand while they grimaced and held their arm outstretched as far from themselves as they could. “Right,” I said to myself, “you get one go at this. Now walk up there and meet that beautiful being face-to-face. And if she attacks you, so be it.” My turn came, and with chin lifted and jaw firmly clenched I offered out my arm so that the glove, and the majestic Harris Hawk, could be placed upon it. For a few seconds, I froze, shocked by the weight of her, by the power in the grip of her talons and by the fierceness of her hooked beak. But then I recalled the way that she and her falconer spoke; subtle, wordless, body-to-body. And so, terrified, and in awe and wonder, I exhaled the breath I’d been holding and drew my arm into my body, to hold her face inches from my own. She was electric. Humming with skill and latent power. I marvelled at how a being could simultaneously be so still and so fiercesome. We held each other in regard for a moment, before the falconer, smiling, said “She likes you”. “I like her” I whispered, before our photograph was taken, and I handed her back to the falconer. Thanking them both.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Someone in the village has been feeding the Kites. There’s an unusual number, wheeling above the valley—David counted forty, the other day, spinning a languid gyre. I’ve a cricked neck from holding my face parallel to the sky, and at times they hover so low I can see the whites of their glassy eyes. Their constant spectre is as intimidating as it is hypnotic, and they drift overhead like a half-remembered dream, while we press on below. One eye on the sky. I find myself envious of their honeyed glide. The grace with which they seem to meet the day. I have, of late, become increasingly irritated by my seeming inability to feel a sense of ease. The news cycle exhausts and demoralises. What was a creeping sense of disquiet has become a steady march of dread, and the crumbling of systems which long presented themselves as trustworthy continues unabated—each passing week seeing the circle of complicity widen, and the nature of what was being protected grow ever darker. The news is magnetic interference and my mind a compass needle that cannot find true north. I am exquisitely disoriented by this moment in time. My defensive go-to, since childhood, in the face of confusion and unrest, is to sense-make. The tumult that infused my youngest years saw understanding become sword and shield—and confusion my mortal enemy. Those grasping arms served me well; until, of course, they didn’t. Until wielding tools of rationale became as insane as the thing I was fighting. Some things will not yield to understanding. Certain darknesses have no angle from which they begin to resolve, and to keep searching for one eventually becomes its own kind of madness.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Just as the Crocuses rose tentatively out of the earth, the Song Thrushes started to sing. Together they announce that time rolls on, and that Spring—while still sleeping—stirs. Daybreak has become jubilant, and the Song Thrush insists I close my eyes to better see the complexity of her call. These dewy mornings, each one an invitation to come to life, to join the throng of beings alive. Of beings born and not yet died—of which, in the long view of history, there are surprisingly few. How fortunate we are, for this brief time, to be among them.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Over the last few weeks I have somehow become caught in a relentless cycle of relocating Ladybirds—or Ladybugs, for my friends in North America. David’s office is the designated ‘safe room’ for our tiny, colourful friends, and I’ll tiptoe in, hands cupped, trying not to disturb. “Another?” he’ll say, without looking up, as I deliver the bug to a windowsill lined with half-raisins and bottle lids of shallow water. Our little devotions blend into life like wallpaper. There is a twice-daily sweep for ‘the overturned’; the ones who fall onto their backs and cannot right themselves. It’s a logistical type of love and, essentially, a small liturgy for a world that I do not know how to save. I feel a certain kinship with ‘the overturned’. So often, these days, I find myself upside down, and reliant upon something larger than I to regain my footing. Death is surely larger than I, and I will sometimes wrap my thumb and fingers around my forearm, closing my eyes, picturing the bones therein. They tell me that I am temporary, and that I am made of the world. They remind me of how, somewhere in the area of spacetime we’ve labelled as ‘the future’, these bones are already dry, flesh-bare and exposed. And so the feel of their soft, warm current-day cover lands me squarely in the present—which, it seems, is the only place I am sane. Acknowledgement of my temporality rights me.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Recently, in the middle of the night, I was held within the grasp of some quite impressive physical pain. I felt distinctly as though there were shards of glass in each of my shoulder, elbow, wrist, and finger joints, with even the slightest of movements causing them to grind, pierce and slice. 2 a.m. always has a habit of welcoming uncharacteristic ways of thinking for me, but bring pain into the mix and things quickly get out of hand. The blend of darkness, cold, seeming solitude, and agony sees a narrowing of my thinking, a funnelling, whereby any potential for relief is chipped away to reveal only a point which swears that this, this suffering, is the only true thing—and not just in this moment, but the only true thing which has ever been. Nothing has ever been good; I have only been delusional. Nothing will ever be good, either, and the sooner this is accepted, the better. We should all stop heaving ourselves up the sheer face of this summit-less mountain of false hope and accept our fate. Happy New Year, by the way!

