A Globe of Birds

The lakes were ridged and pathwayed with ice. Its edges broke through the night-colour below the surface, and disrupted the otherwise pristine reflections of the sun-dyed trees. Their naked branches hung immobile over water and shore alike. Blue sky, white steel of the high fence beside the railway. Along the spines of the grass frost still shone.

Hands-in-pockets is the best way to stand and look on a day like this. The cold is crisp and brittle in places, in others, particularly along well-walked paths, or in hollows, it's soakingly, smotheringly damp. Down at the bottom of Wolvercote Lakes, where the fallen trees are sinking into sucking mud, the chill would have been all-consuming.

But even so, as I ambled by the bank, over the slippy leaf mould, I could feel a touch of the sun’s warmth on my face. It was beginning to drop down beyond the village and in every breath there was a foretaste of more frost to come.

That hint of warmth was matched by a flickering of life among the trees. It was both visual and aural, at the periphery of sight and hearing – shadows across narrow trunks, a blur of shape, sounds pitched towards the upper end of my ears’ register.

I was dry-throated after my walk up the river and canal from south Oxford, so sat in the hide built by the Oxford Preservation Trust, which owns the site, and took several swigs from my water bottle. On the lake surface visible through the observation windows a few coots drifted around a few mallards – water life at its most lethargic. But above me there was a crowd. I went and stood in the middle of the leaf-lined clearing.

It had been a good day for bird-spotting. It usually is when it turns bright after a run of claggy, grey days. My total species tally for the walk was 23, of which the second kingfisher, silhouetted against the Thames at sunset, and a lapwing over Port Meadow were highlights. At Wolvercote Lakes there were no really unusual birds, there was no huge flock. But there was an immersion in bird life.

Long-tailed tits were moving from trunk to trunk, their calls high and persistent. They hung upside down, they flitted continuously, their tails swung like weather vanes. Some hopped along branches as if they’d forgotten where they were going. Slightly higher up, a few blue tits pottered about. Their calls were louder and their movements slower, but the blue on their heads was almost that of the sky.

A couple of great tits sat on branches in the middle of all the activity. They called to each other, but otherwise sat still. I could take as long as I wanted to look at the short black feathers on their heads, the fluff-yellow of their chests, their stubby bills, the tight grip of their feet on the twigs.

Right down at ground level, a solitary bird went about its business. A casual glance could have suggested any old indeterminate brown bird, but I knew it at once – I used to watch its relatives pecking at the willow trunks behind our old house. It was a treecreeper, going up and down the near-vertical bark, probing and probing with the stiff feathers of its tail. Like the long-tailed tits, it never stopped moving, but it never looked up, kept its gaze intently on the bark in front of it, whether upside down or right way up.

I imagine I was being like the treecreeper, narrowing down the world to the globe of birds in that clearing. A metaphor for short-sightedness, narrow-mindedness? Only if you think there are easy equivalences between the wild world and the human. I see it another way – in finding this spot, these creatures, I was looking outside my world, finding a different one. I cannot live in it, but I am part of it because we share this space, this time.