Meetings

"Think of this. A sword is like a bird. If you clutch it too tightly, you choke it - too lightly and it flies away."
from Scaramouche (1952)

It's only one line from that film, but it says something important to me. I remember the moment - only the moment, not the context - I understood what it meant. The handle of the foil nestled in my fingers and the weight of the blade seemed zero, the point angled towards my opponent's chest.

I now appreciate the pause at the start of a fencing bout between the referee's "en garde" and "allez". The sword sits still in my hand; the least pressure from my fingers will direct it. The moment is one of readiness, one of potential before action begins. In times of stress I sometimes look for calm by imagining my grip on the epee handle (I've since changed weapon) in that still, poised state, and think of the stillness spreading from my finger ends, through my body and into my mind.

I doubt I'd hold a real bird in such a collected way. Its heat and trembling, the prickling of feathers and feet, the rapid quiver of its heart would focus me in quite different way - always already adjusting.

Late spring brings such thoughts to mind because that's the time of unexpected proximity to newly fledged birds. The most common kind of encounter is not that far from simply seeing a bird in the garden - it's the relationships among the birds that are most interesting.

For example, a string of jackdaws might settle on the fence, and "chack" among themselves. The young ones are a little smaller and more glossy. Then they launch off, as if on a tour. Or the garden and the house are filled with an immense racket - one mature and three young magpies are scolding a cat, which slinks away, foiled again. A family of great tits, the young ones not quite as yellow-stomached as their seniors, take turns on the bird feeder.

For me, every bird encounter is instinctively compared with two formative ones from my childhood. One is now a family legend; the other I'd barely thought about for almost thirty years until this summer: a young crow, barely fledged, was somehow injured and grounded in our back garden. For a few days I went out with some bread to feed it, and its beak scraped against my fingertips (we didn't know that bread is not the best food for birds back then). This memory is very hazy, but I believed that the crow had got better and taken to the air. Perhaps it did.

I was the one who heard the noises in the chimney. Soot was falling down, and there were sounds that couldn't be explained. I have a clear image of my dad wearing big red gardening gloves half-sprinting from the fireplace to the window, and the freed crow like a slip of the pen against the hedge.

Conrad Crow, by dint of having fallen into our fireplace, became a friend of the family - at least in the stories my dad told us for years afterward. Some were recorded on cassettes we played again and again. I don't remember the details, only the pauses in the stories (my dad says he was thinking up what would happen next!) while the ideas and adventures swirled about us. Conrad is a long-lived bird - when my daughter sees her grandparents, he is still a bedtime hero. She often tells me that Conrad's in the garden. (I doubt the woodpigeon I rescued from the water butt last year could attain the same status.)

New-fledged birds have less fear of humans than their surviving elders, and this leads to moments when those past meetings are recalled. As I walked home down the Thames one mid-June afternoon, a whirring call in one of the bushes by the field made me stop. I wanted to see what was making the noise. I stepped off the path and down the slope to the spiked fence edging the horse field. Normally I have to search hard in the branches' mesh to find the bird, but it sat there against the sky. A greenfinch - more a grey-finch, as its colours had not yet matured. It turned its head to the side to look at me. (I recalled the god Tash in CS Lewis' The Last Battle.) Its weighty beak reflected the sun - and it did not fly away. We measured each other up until I had to go so as not to be late home.

Every couple of days I wash out and fill the bird bath at the far end of our garden. One day, something flickered in the corner of my eye as I turned away. I stopped, and very gradually moved back. A juvenile robin was perched on the rim of the stone bowl, the ends of its toes just in the water. It was not yet old enough for the red breast - the dark shade of the feathers on its head lightened further down its body. This modulating colour was flecked here and there with paler spots. But the eye was watchful, and the head flicked from angle to angle. Still, it clearly didn't see me as a danger. I could have put out my hand and touched it. Each feather was visible. We stood for a few seconds, and then it hopped into the water.

The robin splashed, had a drink, and flew up into the buddleia that overhangs the bath. I saw its eye moving about. Then down the bird came again, and had another drink. I felt as though it would come and sit on my shoulder - but didn't move, for fear of scaring it off. Eventually the robin left gradually, short bursts of wing, then another pause on a perch, its head always moving but never thinking of me as a threat.

I've seen the same bird up close many more times in the weeks since then - though never quite as near. Like the young greenfinch, it hadn't yet learned to see danger in humans, unlike the magpies with their parental guidance. Research I saw on the British Trust for Ornithology website underlined the learning they would have to do.  Apparently, male great tits with broad belly stripes are more aggressive and bolder, and more attractive to females - and therefore have more breeding success. But in cities the birds with broader belly stripes have far shorter lifespans than the shyer ones with narrower belly stripes. To call this "natural" selection would feel strange, and the article said it was not yet clear whether the female birds had latched onto the difference in lifespans.

Boldness versus caution was one of the important parts of the most memorable close bird encounter I've had in recent years. Not far from us is a pub/café on the riverbank. We've known it a long time, and despite its present very active owners it's been a quite ramshackle building for many years. It's our local and there are many weekends when the three of us end up there for tea or beer, and cake.

One rainy spring afternoon we were able to get a big round table by the back window. The view out didn't match the ones available across Iffley Meadows, or down the garden to the river, but there was a fire in the grate - and in the wall outside were blue tits.

It was a first for all of us (even though two out of the three had had thirty years' more opportunities) to watch the parent birds repeatedly flying in with food for the bobbing heads - grey-blue feathers, yellow bill tips. Just outside the window the wall jutted out into the pub garden, and had fallen away below a group of pipes. The parent birds had nested in the gap, and reared six offspring. We all watched attentively. The slight-bodied parents barely settled on the lip of the nest before they were gone again.

But over time it became clear that something more was happening. Gradually one chick climbed out from the others. Its wings seemed no more than curled leaves, but it flapped them vigorously - in between taking all the food its parents brought on their fleeting visits. Its first take-off was sure to be soon. We ordered another round of teas. We were certain that if we looked away that little body would drop, or fly. The bill appeared too short to feed, the colours of the feathers washed out before they'd even formed.

I don't know if our daughter, only four or so at the time, knew what was going to happen. We older ones did, but had to adjust our expectations, built on years of edited TV footage, to how long it would take - far longer than you'd think.

The owners of the pub were fretting that the chicks would end up stood on, or eaten, as soon as they stepped out, and brought a chair round for the pioneer to land on. But that first bird knew what it was doing. Its first flight was like that of a soggy paper aeroplane and yet still landed on the chair back and sat there looking round.

In the nest, the other chicks still raised their beaks. The parents went to them, not the fledgling. It had taken the biggest step we could imagine in the life of a bird, but only we felt the sentiment. I'm sure the cheeping of the first chick out would soon have won it some attention. Until then it sat in isolation, its brain adapting to the world, its body finding a new kind of readiness.