May

The robin nest, as far as I can tell, is wedged behind some hop stems, against the north-facing wall, just beneath the trellis. It’s also behind the shrub rose, which is prickly. This means it won’t be troubled by wind or sunshine and heat, and is surrounded by thorns, which will make predation hard for cats. Well done, those robins.

I still worry about squirrels and magpies. There are crows, too, which steal in each day to gobble tadpoles. Tosca chases them out of the garden – they’re big enough to be invaders of her territory – but they always come back when she’s inside. The cats don’t, there are definitely fewer of them since Tos arrived, but the combined threat of predation is a hard one to bear. I know how few robins there are in this neighbourhood. I know the future of these chicks is, partly, in my hands. Suddenly I want to spend more time outside, not less. I want to guard the nest with my trusty, barking canine. I want to help secure the future of those baby robins. I want there to be more robins.

Helen, who lives in the house behind mine, told me they have nested with her a couple of times but always lost their eggs to magpies or squirrels. Another woman in the next road has said the blackbirds nesting in her garden suffered the same fate for three years before they gave up. When I moved here four years ago there was one dominant blackbird and three sub males (his sons?) who sang each evening from the top of Helen’s house. They’re all gone now. The last time I heard a blackbird was in March; he had been singing his dawn chorus alone since January. One day he stopped and I haven’t heard him since. There are some about, in the next road maybe, but I rarely see a blackbird in the garden.

Two common bird species that are almost absent from our landscape. Two common species that should be singing from every other rooftop but are struggling to live among paved and plastic gardens, in conditions that provide advantages for magpies, crows and squirrels, where every other home has a cat. Can we please do better for our birds?

Nest building took around five days. Since then all has gone quiet and I have avoided the area. I’m not avoiding the garden completely, though, as I realise – and as Emma suggested – the robins chose us for a reason. Perhaps the dog and the gardener are integral to their plan? Perhaps they know I will protect them? I’m assuming the female is now sitting on eggs, that they are being discreet so as not to alert the magpies, cats, crows and squirrels. The female lays up to six eggs, at a rate of one egg per day. She lays in the morning while the male sings from the cherry tree five doors down, defending his territory, which spans several of our small gardens. I would think she has laid all of them now and is sitting on them, quietly waiting for them to hatch. They should hatch within two weeks, when the sound of hungry chicks will alert all of the predators. I check the dates in my calendar, for when I can anticipate noisy nestlings. Can I clear it? It’s Chelsea Flower Show that week and I have to go to press day. But the rest of the week? Yes, clear it. I buy a parasol for the table so I can work outside. I don’t want to interfere with the nest, I don’t want to do anything to poke or get in the way of these birds and their young. But if I’m working away at my makeshift outside office, the dog sunbathing on the grass, then surely the magpies and crows, the cats, squirrels and foxes will stay out of the garden? And the robins will have a chance of success. If we – the dog and I – can get them to fledgling stage that will be something. At least we can get them to the point where they leave the nest. It’s got to be worth a try. In the meantime, we pack our bags for a mini-break in the New Forest, leaving the robin to sit on her eggs in peace. I hope upon hope the predators don’t notice her.

In the woods we are dusted with the glitter of goldcrest song, as shafts of light bend time and space and the world around us becomes taller. Who sings above us? Goldcrests and firecrests, redstarts, coal tits, blackbirds, robins. Everyone. Autumn’s leaves crunch underfoot as we make our way through the trees but I stop and stop and stop, and listen to birds. I want to sit beneath a tree and soak it all up. I want to bring sandwiches and spend the day being washed with birdsong. I want to…

‘Kate!’

Emma throws a ball for Tosca, who gambols about, high on woodland smells, and begs her to throw it again. We are on a woodland walk in the New Forest, day three of a five-day mini-break, where every day is the same: we get up, we go for a walk, we return to our cottage and read books or pop to the pub for a pint and a packet of crisps. We eat dinner and watch TV before going back out to look for nightjars. The dog goes bonkers over new smells, I moan about not living here permanently, Emma can’t work out which of us is more delighted. Every day the same. It’s wonderful.

