Release
a feather, a whirlwind, a box
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.
Recently, at the rescue centre, I walked a couple of other volunteers down to the lower lands, where the large aviaries that house the juvenile corvids sit. I’d helped to train one of them, and now she was showing the ropes to a new volunteer on his first day. As yet, she’d not had the unique experience of entering the Jackdaw’s aviary, so before we reached the door I shared that, “The ones who want to be fed will perch, all the others will frenzy. Just focus on the Birds in front of you, don’t worry about the rest”. As soon as we walked in, twenty plus Jackdaws took to the air in unison and began their frenetic aerial circuits, wheeling at speed, as two of the youngest perched on a branch to the side, fluttering their wings in anticipation. I stood back, watching proudly as the volunteer calmly fed the blue-eyed pair in front of her, and the others spun their black-feather whirlwind. As blurs of dark bodies flashed before my eyes, and wings forced bursts of air across my face, the new volunteer eyed me suspiciously from outside, and asked “Why aren’t you flinching?” It was a good question, and it took me a moment to locate the answer, which was, “Because I trust them”. As we left the lower lands and walked back up to the centre, I thought about my own first day and how totally overwhelmed I’d been. Being with the Deer fawns this year has propelled a part of me back through time to that first season, when I was gripped simultaneously by peak wonder and peak fear—and from here, in the present, I can look over my shoulder and watch how that trust sprouted, and how it grew and grew. How, through repeat exposure, steady observation, and a willingness to become a student of another species, that trust was fed and watered, and its roots and limbs became anchored in earth and sky. And, graciously, it spread, beyond the Birds and into me, and then out into life itself. However frenzied the days become, whatever shape the whirlwind takes, this trust carves an eye that sits calmly in its centre.
Outside of the corvids and the Birds of prey we can, typically, get away with speaking to the little Birds. Our chattering does not prevent their inner wild from unfurling, and so I am prone to speaking to the Birds to whom I tend. I’ll let them know what it is that I am doing, and tell them how brilliant they are. The silence, then, that is required when with the fawns is, to my ear, especially loud. And perhaps never louder than at the weekend, when a newly born fawn was brought in after her mother was killed—and she cried, and cried, and cried for her. It was a sound I wasn’t familiar with, and yet one that I knew intimately. Each and every mournful bleat formed an arm that reached into my chest and pulled my three-year-old self up and into my throat until I was literally choking on her. The fawn, eventually, settled. Comforted by the others, and tended to so diligently by the people to whom she is now ward. I have placed the sound of her cries into a box that I keep, during this busy season. It is labelled DO NOT OPEN and it remains untouched until the Swallows have flown and the days become shorter, and the chill in the air signals my grief welcome. To engage with it now would render me undone, and I am currently required to be intact, so I move with the eye of the storm, until it is time for me to dive headfirst into it. I trust that my grief will wait for me to greet it, and until then, my three-year-old self is tended peripherally. At the farm, the fierce heat of the summer leaves the residents lethargic, so I dampen my hands before going to the Rabbits and softly stroking the backs of their ears; their little bodies slowly dropping with relief as they begin to cool—and it is in these moments that she, too, is soothed.
The wild follows laws older and larger than any we may have created. When the time eventually comes for my own release, for that ultimate embrace of the wild, I intend to trust Death as I have come to trust this life. To trust that the wild runs through me.
Yours in aimless flight…
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Always so special, my friend. Thank you.
So beautiful. Little wing is lovely and very brave