Things seem askew. The chew-toy squeals of rose-ringed parakeets rise above the songbird natter among the ash trees of a Bradford park. A friend sends pictures of a goshawk seen, improbably, in suburban Airedale woodland. High on the mill chimney, framed by lightning conductors, a peregrine falcon watches over my lockdown coffee on the back step. None of this, surely, is normal. Might it be the new normal I’ve heard so much about?
What is normal? The chiffchaff’s tireless two-step sounds all morning long from the allotments at the bottom of the street (between my step and the peregrine’s chimney). From adjacent birches in that parakeet-ridden Bradford park, two cock blackcaps spit breakneck territorial song at one another. These tiny birds have just come tumbling in as part of a 15 million-strong contingent of spring migrants from Africa and southern Europe. How is that normal? It wouldn’t be, if we weren’t so used to it – it would be jaw-dropping if it didn’t happen every year.
And the parakeets are not so strange as they seem. They have long been old news in trendsetting London, but it turns out that Bradford is not so far from the leading edge as may have been supposed: our park’s population has been here for years (about as long as I have). The peregrine, too, is only as fantastical as you want it to be. We’ve all seen the webcam footage of chicks hatching on cathedral steeples, or seen the adults pitching headlong from the upper storeys of city high-rises – but to a birdwatcher who grew up knowing the peregrine as a creature of remote wilderness and a species on the brink, it’s still hard not to feel a sharp rattle of dissonance. The goshawk, meanwhile, proves to be an escaper, from a breeding centre somewhere to the south. People complicating things again.
The only real constant in nature is change. I like to be reminded of this – I like to remind myself that if I step outside and don’t see something new, something weird, it’s only because I’m not paying attention. Until last week, I’d somehow never noticed the extraordinary skylarking display flights of the starlings over the streets here. But this isn’t lockdown wildlife. It’s just wildlife. Turns out nature was weird all along.