Here I am less anxious. There’s a robin and blackbird on every roof, along with tits, house sparrows, dunnocks and goldfinches. There are bees, albeit small ones (a sure sign of a cold, wet spring), there are some butterflies and other insects. I wouldn’t go as far as to say the insect life here is abundant, but it’s better, noisier, than at home. There are new birds to meet: on the heath I find stonechats and meadow pipits, plus curlews and lapwings I can get to know better. In the woods I meet firecrests and marsh tits, woodlarks, common redstarts. At 4.00 a.m. I wake to the dawn chorus against a backdrop of churring nightjars. All around me there are new sounds. New sounds that aren’t new but are old, ancient and mostly forgotten. New sounds for my ears – here, ears, take them, they’re good for you! Take them and hold on to them. Bathe in them. I want to dig myself into the sand and drown in a high tide of firecrest glitter, of birdsong.

It’s easier, here, to forget what’s happening, to lose sight of the collapse of insect and bird populations, of the increase in temperatures and the flooding and fire that barely makes the news but which I see each day on Twitter. I feel calm here. There are pregnant donkeys and horses with tiny foals; nothing bad can come from a place with such delights. The donkeys try to get into the garden but the woman who owns the cottage won’t let them in.

While we’re away the news breaks that we’ll ‘probably’ reach 1.5°C of average global warming by 2030; indeed, the World Meteorological Organization says we have a 66 per cent chance of reaching this ‘limit’ by 2027. The BBC stresses that reaching this milestone will likely be temporary, but makes no mention of tipping points, such as the thawing of Arctic permafrost that would release huge deposits of methane into the atmosphere, leading to further ‘runaway’ heating. No mention of when we are likely to hit 2ºC (by mid-century) and what life will look like then (horrendous, if climate scientists are to be believed, which, of course, they should be). Still, I am grateful the report actually makes the headlines, although only for a few hours before Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are involved in a car chase and I wonder what schemes are at play to keep the masses from the truth.

We walk for miles: on heathland and in woodland, on beaches and along rivers. We are recharged. And then we go home again, to empty flowers and a dawn chorus of just one robin, to Drone Bastard flying his drone at gulls. I try to stay positive. I stand in the kitchen and look for robins. Where are they? There’s no sign. I feel glum, wondering if they laid eggs, if any eggs have been eaten by squirrels, if the robins themselves have managed to avoid the attentions of cats.

‘I think the nest has been abandoned,’ I tell Emma.

‘Oh dear,’ she says.

‘Do you think I should check?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

I look online for guidance of such things. I want to find an article entitled ‘Paranoid? Here’s how to check on your robins without disturbing them’. Instead, I find a nest-watch survey on the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) website, which actively encourages you to check nests but to do so in a careful manner that doesn’t interfere with the birds. Then you report your findings for ‘science’. It tells me I can check the nest but only when I know both parents are not present, and to quickly look or take a photo and then retreat. OK! But there are no robins. Are there robins? Where are the robins?

I spend more time looking through the kitchen window. Of course, the robins are still in the garden, they are just keeping themselves to themselves, as robins do when they’re not fighting or protecting territory. I’m so relieved. I watch them dart about, the male bathes in his favourite water-butt bird bath while the female perches on her favourite rowan branch (they have a branch each, which is a delight). Then they swap – him drying off in the rowan, her taking a bath. An evening shower after a long day of, what? Sitting on eggs? Feeding young? Laying eggs to replace those that have been eaten by squirrels? They fly off, in the direction of my neighbour Kate’s garden, and I know this is my time. I dash out, excitedly, nervously, and fumble to use my phone to locate the nest. I don’t know where it is exactly, but know it’s somewhere in the hops. It doesn’t take long to locate it. Through the viewfinder I home in on a little grassy bowl holding six eggs. Six eggs! I take a photo and dash back to the house to look at it. The photo is blurred and so I have to return, stealthily, to get another, which I make sure is in focus. I run back into the house again and shut the door. Phew!

Six eggs! They are beautiful, perfect. Cream-speckled brown with a matt finish, laid in two neat rows of three. Some are lighter while others are more brown. I write everything down for the BTO, including the time of day, the height, aspect and overall description of the nest. The six eggs. Six eggs!

The nest is marvellous, built on a ledge of hop stems just beneath the trellis. It’s entirely hidden by hops but also right against the wall, so is protected from wind. They have been enormously clever. I look back at my notes and realise I first noticed them looking for a nest site in early March; this event has been two months in the making. I am so in awe of them.

I return to the kitchen and watch to make sure they return to the nest. They do, or at least the female does – I don’t know what the male does while she sits on her six eggs. I see him on his little rowan perch, bathing in his makeshift bird bath. He is part of this garden and I love him, I love them both. This place has nothing of the magic of the New Forest but it has the potential to have six more robins than it had a few weeks ago. I’m absolutely determined that it will.

