‘Look at their little beaks!’ I say to Emma as we sit on the lawn and peer through binoculars at five chicks among the hops and roses. They are fidgety and flighty. I daren’t nip in for a photo in case I force them out sooner than they are ready.
Besides, I can’t get in now. Over the week I have become more and more anxious. Both the crows and the magpies have been bringing dead starling and sparrow chicks into the garden and butchering them in the bird bath, before taking them back to feed to their own nestlings. I find the gruesome remains of bones and pin feathers in the water. They’re also soaking bread in the bird bath, along with an entire pie and what looked like the contents of a packet of Nik Naks. It’s clear the dry weather is affecting them, too.
Crows and magpies aren’t stupid, and I have convinced myself that they have been waiting for the robin chicks to become big enough to be worth taking – why not let the parents do all the hard work so you can give your own young a bigger meal? The crows come in every day and sit on the fence above the robin nest, of course they know what’s going on.
Our barky little canine does a good job of keeping cats, crows and squirrels away during the day but what about at night? I see cats on the night camera, and there’s nothing to stop foxes helping themselves to the nest while we’re still in bed.
So I built them a cage.
I have an old rabbit run, which I bought second-hand for the purposes of looking after poorly hedgehogs but which I have used only once. I have considered getting rid of it but it’s useful for other things: keeping the dog and pigeons off germinating grass seed, placing over a bit of border that has suffered too many playful foxes. But now it’s being used for another life-saving mission: I’ve fixed it around the robins’ nest. It’s supposed to be built into a rectangular, roofed frame but it’s collapsible and has five panels, so I have joined these together with twine to make a roofless, fenced-off area. It covers a fairly large space, meeting the fence to the left of the hazel and to the right of the shrub rose (with the guelder rose in the middle), with three panels at the front, on the lawn. It’s high enough to stop cats and foxes getting in and tight enough to ward off crows, which seem to struggle navigating small spaces. It’s probably not squirrel proof but it’s a barrier for cats, foxes and crows, at least.
I built it in stages as the robins left the garden, to cause as little stress to them as possible. They don’t seem to mind it, they know the cage – it was on the grass protecting germinating seed when they started building their nest – so I already know they can fly between the bars. They continue to feed their chicks constantly. I like to think they also know what I’m trying to achieve; it’s been so long since they had a successful nest.
In bed, I lie awake trying to work out how a predator might get in, and sleep better knowing most of them can’t. When the dog gets us up at 4.30 a.m., I let her out for a wee and then leave the back door open so she can patrol her territory. The robins don’t mind Tosca, they haven’t once let out an alarm call when she’s been in the garden. They tolerate Emma and me as long as we don’t get too close to the nest, and they absolutely hate next door’s cat. But they’re fine with Tosca, they ignore her and she ignores them.
I get up at a more reasonable time of 6.00 a.m. and spend as much time outside as I can. I potter gently while the dog alternates between sleeping in the sun and sleeping in the shade. We both chase crows. Emma comes home from the gym at midday and makes herself comfy on the sun lounger – we three protecting the robins although staying away from the vicinity of the nest. In distant parts of the garden I dig up an ornamental poppy that I’ve been waiting to go over so I can move it. I divide and replant cranesbills and trim grass at the lawn’s edges. I tidy the shed. I sow lettuce seed and water potted hazels, all as far away from the nest as possible. Eventually, when I have finished all the other jobs, I try to do something with the new border around the pond.
The robins continue feeding their young. They are calling to them now, making beautiful twittering noises that the chicks are responding to – practice, perhaps, for when they have fledged and will still rely on their parents to feed them. They are taking a good number of mealworms and I top them up, with fresh water, to keep them going. I also spot the male return with an enormous caterpillar and a tiny snail, proof that there is some natural food out there for them despite the continued lack of rain. I dig up an earthworm and throw it near the nest and the female swoops in immediately. I feel bad for the worm but the fizzing sound of excited chicks 20 seconds later more than makes up for it. Besides, how else will robins get worms in this weather? The ground is baked. All day we hear twittering and fizzing. We watch the many routes the parents make to the nest, the different food items they bring back to their chicks. We listen to the calls they make: the ‘Here I am’ deets, the soothing twittering, the warning whistle when I get too close to the nest and the frantic alarm calls when next door’s elderly cat pops out for a snooze in the sun. By the end of the day I can almost speak Robin. Emma takes Tos out for a walk because I refuse to leave the garden, and instead I lie in the sun and read for a bit before falling asleep to the sound of happy birds. They won’t fledge today but they will soon, and we are one step closer to success.
