It would be tempting to just write: “Ditto. Same as last year. Nothing much has changed.” Because nothing much has, here on my patch by the river. I know what I’m likely to see when I head down here, give or take the odd kingfisher (not today) or treecreeper (yes today, spiralling quietly upward in and among the hawthorn). Siskins bother the alder-tops and a bullfinch toots mournfully from a sycamore thicket. A wintering little grebe, looking as small and vulnerable as a duckling, circles at the river’s edge. A roe deer kicks up its back end, flashing its scut.
But on the other hand, in other ways, everything has changed. Everyone here is a little older, has learned a little more. A year’s worth of weather has blown through the woods. Most of these birds (long-tailed tits milling in the middle storey, blue tits making their rattlesnake alarm-calls, song thrushes maintaining a strong line in jibber-jabber from the tree-forks) won’t be the same birds as were here last year, though they wear the same colours and sing much the same songs. The world has turned. Everything is different.
Some of the changes I can even see. Someone has flytipped a van-load of car tyres on the opposite side of the river: they slobber down the bank like a clutch of giant frogspawn. The great riven tree beside the dry stream-bed has split a bit wider open, and brambles have found their way inside the trunk. The warden has been busy, over winter, knitting new hedges.
I stop at the fence that encloses the close-strimmed meadow upstream of the trees. To the left, on a branch overlooking the uncut scrub between the meadow and a car-radiator factory, a male kestrel is perched, grey head bowed as he studies the undergrowth for movement. To the right, as if put there for contrast, as in a parable or a story for children, a female sparrowhawk rises in widening circles, silencing the birdsong as she goes.
• Richard Smyth’s An Indifference of Birds is published by Uniformbooks on 14 February