We had, perhaps, not factored in the possibility that Mum had forgotten how to grow tomatoes. She used to grow them every year but stopped when she had her haemorrhage and hasn’t tried since. It has been at least five years. I try to direct her from Brighton.

‘Show me photos,’ I say on the family group chat. She keeps forgetting, tells me she’s tired from (still!) weeding the path and watering. I’m worried she’s overdoing it, that she’s taken on this task and is giving it too much, that the weedy path is distracting her from the tomatoes. Eventually, after much nagging, she sends me images of plants in too-small pots, supported by enormous bamboo canes that are very loosely tied to not very much at all. Ah. I suggest she repots them into slightly larger containers, pushes the canes into the compost rather than leaves them loose, and sends me more regular updates.

As well as the tomatoes and sweet peppers, she is also growing basil. She was going to grow it from seed before I suggested she buy a pot of basil from the supermarket and then divide up the rootball, potting each young plant up separately. Supermarket basil is actually lots of plants crammed into one pot together; they have few roots for the amount of leaf and don’t live long (they’re not supposed to). But if you remove them from the pot, separate the individual plants and pot them into containers of fresh compost they will develop more roots and grow into strong plants. It’s a much easier way of growing basil than from sowing seed. However, these too are looking straggly and sick, and are also being supported by bamboo canes. I suggest she cuts them back and waters them a bit less often. ‘OK!’ she says.

All but one of the pumpkin plants has been eaten by snails.

‘Have you thought about removing slugs and snails from the greenhouse, Mum?’

‘Great idea!’ she says. I tell her I’m worried Stanley won’t have any pumpkins for Halloween.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well, I’m very tired.’ I can tell it’s all a bit too much for her and feel bad for nagging about the pumpkins. But really, Mum, have you considered not weeding the path?

She does her back in and needs to rest. We all agree this is a good idea. Ellie takes over watering duty and, once again, the basil plants are drowned. I decide to take a break from nagging about the pumpkins; it’s the last thing anyone wants and it won’t be the end of the world if Stanley doesn’t get his Jack-o’-lantern. There are bigger things to worry about.

It’s dry again. Amazing how quickly things can change from too wet to too dry. It hasn’t rained for weeks, the ground is starting to crack again and my four water butts are empty.

Again.

The garden is OK, for now. I’m more prepared this year; I’ve been watering and keeping the pond topped up (hence the empty water butts) and I’ve already moved the mop bucket into the shower to collect grey water to reuse on the garden. But it’s nesting season and the birds are struggling – in the park, I watched an exhausted blackbird follow volunteer gardeners as they weeded the rose beds. He left with a full beak of worms but what will he do now the gardeners have gone home? How are he and his chicks now?

The robins are flying back and forth with bits of this and that – the eggs must have hatched. I look through my binoculars at beaks of tiny worms and other morsels. I’m pleased to see there’s some food around for them, but there’s not much. The flowers are still devoid of bees, there are few flies, I’m still not seeing anything like the abundance of even 2022 – where are they all? Where are the red mason bees, who started nesting in my bee hotels and then abandoned ship? Where are the butterflies? By this time in 2022, I had found three batches of small tortoiseshell caterpillars. Where are the mining bees, the plasterer bees? I planted angelica for the wasps but the flowers have gone over and I didn’t see a single wasp or even one insect on the blooms. What’s going on? I see similar reports on Twitter, whole patches of wildflowers empty and quiet, people in despair. Where are the insects? Was it last summer’s drought or the fluctuating winter temperatures? Was it the cold, wet spring? Are the insects dead or just late? All of the above, probably. I watch a robin take a sunflower heart from the feeder and ‘rinse’ it in the bird bath for moisture before taking it back to the nest. Oof, that’s not good.

Nestling birds don’t drink. They get all of the moisture they need from caterpillars, worms and other grubs. Or so they should. Twitter is full of people crying over starving chicks in their nest boxes, of a new ‘Silent Spring’. Rinsing sunflower hearts to feed to baby chicks surely means my robins are struggling, too. What if the chicks are dehydrated? What if they’re not getting enough moisture?