I meet friends and family for drinks and catch-ups and find myself withdrawing into myself, away from them. They say the most ridiculous things. No one knows what’s going on. Over the last two years I have been accused of trying to scare children, of not being present, I have been told none of what I fear will happen in my lifetime, that everything will be OK because ‘someone will invent a machine’. There are scripts, among deniers, that are churned out religiously.
There are fewer of them these days but they are still about: full deniers who say the climate has always been changing, that pseudo scientists have exaggerated it all and besides, don’t you drive? We can’t return to living in the Dark Ages, they say. ‘Stop using fossil fuels? Preposterous.’
Most people accept it’s happening but refuse to believe it’s a problem. They are ‘partial deniers’ and claim the fossil-fuel industry is in the best place to find a solution to the climate crisis because they ‘have so much technology and resources’. They don’t understand that the climate crisis is more than atmospheric levels of carbon, they claim governments simply won’t let the world end, they hail the invention of a carbon capture machine that doesn’t yet work at scale. (The machine actually works very well if you realise its intended use was only ever to buy more time for the fossil-fuel industry.)
A mate asked me if something was going on, if something was wrong, because she’d seen so many butterflies lately. ‘Is there a plague of butterflies?’ she asked. I responded by asking her what the butterflies looked like, how many, exactly, she had seen. ‘They were white,’ she replied, and she’d seen no more than 20. But seeing them had surprised her so much that she’d thought something was wrong, that there was an invasion, that there was something going on that needed to be controlled. I could have wept.
It terrifies me that we are so disconnected from the natural world. That people don’t understand the very basics of how life works. I’ve had friends tell me we’re going to be OK because climate change ‘isn’t going to be as bad here, is it?’ To which I ask where their food comes from, and if they’ve considered where those fleeing uninhabitable countries are going to try to live. They look at me as if I’m speaking a foreign language.
‘We’re going to move abroad when the kids finish school. I just want to live somewhere really hot, you know?’
‘Let’s all get a timeshare in Spain!’
‘But you can’t think like that. Just don’t think like that.’
‘Hahaha, my great-great-grandchildren are so fucked.’
‘I just think food security is far more important than saving bloody bees.’
‘I’ll be dead by then.’
‘Just focus on the now and the people in your present.’
‘Well, I like the mild winters and the longer summers.’
‘Darling, look out of the window! Everything’s fine!’
You can’t see the quietness of everything, the disappearing of the life, on which Earth depends. You know we need that rain (but not too much of it)? We need that soil? We need those plants?
Isn’t it funny how nature has always been something to conquer and control? The aphids on our beans, the mice in our house, the midges around our face? With every generation we have moved further away from it, from life itself. We live in houses, take hot showers, deodorise and sanitise. We entertain ourselves at the cinema and gigs and festivals and the theatre. We watch TV and read books and listen to the radio. We dance, oh we dance. And it’s wonderful, it really is. But, for most of us, Nature is ‘other’ to all of those things. It lives outside and preferably far away. Where does it live? In our gardens? Sometimes. In the countryside? Barely. In the forests and woodlands we have yet to chop down? Just about.
When I talk to people about climate change they either laugh, stare at me blankly or appear to take what I’m saying as a personal attack on them and their freedoms. ‘It won’t happen’ is the most common response I get, ‘they’re just not going to let it get that bad.’ (Who are they?) But it is that bad, it’s already happening. As I type, temperatures in Pakistan have reached 49.5ºC. There are record-breaking temperatures across Asia, Africa, South America, Australia. Twitter is full of wildfires and floods, of death and human suffering.
