The whiskery leaves of the nettles, the out-of-hand brambles, the stale summer green of the crowding hawthorn, the new branches of the young beech and linden trees – they all look as though someone has been careless with a bucket of whitewash. The reason isn’t hard to figure out. As I stand here at the edge of the woods, knee-deep in the understorey, a male blackbird up above adds another damp ovoid daub to the monochrome Jackson Pollock effect. What goes in must come out. Cherry season has begun, and I’m in birdshit central.
The poo of hungry birds is vitally important to the propagation of the wild cherry tree (its scientific name, Prunus avium, acknowledges as much). A German study in 2007 found that 17 species were involved in the distribution of the tree’s seeds – each cleverly smuggled within an eye-catching gobbet of sweet pulp. Blackbirds, song and mistle thrushes, jays, woodpeckers and wood pigeons, among others, were joined by migrants on a calorie-loading mission: blackcaps, whitethroats and garden warblers.
There are two wood pigeons feeding in the canopy now. Earlier, as I climbed up from the ponds, I saw a roe deer charging through the brambles and high thistles up ahead. I’m sure it made less noise than the pigeons are making as they lumber and pitch from branch to branch. I’m pretty sure you could put the roe deer 30 feet up in a cherry tree and it would make less noise. But of course the birds are indifferent to trivial notions of grace – these cherries are a time-limited bonanza. I pick my way down a trail through the trees. It’s mostly songless: the embarrassed silence of the summer moult.
Heaton Woods is an old reach of woodland within walking distance of central Bradford – the kind of place where people say: “This? Here?” The population of Heaton is about 50% Pakistani or British Pakistani, and most of the people in the woods today – running, walking together, pottering about like me – appear to be from an Asian background. Now that access to nature for non-white communities is a mainstream talking point, places like this – where there are cherry trees full of birds right in an old mill city’s immigrant heartland – feel particularly important.
