Having crashed into glass, you might think the bird would pause to take stock, look around and rediscover the open door it flew in through. But bird-brained is not an insult for nothing. Even the most ardent ornithophile has to acknowledge birds are not great reasoners. Crows may be able to count, and parrots parrot, but most of their classmates are thumb-suckers at the back. So they fly up and down the glass like third-formers encountering algebra until I arrive to wrap my ever-loving hands around them and bear them back out the door and let them go, whereupon they hammer off into the distance with a story to tell.
That birds are poor reasoners is hardly surprising when you consider their lineage. For if you were take a garage blackbird, pluck it, lay it on its side and trace its outline with a pencil, the shape you would trace is that of a dinosaur. The thrushes on your lawn are the direct descendants of the T. Rex. Your garden is Jurassic Park.
Nevertheless, because they’re common and because they’re pretty and because they do us no harm, birds have become symbols of things being well. We thrill, for example to those displays of a billion starlings coming in to roost and shifting through the sky like filings drawn by a magnet. Any other creature in such numbers would cause unease, a sense of verminous threat, like a plague of rats or locusts. But not birds. In the light of which, come with me for a walk at dusk through Lyttelton.
As we make our way along Simeon Quay, do you note that background bird noise? Not singing as thrushes sing, but excited cheeps and tweets, a sort of urgent avian discussion. And see those little bird bodies flitting above us, insignificant in themselves but in growing numbers. As we turn on to Brittan Terrace, both the volume of noise and the number of birds increases.
To our left a palm tree comes into view, seeming out of place in this non-tropical port, but 20 feet tall with a great pluming mop top, like Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. And in and about that mop there’s a darting, cheeping, squabbling mass of sparrows. It seems every sparrow in Lyttelton comes here to roost. How they all fit in I cannot tell you, but as the light fades the last few jostle their way in and this single tree becomes a vast convivial sparrow dormitory. Then darkness falls and a couple of thousand dowdy little birds sink into a unity of silence. I like to go there of an evening, just to see it.
And then this morning the low spring sun lit the frosted glass in the door of my study and it was enough to haul me from my desk and out to meet the day and the warmth was a blessing on skin and skull. As I stood to drink it in, a stream of cackles, whistles and bright notes came from the wattle tree that smothers the kitchen window. Up in the branches, darting and trilling and silhouetted against a morning sky that was almost white with light, were no fewer than five bellbirds.
Whether it was some sort of mating ritual, squabbling over territory or perhaps just exuberance at the warmth of the sun on their backs at the end of a long and hungry winter, I cannot tell you. What I can tell you is that I, who had a head full of Trump, Putin, lies, wars, car crashes and All Black defeats, watched them springing about in the tree for several minutes and then came in to write this. Birds in trees.