But they won’t let it get that bad.
For us, do you mean? Perhaps the people of Pakistan don’t matter, or the fact that 49.5ºC is no temperature to work, live or grow crops is irrelevant to you. Perhaps you haven’t thought about where the world’s wheat and rice grows, where the people of soon-to-be-uninhabitable countries are going to escape to. At what point will climate change matter? At what point will it be so bad that you, finally, have had enough of it? When the fire and floods are at your door? When you’re hungry because the crops have failed? At what point do we, as a nation, as a continent, as a global community decide enough is enough and really pull together to lower emissions, which, as I type, are still increasing? At what point do we realise that no good can come from ignoring this? Why, when we live in a stable climate that feeds and nourishes us and that is full of such incredible beauty, would we deliberately risk everything? What good is money when you can’t leave your home because of wind? When you don’t have a home because of fire or flood? When your plate is empty? When entire nations of desperate people escaping literally everything are knocking at your door?
At the time of writing, not one G20 country is anywhere close to meeting the targets laid out in the 2016 Paris Agreement. Imagine if they were – together, the G20 emit nearly 80 per cent of the world’s emissions. Local news reports tell us runway expansions and post-Covid holiday booms are a good thing, while reports of Amazon deforestation due to beef farming, of the devastation caused by wildfires, of the Earth-altering loss of ice, are ignored. If I could wish for one thing, it would be that governments the world over took the climate and biodiversity crisis seriously, actually listened to scientists and worked together to solve this problem. Humans are problem-solvers, after all. We could do so much!
It makes me so sad that most people don’t understand that loss of nature and climate change are essentially the same thing. That ‘biodiversity’ means life on Earth, that we can’t just suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and continue destroying the world’s life systems. Systems that absorb and store carbon and water, systems that provide homes for insects that pollinate our food, and others that eat ‘pests’. Systems that ensure we have clean water, healthy soils to grow food in, breathable air. To think we are above these systems is completely bonkers when we actually rely on them for life. Our life. Everyone’s life.
When I’m old I will sit at the window and look at the garden. My knees will have finally given up, the rest of me creaky and stiff but I will sit, with tea and maybe the crossword, like Mum, and I will watch my world grow wilder without me.
There’s no shame in letting your garden go as you age. There’s no harm in setting it free. There’s a beauty, I think, in watching your patch of land grow as you fade. My garden is wild enough as it is but I am always in it, with secateurs and twine, tying bits in, trimming, controlling. I mowed the lawn this year and I liked it. But when I’m old? I will let it go, all of it. I will let ivy take my house, let the pond silt up, let the hedge grow tall and wayward. The frivolity and freedoms of youth, long gone for me, will be realised outside, in one final, out-of-control party. What new species will turn up? Who will make nests? I am almost looking forward to it.
The old people in my neighbourhood are stewards of special places. Of stepping stones, of spaces for wild beings to breathe. They don’t venture out, they can’t keep it tidy. And so these gardens return to nature in a way most of us wouldn’t allow if we had the bodies to do something about it. Wildlife deserves to live without the constant threat of humans and I’m grateful for these near-abandoned gardens, these urban patches of complete wilderness.
When I’m old we will have passed 2ºC of average global warming and could well have reached 2.5ºC. By then there will be more food shortages, more migration, more war. There may be lockdowns due to heat and wind. The sun may be too intense to be out in. No rain, too much rain. We may lie in bed at night listening to the wind howl, worrying about our roofs. Will we still have a Gulf Stream, an Amazon rainforest? Will the continents of Asia, Africa and South America still be habitable? Will southern Europe? Will people be living in the Arctic to escape the heat, trying to grow food in soil that has been permafrost for thousands of years amid storms, drought, a lack of pollinators and everything else an unstable climate throws at us in a formerly uninhabited part of the world?
Will I even make it to old age?
Where will the people go? Where will the customs, the cultures, the traditions, the histories go? Where will the love and friendship go? What will be passed down to future generations, what will be taught? Letters, photographs, lockets, rings, stories, laughter, gardens. Caught in a storm and blown around the Earth as dust for the rest of time. And the wildlife. What will be left? Will there be robins?
