{"id":1299,"date":"2020-07-23T07:26:59","date_gmt":"2020-07-23T06:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writersrebel.com\/?p=1299"},"modified":"2020-08-19T17:26:33","modified_gmt":"2020-08-19T16:26:33","slug":"read-birds-under-lockdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/read-birds-under-lockdown\/","title":{"rendered":"<span>Read: Birds Under Lockdown<\/span><span>Nicholas Royle<\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On the last day before the hospitality sector in England locked down, my wife and I sat in a hotel garden in Cumbria watching the comings and goings at a bird feeder. The occasion was my birthday and the dinner had been booked for months. It just happened to fall on the last day of service; there was some doubt over whether we would get breakfast. The bird feeder, meanwhile, was being visited by goldfinches and greenfinches, blue tits and great tits. The colours were vivid in the late afternoon murk: the red-faced goldfinch caught out in some transgression, the yellow and black bars on its wing a flashforward to the hazard tape that would mark off the weeks to come. The greenfinch was cloaked in a velvet far greener than the bird books ever suggest. Even more exciting was a pair of bullfinches: you\u2019re only certain in your identification of the rosy-pink breast of the female when you also spot the male, its shocking peachy-pink puffed-out chest unmistakable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Back home we decided the way to survive lockdown was to buy a bird feeder. A local hardware shop, with a table in the doorway and a queue around the corner, sold us a basic model, which we filled with peanuts and hung from a low branch on the tree outside our bedroom window. I had worried the squirrels might get in on the action, but hadn\u2019t realised how quickly and efficiently they would take care of business. They simply climbed down the string and turned the feeder upside down so that its lid came off. We refilled the feeder and tried various approaches to defy the squirrels until we finally had to admit that the hardware shop had mis-sold the item, which was not a bird feeder at all, but a squirrel feeder.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My wife went online and ordered a device similar to an intercontinental ballistic missile, its glossy metal overhanging lid and slippery Perspex cylinder surely rendering it squirrel proof. We hung it on a wire and filled it with mixed bird seed, and then sat and waited. And waited. And waited. Acquaintances warned it could take weeks for the birds to get the message (the squirrels having grasped the concept of futility). It did indeed take weeks \u2013 how many is hard to say, since they passed so quickly in April, May and June. One day we noticed the level of seed had dropped. We started watching for longer periods and finally spotted a blue tit. Then a sparrow. A great tit followed \u2013 or was it a coal tit? The tits and sparrows almost emptied the thing in a week and we bought more seed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We discovered that you have to make sure the feeder is never empty. One night, a week ago, it did become empty and we were unable to refill it until the next day. It\u2019s funny how quickly word gets out that the feeder is empty, but once you refill it, the birds continue to stay away for several days. Bad news, it seems, gets around the bird world faster than good. It took four days before we noticed the level had dropped and, then, another day passed before we saw the first bird, a house sparrow, back on the feeder.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I want to see the great tit again, or the coal tit, because I want to identify it. Is it a small great tit, perhaps a juvenile, or an adult coal tit? I know the difference on paper \u2013 I\u2019ve got a shelf full of guides \u2013 but it can be hard to put that knowledge into practice in the field (if looking out of one\u2019s bedroom window at a bird feeder through a pair of binoculars can be said to constitute being \u2018in the field\u2019), when what might be more important is the jizz. Yes, the jizz. To be fair, if one may still use the expression in contexts where it is actually germane, I did do a double-take when I first saw a copy \u2013 I say \u2018a copy\u2019; obviously I mean \u2018my copy\u2019, since I bought it; how could I not? \u2013 of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Birds by Character: The Fieldguide to Jizz Identification <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">in Henry Bohn Books in Liverpool. Jizz, as you might already know, but I didn\u2019t, means the general character of a bird. \u2018Jizz is instantly appreciated,\u2019 writes author Rob Hume, \u2018but its meaning is understood only through experience.\u2019 Turning to the coal tit, I read that its character is that of a \u2018tiny, lightweight ball\u2019, which doesn\u2019t help, but \u2018Zooms to peanut bag, stops dead from full speed, zooms off again with nut\u2019 does describe pretty accurately the way my mystery tit behaves around the bird feeder.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As spring turns to summer I know there are birds are in the bushes and trees because I can hear them, but the foliage makes them hard to see. The bird feeder draws them into the open for a few seconds \u2013 time to identify them and simply enjoy watching them. Each new bird \u2013 or returning bird \u2013 that alights on the feeder produces a miniature rush of endorphins.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One bird we haven\u2019t seen is a bullfinch, but maybe we will see one \u2013 or a pair \u2013 when we go back to Cumbria, for dinner, bed and breakfast, and the hotel garden bird feeder.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Nicholas Royle<\/strong> is the author of three short story collections \u2013 <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mortality<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ornithology<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u2013 and seven novels, most recently <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">First Novel<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. He has edited more than twenty anthologies and is series editor of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Best British Short Stories<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Reader in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, he also runs Nightjar Press, which publishes original short stories as signed, numbered chapbooks, and is head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize. His English translation of Vincent de Swarte\u2019s 1998 novel <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pharricide<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> has recently been published by Confingo Publishing.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; On the last day before the hospitality sector in England locked down, my wife and I sat in a hotel garden in Cumbria watching the comings and goings at a bird feeder. The occasion was my birthday and the dinner had been booked for months. It just happened to fall on the last day [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/read-birds-under-lockdown\/\">Read More&#8230;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> from <span>Read: Birds Under Lockdown<\/span><span>Nicholas Royle<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1301,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[139,140,152,10,151,138],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Read: Birds Under Lockdown - Writers Rebel<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/read-birds-under-lockdown\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Read: Birds Under Lockdown - Writers Rebel\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&nbsp; On the last day before the hospitality sector in England locked down, my wife and I sat in a hotel garden in Cumbria watching the comings and goings at a bird feeder. 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