On Blackbirds and Bonding.

There’s something unusual going on with the blackbirds in my garden. Around the time of sunset and shortly after, they suddenly become active and numerous just when the other birds have mostly disappeared for the day. The males are usually flying fast and determinedly from tree to tree, often chasing other males. The females are mostly hopping around the lawn and vegetable plots, or in among the vegetation in the flower beds, picking up unidentified morsels from the earth. And they come closer to me than usual, only moving away if I put a foot one step too far in their direction. It feels almost as though I’m beginning to bond with blackbirds in the twilight hour.

But as I said to the woman in the pet shop where I went to buy my sack of wild bird seed yesterday: ‘there are worse things to bond with than blackbirds.’ She agreed. And then I asked whether she was familiar with the story of Molly Lee, ‘the Burslem witch’ who was buried with a live blackbird in her coffin, and how disturbing the thought of such an atrocity is. She did know the story; she’d even visited Molly’s grave which had been re-aligned north-south in an apparently successful attempt to lay her ghost.

I also suggested that the pet shop acquire two friendly dogs to work shifts sitting by the till near the door. It occurs to me that the shop would be constantly full of people wanting their dog fixes (as I do.) You wouldn’t think a visit to a retail park could be interesting, would you?