For a brief moment, a cock chaffinch owns the world: a handful of seeds on a metre-square of concrete at the cold end of February. Watch the fighter’s forward shuffle, pushing towards the ropes of his entitlement; the eye-contact with invisible opponents. In a scattering of wild bird food, harvested somewhere else, bagged for the supermarket and broadcast here to rekindle a bond between person and bird, he asserts his antique right to gleanings.
He selects a seed the way a waller lifts the perfect stone to fill a gap. The precision instrument of his beak applies just enough pressure along the ridges to split its seam, then he rolls it crosswise to crack and separate the case, which he drops. This empty husk is the chaff, and the chaffinch’s skill is in the threshing of each grain, the winnowing that separates the germ of life from the box it comes in. Chaffinch do not eat the chaff but create it, a litter cast for others; I suppose the bird’s name comes from its foraging the rubbish of harvest. The chaffinch swallows the seed, and the future of wheat, maize, millet or oat plants becomes the future chaffinch.
His chest is dawn-lit, his head grey, the heraldry of his flash-feathers – which are only seen in flight – signalling the breeding season to come. Chaffinches that overwintered in single-sex flocks are all feeding together now; they wait at the margins of the world as his cock-ness performs his rites alone. He has no song yet but soon it will sound like coded whistling to a hidden charm of finches to show themselves, each phrase ending in a little instruction.
Until it’s time to sing, he bulks up to energise his colours, sharing this food with robin, wren, blackbird, dunnock, house sparrow, wood pigeon and collared dove. There is a kind of pecking-order in the coming and going but no real conflict. The birds are edgy, there is cover, and escape routes, but they watch for sparrowhawks. Despite this, the cock chaffinch takes over the world, a meadow inside him, one grain at a time.
• This article was amended on 1 March 2018 because an earlier version referred to “collard dove”.
