“I feed the pigeons, I sometimes feed the sparrows too, it gives me a sense of ENORMOUS well-being”
– Blur – Parklife
A momentary burst whips my attention, particles dispersing in a brief explosion before returning to their centre as if pulled back by the sharp inhale of gravity or a length of bungee cord. I see not the elements of the cloud but the movement as a whole, a split-second expansion and contraction where all parts seem to disperse and then reform together by the same force, although made up of individuals pieces.
My eyes catch the tail-end of a black cat darting past the window, the cause of the explosion. All too quick for me, I reacted slowly – humanly – to the dispersal of the birds to fully grasp the complexity of their reactionary flights away from and back to their perches on the trees out the back, the scene looking like a tape being rewound while it’s already playing.
I rush to find a tool describe the image yet I’m too slow again, as now I must observe the slow prowl of the cat as it skulks back, head down, into the shadows of the sopping wet bushes in the corner of the garden, dripping dry in the sun after an unexpected torrential shower. Unexpected to me, despite much of my vocation in observing and illuminating the day-to-day of myself and the world seeming to be caught up in the business of analysing the west of Ireland’s weather and its effects on its inhabitants; and yet I truly believed that the sunny morning would carry on for the day. But the animals are no doubt far more learned in the field of weather prediction than me too, unbiased by emotion and fruitless optimism.
The cat prowls, I look up, first to it and then back to the trees, where inevitably there are now no birds. The cat looks to be pretending not to see them, though I’m sure the birds are wise enough to its ways. Or most of them will be anyway. I haven’t found many dead birds in the garden these past months, though I see plenty of hungry cats stalking the landscape from time to time. Of course, you see them less when they’re satisfied, and if they were that hungry they might leave little evidence bar traces of feathers.
I’m still at an early stage of figuring out the ways of the birds, still an amateur observer with little practical education. Still wondering if these are even the same birds who come to feed on the nuts and seeds hanging in clear plastic or wire feeders day after day, or if each visitation is by a new bird, travellers pulling in for coffee and a sandwich at a truckstop drive-thru. I’m new to all this.
I only know my own involvement yet – that the feeders need refilling most days, or sometimes after a period of hours, but only the ones with the mixture of fine grains and small seeds, not the one with larger peanuts. I don’t yet know if they are less partial to the taste of the larger peanuts that fill two of the feeders, if they just haven’t tried good peanuts yet, or the most likely assumption for now: the peanuts are too bloody big for them to grab from the feeders. I do know they’ll eat them when they’re hungry, which means it may be just that they’ve to develop the taste for them.
So it is with my education in these things, any previous theory having been handed down in school, primary school even, in a class called ‘nature’. It was always the one given least regard – English, Irish and Maths being most important and gotten out of the way all before lunch time filled us up a bit and sent us off into the yard to run ourselves into the ground. And yet sometimes it seems that nature should have been the foundations of education, before different aspects of culture are built on top of them. Surely it’s a more universally applicable field of study.
There’s a difference between learning about something in school and actually understanding it. The former requires intense effort, memorisation, discipline, listening and reading skills, and some kind of authoritative pressure; the latter requires just that you take part in something you enjoy. Less pressure, more curiosity and participation. One is difficult, the other a pleasure.
The esteemed physicist and thinker Richard Feynman tells a famous anecdote in his autobiography “The Making of a Scientist”:
“One kid says to me, ‘See that bird? What kind of bird is that?’
I said, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.’
He says, ‘It’s a Brown-throated Thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!’
But it was the opposite.
He had already taught me:
‘See that bird?’ he says. ‘It’s a Spencer’s Warbler.’ (I knew he didn’t know the real name.)
‘Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.’
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
I don’t know the names of these birds, neither the taxonomic titles nor what they’ve been christened by humans or fellow birds. And I don’t truly know much about them yet either. Though I’ve noticed some things in the past couple of weeks since I was given instructions to feed them. I notice their absence, firstly. I’ve already been conditioned by the lack of movement of flittering wings, the corner-of-the-eye glow of yellow breasts, of pecking heads on feeders or of momentary pitstops on the washing line (which has little other use at this time of year), to immediately check my own surroundings: is it weather, predator, or do I simply need to fill the feeder again?
Instinctively my eyes dart to check the sky, or along the lower reaches of the back wall for movement of larger animals, before finally resting on the bird feeder. All movements of perception happening in a moment, before I understand what I’m doing. In fact, it’s only now that I write this I’m taking stock of the small steps of conditioning that have occurred over the past weeks. And although I know my role in bringing birds to the garden with promises of food, I’ve paid little attention to the effects in turn that the birds have on our own habits and routines.
These are only the first steps in learning who these birds are and truly understanding them. I’ll get the urge to look up some online resource some day soon and try to match their mugshots to those of perpetrators long caught and catalogued by scientists and analysts, and maybe learn their names in different languages or other details like that. But the information is just a story, and it’s only in the back garden I can really understand them.
Until then, I’ll just keep playing my part in the emerging routine we’ve established together, and they will too. Each day their movements catch my eye a little bit sooner, or I piece together more of the finer details of their comings and goings. Maybe some day, I’ll see the root cause of the explosion – the cat – before they even do.
“And then I’m happy for the rest of the day, safe in the knowledge there will always be a bit of my heart devoted to ‘em…
…PARKLIFE!”
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