A Good Time For Covid?

Nigel and I have been laid low by Covid, presumably the Omicron variant.

Since I have been working in secondary schools and he has attended the odd meeting in central London, this highly contagious variant did seem unavoidable.

Long country walks are something we consider essential to happiness, but at the moment we are confined indoors.

So I have been consoling myself that if there was one good time of year to be trapped at home, then this is it – ten dry, cold, overcast January days, with daylight fleeting early.

The very countryside has appeared dormant.

Yet as I have begun to feel better, I can see how wrong I have been.

Whenever the sun shows its face, I hear birdsong, led by our robins, but including a swelling number of other species.  Blue tits are showing a great deal of interest in our nest boxes.

Our doves have begun to vie for the best nest sites in our dove cote.

Each night, foxes rend the air with their barks.

Even the hedgehog which we have been fostering this winter seems to have no interest in hibernating.

So when I finally get the all-clear to leave the house, the first intimations of spring will be awaiting me with open arms.

Video of Nigel feeding robin by Carenza

Blue tit photo by david Griffiths on Unsplash

Swift Response

If there’s one bird for me, then it is the swift.

If I am reincarnated, that's what I would opt to be.

They barrel around our summer skies in small flocks, shrieking with delight as if our rooftops are their own personal Alton Towers.  Life through the eyes of a swift must look like one long arcade game.

But maybe being a swift is not such an idyll – every May when they arrive back from Africa, they find it more difficult to nest. 

Hundreds of years ago, they nested in vast ancient trees which furnished plenty of nooks and crannies.  However, as mankind has dominated the landscape, they have used our buildings instead, colonising holes, cracks and fissures.

But as our building techniques become better at sealing every chink and gap, swifts find it harder to find a home.  Numbers have greatly decreased and the swift is now endangered in the UK.  However, it is not hard to offer help. 

Newbuilds or extensions can have hollow swift-bricks built in.  Existing buildings can have nest-boxes fitted under the eaves.

The church I attend, St Luke’s, doesn’t have much land, but is currently planning a small wildlife garden.  When we talked to Heidi from Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust , we discovered we had valuable vertical real estate in the shape of a North-East facing wall, ideal for swift nest-boxes.

So we’ve ordered them now, in time to put up before May.  

Let’s just hope the swifts make those lovely excited shrieks when they see them.

For more about helping swifts:

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/swift/

http://actionforswifts.blogspot.com/

https://www.swift-conservation.org/

photo by Vika Strawberrica, Unsplash

 

 

Getting on with it

Christmastide has always had the quality of being a magical island, rising above the drab grey seas of midwinter, twinkling with fairy lights and warmed by mulled wine.  Even more so since the children grew up and left home - now it is a time when they return and we re-form the nuclear family we once were.  We do the Christmas baking, read the Night Before Christmas together, watch old films, play daft games and go for endless muddy walks guided home by the glow of early sunsets.

Nowadays, as soon as the last child has left, without waiting for the 5^th or 6^th of January, I take the decorations down.  I guess it draws a clear boundary between the fresh start of the New Year and the precious island of Christmastide, a country which has sunken below the horizon for now. 

But next December, we shall set sail again, navigating towards Christmas, guided by its winking lights and the hope that our children will journey to be there with us once more.