A Silence

I am going to keep things like this.
--“Hawk Roosting”, Ted Hughes

One of the compensations for my work journeys to Canary Wharf is the walk to Oxford station in the mornings. The route I take alternates for most of the way between quiet suburban streets and parks, and a stretch runs along the river. While the waters were high throughout late winter, one section across Oxpens Recreation Ground was impassable, so I used a route along a narrow branch of the waterway, which is backed onto by a modern development.

This way was a revelation. Many of the houses’ inhabitants put food out for the birds. These feeders are very successful – I saw more birds there in a few minutes than I would in the garden at home during a whole day.

But the walk as a whole is one for the ears. Each part of it has its own selection of bird calls. House sparrows crowd the shrubs on the first streets, squabbling and rattling the leaves. In the first park, mallards clash with coots, while goose wings burr the air. Then starlings on roof ridges draw attention with sounds that demand a visual description – arcs of colours light sparking from the TV aerials down as far as the road. In the next park, blackbirds are “pouring whisky in a glass” (as I’ve heard it called), magpies chipping at stones, crows tearing thick envelopes. Sometimes there’s a songthrush taking a kaleidoscope to its phrases.

At this point I cross the river and (until the normal way was clear of flood and consequent swamp) go behind the houses where the bird feeders hang. Sparrows are frequent here too. We never get them in our garden, and the year-on-year declines reported among others in the Big Garden Birdwatch results always make me think that they’re halfway to rare. Not yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Sparrows are among the first birds I remember watching closely, as they sat on the gutters of next door’s house on summer evenings, so to see their cushiony shapes in the trees above the stream on the opposite side of the path the houses is reassuring.

There are also blue and great tits, daily regulars round our house, whose patterns I enjoy because they are so crisp along their flanks and head. There are greenfinches, dunnocks, more starlings. Also in the trees, and on the window ledges, sit chaffinches, the males among the brightest coloured birds, and their song always finishing with a twist, as though someone were drawing a zigzag with a stone across a slate. One early morning I saw my first ever siskin there. Its yellow brown is barred with black.

All these birds zip from tree to feeder, feeder to roof, roof to tree. If the sun is out, their shadows are a continuous flickering across the tarmac path, as if an old film reel were rolling. The sound is insistent: cheeps, whistles, tweets (old school), whirrs, clicks, the tapping of beaks on nuts, the skirr of feathers, the slap of swinging branches on each other. Blackbirds and magpies might add comments from the sidelines, or a crow from overhead. The proximity of food and cover, and the presence of lots of pairs of eyes to keep a lookout, make this stretch one of the busiest bird spots I know.

So when one early morning I was passing through and it was silent, it was so strange as to be almost unpleasant. It was not long after first light, when birds (but not many people) are most active. Not being entirely awake, I didn’t at first notice the quiet. The day was starting eerily in any case, with a mist just thick enough to smudge out the edges of trees on the far side of the parks. The air had that flush of moisture that makes each breath seem a little richer. A few daffodil leaves poked lonely fingers through the leaf litter, but no buds on the trees had yet broken out.

Sound was being peculiar. The drone of the ring road seemed to be pitched down vertically onto where I was walking, and the Doppler effect of geese passing overhead seemed strangely exaggerated, as though being tried out for a radio drama. And when I had passed through the dripping tunnel under the wide footbridge I heard instead of noise just the faintest brush of twig on twig in the trees (and the ring road, “naturally”).

I kept looking at the feeders as I went along, and up into the trees. After a minute, I began to wonder if the mist and the cold had stopped the birds from getting going (excuses I would have liked to use). But neither were so bad that hungry creatures would have given up the chance of an easy meal. For a moment I had wild thoughts that disease, like the trichomonosis that is affecting the greenfinch population, might be to blame. Then I saw the cause of the abandonment.

In JA Baker’s The Peregrine, and “Hook” by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, there is excellent writing about the effect the presence of a predator has on its prey. I’d heard something similar about sparrowhawks. Every so often I’d catch a glimpse of this, looking out into the back garden and seeing a sharp grey shape shoot by to a chorus of stillness. Once, in a previous house, a male and female hawk took turns to digest their meals in the willows between us and the railway line. But the silence, the absence of other birds was never this complete.

The sparrowhawk stood close to the peak of the roof, most of its body silhouetted against the cloud. It did not move.

At first I thought “a pigeon”, going by size, colour and the fact that most initially interesting-looking birds turn out to be pigeons. A second glance told me that I was quite wrong. No pigeon would have that muscled look, the steady head position meaning that even I was being measured up. After a few seconds it casually moved to the very top of the roof. I saw its wings unfold, and it swept out of sight. I carried on walking, but the trees and gardens I passed remained empty of birds.