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

A couple of years ago a Tawny Owl came into the rescue centre. She was found orphaned, and had been hand-reared by a pair of well-meaning members of the public. When Pigeon (the Owl) arrived she believed wholeheartedly that she was human and had no idea that she was, in fact, a Bird of prey. Upon first being introduced to other Tawny Owls she was terrified, clinging to the wildlife manager for dear life and refusing to look the creatures that she so resembled in the eye. Owls are particularly prone to imprinting. At the rescue centre, baby Owls are fed using tweezers concealed within an Owl hand-puppet; their human carers masked by mirrored visors, all to ensure the Owls imprint only upon their own Owl-ness. Over time, Pigeon, through gentle and persistent proximity, began to remember her true self and, eventually, she relaxed around her kin. I wonder whether I was in fact raised by Birds, and my unease around human beings will one day wear off. At the end of the season, Pigeon was released back into the wild along with the Tawnys whom she had once so feared. Back into a world that retreats as the light withdraws from the day; but not she—for the night is hers, and the dark thick with potential.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

The Crows looked like shadow puppets in the half light this morning. The unfolding corvid drama has become quite Shakespearean since one of our Crows decided to make an example of a Magpie by pinning him to the ground and pulling the feathers from his back. The truly wild racket that exploded out of the larger Magpie contingent brought me outdoors, from where I intervened and watched to ensure that the victim was not seriously wounded. Amazingly, not five minutes later, both parties had returned to their respective patches of nuts and seeds. Perhaps, like me, corvids reserve their grudges solely for human beings.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

The temperature, here, has plummeted. Every year on the eve of the dawn that brings the first frost I spend the night fitful and restless, gripped by worry for the little Birds. I lay there, picturing myself with a set of vast wings, folding over and around each songbird, in the way that mama Swans enfold their signets. When the sun rises and the Blue Tits appear—peeping out from the Conifer like little Christmas decorations—my lungs return to their full capacity. I am reminded that they are made for this. That countless Blue Tits have faced countless Winters, and that nature knows exactly what it is doing. It is I who am lost to worry and fear.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

This week has seen us return to the loving embrace of a vitally autumnal England; the vibrancy of which, even on the greyest of days, soothes my aching heart—parts of which remain firmly entrenched within a pair of four-legged beings in Africa. I dream of them, and the kisses of mine which belong upon their foreheads hang in the cold morning air, nowhere to land. Grateful, then, am I to have walked into the time of year which feels most like home—a concept which, to me, seems quite amorphous. My beloved is home. The winged, are home. The earth in which my mother’s bones rest, is home. Slowly, this body of mine becomes home. Home is where twenty-two Magpies polkadot the lawn, and where three large Crows police them. It is where wings both wide and miniature manipulate the air to their will, and where tiny lungs compel the sun to rise—so that they might once again sing it to sleep. Reverence to these beings who dance with the days, who speak dusk and dawn, and keep time with the ancient rhythm. May I only ever become more birdlike.

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