As a climbing frame with incentives, the hazel in our garden had drawn visitors all through the day. Every time I glanced over, there was a bird in the bush – a robin, a dunnock, six sparrows. They dived in, using it for shelter, as a song post, a meeting place, a launching pad for the pond. And, most of all, as a feeding station, a thousand green plates offering takeaway dinners.
Here was incontrovertible proof that suckers grow on trees: a myriad of bugs, walking, crawling, puncturing the soft greenery of May to drink of its goodness. More bugs eating those bugs, and birds eating them all up, yesterday, today, every day since those leaves first burst forth. And now, late in the afternoon, the sun lit up the leaves’ bleeding wounds, the glinting stickiness of aphid honeydew.
I thought by then that the birds would have exhausted the bush’s bounty, but I reckoned without its habitual fringe player. The afternoon before, I had seen a blue tit scale to the top tip of a rosemary bush, as if it were auditioning for the role of herb fairy, while the bigger birds footered about among the branches below. Now a blue tit once more took to the edges, stepping beyond the bounds of other birds’ possibilities, reaching where only it could go.
It touched down on the hem of the hazel’s skirt, the first giant outermost leaves suspended on twiglets thinner than a shoelace. This would have been a quivering, buckling gangplank for a sparrow twice its 11g weight, but the leaf just sagged gently beneath the blue tit’s featherweight bulk.
The tiny beak swiped and stabbed, three times in a second, then the bird hopped to the farthest leaf. The bough bowed but held, the tit pecked, then sidestepped to the next terminal twig, and then the next, depressing each in turn as if it were walking along a piano keyboard.
Springing to a last twig, the blue tit flipped upside down as it landed, claws locked on its high wire, its throat stretching to jab at something on the underside of a leaf. It hung and flew, and I was left with a shaken leaf and a memory of supreme agility.
