Magazine

I miss the birds

Caitlin Moran

Published October 11 2014

When I was a child, the dawn chorus was a sudden explosion of sheer creation joy. Now my garden is empty

When I was a child, I lived in a world of birds they filled the hedges, the trees, the skies, the lips under the roofs.

To step into the garden was to propel an indignant flurry of sparrows upwards, outwards, from their dust-bath they would scold me like tiny parents, before returning. I knew, absolutely, that sparrows could be my friends one day I would lie still on the ground for hours with bread in my hands, waiting for them to come to me. I knew their lives; we shared the same house. In spring, their empty half-shells fell from the eaves nests as their chicks hatched, often followed by the chicks themselves. Chicks fall from nests a lot. In their youth, they are dumb. And dead. We would gather around their tiny chicken-skin bodies huge, unopened eyes like blue planets and then give them splendid, mournful funerals, their coffins made of fig boxes.

We knew all the birds: the crack of a snail on a stone by a thrush; the cuckoo-clock call of the cuckoo; the incongruous pink of the fat, aggro bullfinch looking like the beefy men up town, trying to get into nightclubs in their pink Fred Perry tops. And they made us know them: for the dawn chorus every morning was not some meek, placid cheeping it was a sudden, violent explosion of sheer creation joy; loud, wild and unstoppable, with fluid lines of melody I could sing to you, even now, and which would wake you, awestruck.

Does birdsong coax the sun into returning every morning? Perhaps the sun is in love with the tiny, racing hearts of birds it would not come to us, were it not for them and the universe is run on the unrequited love of stars for birds.

Thirty years later, and I have my own house now. In the past two years, I have spent all my money constructing a garden as full of joy as the one I had as a child. I planted my childhood gardens trees hazel, apple, lilac, hawthorn and I waited for my birds to come and fill it. I built an orchestra pit for my own dawn chorus, because gardens are for birds.

But my garden is empty. A fifth of Britains birds have disappeared since 1966. Yes, there is a magpie, and three brave blue tits, and, sometimes, the soft, forlorn thudding of wood pigeons on the conservatory roof. But the hedges do not bustle with sparrows; the worm-pulling industry of the thrush and the robin is absent.

The seething, swarming business of birds rattling the leaves, filling the sky, digging the earth is gone. Sitting in this grand, bird-empty garden is as sad as sitting in a castle, with the candelabras blazing, and the waiters standing in line with trays of champagne and no one coming. I am Gatsby, alone.

I think of all the things my children do not know. Ive taken them on a train that goes under the sea, they can talk to people across the world on their phones, theyve eaten Heston Blumenthals Wonka puddings and yet I would cheerfully exchange all of that if they could walk into a garden full of sparrows, and be scolded by them. To have a child and not have it live among birds nags at me as a thing undone a thing done wrong. They are growing up in a world where humans will be lonely. They will not know the companionship of animals.

Ten years ago, unthinking, I bought my children two cats so that they might know the companionship of cats. But when the cats climbed into the wrens nest and killed the baby wren, the wrens never came back. The apple tree where they once bustled is totally silent, and dark. I have learnt that the companionship of cats comes at the loss of birds. Cats kill 55 million birds a year in the UK. I will never own another cat again. In the choice between tiger eyes and fur, and bead eye and song, I have picked my team now. I am for the birds. I dont care if I come back to a house that is empty, if I can step outside and find the sky full.

In the hours where I wish to treat myself after I have paid my alms and given my thanks for good fortune I skulk around websites, wondering if Ill buy myself a pearl necklace, gold curtains, a pair of green brogues. But what I really want to do is buy myself birds tens of birds, hundreds of birds. To greedily click on cuckoo, and sparrow, and finch, and thrush to have a box arrive, by hatted courier, and to cut the knotted strings, and watch a cloud of them rise up, bursting, and fill my garden with the rightful things of a garden: feather and song; the crack of a snail on the stone; broken eggshell; the hymning of rain and sun.

But my garden is empty. I am Gatsby, alone, melancholy playing birdsong on my laptop, by birds that died a long, long time ago.