Do they think it's Spring?

The thrush is singing songs of spring outside in the eucalyptus tree, where his throat swells and he lifts his beak towards the air to project his voice. Beautiful liquid notes interspersed with some harsher whistles: 'Whip whip whip wheee,' he sings. 'Whip whip whip, hurrah! Spring!Spring! Spring! Spring! Bubbly bubbly. Whip whip wheee.' It makes me feel almost hopeful. My heart longs to expand in agreement, in eager response to his promise of renewal. And it is a beautiful, mild, still, blue day, it could almost seem that winter is over, except I know it is only early January and so how could that be?All the other birds are joining in, from the ivy entwined around the birch trees: the magpie, chaffinches, a collared dove, starlings chattering, a blackbird pinking, blue and great and long-tailed tits, while the seagulls soar majestically overhead, gliding on the lower air currents with just an occasional twitch of their marled or white wings to adjust their course. No jackdaws today.

Now the setting sun is reflecting golden in the windows of the A-house opposite as the garden descends into twilight. We are surrounded by such beauty, and how little time we take to notice it. This garden is full of birdsong, especially on a day like this, charged with it, alive with noise and communication all day long, not just at dawn. How they sing their hearts out! How silent London is by comparison, and even the next-door gardens have little to compare: this garden is an oasis, a relic of a former decade or even century when gardens were overgrown and leafy, and woodland stood all around.

If Jonathan Franzen thinks it is cats that are to blame for the annual loss of songbirds, he should come here. This garden has always had cats - up to four of them at a time - yet it bursts with birds and their songs pouring out of every bush and from the branches, and each year dozens of broods of birds are reared here. It is the loss of habitat, not the cats, that affects them elsewhere. No sparrows though - they have gone (though I have them in my Madron cottage). And I haven't heard an owl this winter. But sometimes nuthatches, firecrests and wrens, most kinds of tit, and lately, I think, a pair of blackcaps.

Still they are singing, calling, yearning, carolling their joy in the struggle of being alive. Animals - and birds somehow even more - are so pure, so at one with life, they are what they do, they do what they are, there is no doubt or confusion of intention or hesitation or identity crisis or gap of consciousness and self-consciousness between the thought and the deed. It is an instinctive innocence, a timelessness in the moment, an ability just to be that humans have all but lost. The roots of creativity lie there, spontaneity, too. And joy.

Now as the light fades, at 4.45 pm, their songs fade too, one by one they go quiet, and I can hear again the indoor noises of the kitchen taking over. They fall silent finally, the last blackbird, at 5.14 pm. Perhaps tomorrow, if it is another fine birdsong day, I'll record them.

'My heart in hiding/ Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! '
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover.
'The time of the singing of birds is come...'
Song of Solomon, The King James Bible