Birding and the nature of grief

                                                     

I wrote this last year during what turned out to be the slow fall into a breakdown - that felt sudden in November, but in hindsight had been coming for a while.  This was one of the early dominoes to fall in a long rally that eventually broke me.  I'm sharing it here because 12 months later I was reminded of the solace of birding and also as a reflection on the cyclical nature of grief.  Grief is absence, not something we should "get over", but something we experience when we recognise the lack of someone in our lives.  Grief informs who we are, if we let it.  It makes us recognise the relationships and things that we still have, because that absence forms the space around those that are still present.  

___________________________________________________________________________________

A family member passed away this week and I’ve struggled to process how I feel.  Not about my relative, who I mourn for and am filled with sadness, but about other family members who are dealing with grief in their own ways.  It’s been an exhausting and difficult few days and I have had to constantly be alert to how others feel and curate my own emotional responses to care for others.

In that context, birding yesterday was freeing and illustrative, and I’m grateful to my friends for allowing me the space to let my grief guide part of the day.

The birds yesterday seemed to either simply be waiting for us as soon as we started looking, or make us wait hours to put in an appearance, with nothing in between.  Tree Pipit at Wykeham Raptor Viewpoint carpark showing as well as any I’ve ever seen (until the ones we saw at dusk while looking for Nightjar), Crossbill and Spotted Flycatcher at their respective sites, Turtle Dove and Marsh Tit (unheard of here in Manchester, in the heart of Willow Tit territory!) were simply there and obvious.  There were some gloriously quick encounters with no need to search and in some ways I feel I needed that reminder that there is still a wild world for us in the UK in the midst of the constant stream of bad news about the environment that our campaigners rightly demonstrate.  Six hours across two spans on the viewpoint, in the sunshine, watching the wild world pass by reminded me that life does not need to be so frenetic all the time. 

It was illustrative that, no matter the importance of the person I have lost this week, no matter how inward my focus has been, the Crossbills and Buzzards and Siskins will keep on investigating pine cones or soaring on thermals, and, far from that being cause for shock - surely the world should stop turning to mourn with me? - it was cause for a gentle celebration that living goes on.

Other birds made us work a little harder.  The Goshawks were distant, indifferent to our searching, existing in a space where human goals and ambitions are meaningless and all that matters is the stoop and the roll and the surge of speed in the air.  We watched them, eventually, and I was reminded of my place in the scheme of things: earthbound but linked to these creatures of tall tree and big sky.  What perspective they must have: I should adjust mine in light of that thought.

The Nightjars were late.  In hindsight, picking the second longest day of the year on which to find nocturnal birds perhaps wasn’t our finest piece of logic, but after a time, churr they did and we found the male perched on a twig high above us.  Watching him transform from the utter stillness of an apparent branch to the unpredictable dance of a giant moth was almost alchemical, the hypnotic flutter of those white spots captivating me as he ghosted in twilit forest.

The hours that we waited for this experience are a reminder that patience is a necessary skill in life, and that this huge and complex universe is not marching to my beat; rather that if I feel the timing is off, it’s probably me that’s lost the rhythm.  All people require patience, a chance to catch up and step in time, and I need to remember that this includes me.

Of course, there’s always a third category of birds on every day trip.  The no-shows.  Pied Flycatchers escaped our two-hour search and no Honey Buzzards graced us with their strangeness (as Kris says, they’re like a child’s drawing of a buzzard and I find that description strangely compelling).  It’s easy to be tempted to disappointment that the bird we were there for didn’t show, but the chance to practice companionable solitude in a wild space yesterday helped me see this a different way: there’s always the next chance to connect with these wild birds, until our thread is cut and there are no more chances.  And even then, they will continue to fly, and some other person might glimpse them in the trees and be reassured by the shape of life.