I wait for my moment to steal a photo of the nest and take it when both parents fly out of the garden. I find three fluffy things with gaping beaks. Baby robins! I run back to the house and look at my photos closely. I think there might be more among them. There were six eggs, could there be six chicks? I make a plan. They are finding some natural food at the moment but it can’t be easy and they’re obviously substituting it with sunflower hearts. Plus, the starlings and house sparrows have fledged and the garden is full of hungry chicks, putting even more pressure on precious resources. How can I help? I can water the garden, of course, encourage worms to come to the surface. What else? The robin chicks are tiny, so small morsels are better than anything big; it seems too early to introduce mealworms. But I have a compost bin of soft, moist brandling worms, of course! When it gets hot they climb to the top to escape the heat and I find piles of them when I lift the lid. Would they like a tablespoon of brandling worms? I open the lid and they are gathered obligingly in little piles on the ridge. I’m so sorry, brandling worms. I fetch a spoon and load them on, and then drop them at the end of the garden, near the robins’ favourite bird bath. I return to the kitchen with binoculars and wait.

It’s a long wait; the robins are suspicious of me and I worry that the worms will just work their way away and not be found. But sure enough, eventually, one of them stops at the meaty pile and takes a worm and eats it, like a human might test food before giving it to a child or sprinkling milk on to the back of their hand to make sure it’s the right temperature. Once satisfied the worms are not poison, it then picks up a couple and takes them back to the nest. Yes!

It’s dry and there are few insects but the robins have a garden with some availability of natural food and a couple of tablespoons of brandling worms each day. There’s a hanging feeder of sunflower hearts that I usually take down at this time of year but which I know is helping to fuel them as they search for better food (I’d like them to stop feeding sunflower hearts to their chicks, though). There are full, fresh bird baths for them to bathe in. I will take photos of the nest only every few days so as to not disturb the parents or the chicks, and the dog and I will shoo cats and crows out of the garden. I can’t do much better than that for now, but I hope I can make a difference. I’m not going to give up on these robins.

The swift spends its life in the big blue sky, airborne except when breeding. It flies here each spring from the rainforests of Africa, lays eggs, raises young, and then leaves again. As the chicks get ready to fledge, they prepare themselves for a whole lifetime of living above us, by doing ‘press-ups’ in the nest.

The swift has declined by 50 per cent in the last 20 years. I dare say there were even more of them 20 years before that, and I try not to think how few of them there will be in 20 years’ time. They used to nest in tall trees but we chopped them all down, and now they nest in buildings, although we’re making that hard for them too. They eat insects, which some studies suggest have declined in abundance by 75 per cent, and they have to navigate fires and storms on the way back to the Congo in summer (and yes, there’s less and less of the Congo rainforest each time they return). Now, in parts of Europe, their nests get so hot the chicks jump out of them prematurely, to their deaths, although lucky ones are saved and raised in rescue centres only to starve or be caught in a storm a few months later. Every single year the number of swifts arriving in Brighton seems smaller and every year another piece of me dies. Could I witness their extinction in my lifetime?

We can help them, to a point. They need nest sites, positioned on the north side of buildings so their chicks don’t fry. They need food to feed themselves and their young, so they need insects, which means they need meadows and ponds and trees and gardens, an absence of pesticides, paving and plastic. They need good weather, which is to say they need a stable climate. They need a stable climate.

It takes a lot for me to get in touch with strangers and ask them if they would consider putting up swift boxes. It seems like an imposition, like an inconvenience – surely the last thing they would want to do while having work done to their house. But, sometimes, I overcome this fear and ask anyway, although I haven’t done so since writing the letter last autumn to those with the scaffolding and the new roof, who ignored me completely. I still take their rejection personally but I must remember that this isn’t about me, it’s about swifts. And they don’t have a voice.

So it is that, when a man posts about his scaffolding on a public group on Facebook, I comment to see if he would consider putting boxes up. He lives on the next road and has a wonderful pitched roof, where I have actually seen swifts ‘banging’ or searching for new nesting opportunities. If he put boxes up, there would be a good chance that the ‘bangers’ would return and find them and thus would help expand the colony of ‘bin lorry’ swifts from the other side of the main road. It might even encourage them to nest with me.

He writes back with a resounding yes, and invites me round. Oh!

I head over on a sunny but windy Saturday afternoon, to find him halfway up his scaffolding, muttering over a downpipe. His name is Peter and he’s nearly 70 but he’s doing all the work to the house himself, which includes fixing the guttering and downpipes, re-rendering bits that need rendering, something about stress fractures and finally a new coat of paint.