I will sit at the window and watch the garden, a little refuge in a shrinking city. By then, more people will have woken up, more people will have taken up their plastic and their paving, returned their gardens to nature, voted out ineffectual governments. People will guerrilla-plant trees to absorb CO2, dig ponds, fight for wildflowers. Our homes will be clad with plants to deflect heat, there will be more solar panels, more insulation. We may have finally managed to decrease our CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions. But it will still be scary, too late for millions of people and other animals, caught out in a drought or a storm or flooded or hungry or just too hot to breathe.
I will hobble out to top up bird baths, I will try to feed the hedgehogs. I will have finally given up on the astilbes. Will the ivy have taken the fence down? I must remember to tell the Twitter men. Will Drone Bastard still fly his drone at gulls? Will there be robins? I will wait, each year, for the swifts to return, I will never give up on the chance of seeing one again.
I will love it, with all my heart, whatever has managed to remain, whatever is left. I will hold its hand until the bitter end, I will love it. I will never give up on this space, on this world, on the little things I can do every day to keep this all ticking over. With every ounce of my fading being, I promise to never stop loving it.
The dog shifts in her bed and gets up, shakes her head with a flap of the ears and stands at the door waiting to be let out. I sigh and open my eyes. It’s 4.30 a.m., the day’s first light shifts beneath the curtains. Time to protect the robins.
We travel downstairs together, her getting under my feet, as she always does, huffing excitedly at the thought of being back in the garden. Still blurry-eyed, I open the kitchen door and watch her run to the far end before I return to bed, leaving her out there. I know her routine: she checks the exits first – the back gate, the habitat pile that foxes jump up on to climb next door, the two hedgehog holes. Who has been in and out? Tosca knows. She works her way around the garden, then, tracing hedgehog trails and fox wees, the lingering scent of cats, which she always responds to with a low, rumbling growl. How cruel we are for denying her the chance to patrol this space 24-7. There would be no cats on Tosca’s watch.
I join her an hour later, as the sun sparkles over the rooftops and is mirrored on heavy dew drops at the tips of grass stems. I sit on the bench with tea, less blurry-eyed but still sleepy. Wet feet. I am travelling to London today to see friends and I have just a few hours in the garden before my train leaves. What shall I do? Perhaps I’ll tackle more of the pondweed, which has thickened up again since I first started removing it. Maybe I’ll weed the patio, removing grassy clumps to transplant into the lawn. Or I could just lie in the sun and read my book, it’s Sunday after all.
I sit on the bench, nursing tea. The robins are up and about, the male perches on the bee hotel and bubbles to his young in the nest but the female is in the habitat pile. I watch her dart around the top and inspect the robin box fixed to the shed wall. She seems agitated; is it me or Tos? There are no warning calls. I call Tos back to me anyway and she jumps up beside me on the bench. The male continues to bubble and receives responding pips from the chicks. But the female… she flies back around to the water butt where the mealworms are and takes one, then returns to somewhere within the habitat pile. Then I hear it, the fizzing of a chick being fed. There’s a chick in the habitat pile, they’re fledging!
As I turn back to the nest two fly out in a flurry of frantic and unexpected flapping. ‘Yes, baby robins you can fly!’ One clings to the bars of the rabbit run, shocked, while the other lands on the back of the bench behind us, also shocked. Tosca leans in to sniff it, gently, before looking at me as if to say, ‘What have you done now?’ Bench robin flies back to the other side of the garden and buries itself among the herb Robert, and the other launches itself into the gap between mine and next door’s trellis, which is thick with rambling rose.
‘C’mon, Tos, let’s leave them to it.’ We head back inside and close the door but I watch, for ages, as the parents fuss around their chicks, which are becoming fledglings before our eyes. Fledglings. We did it!
I have come to learn so much about robins. I have learned that they talk to each other, that the bubbling from the male was gentle encouragement to the chicks to leave the nest, the returning pips were the chicks nervously deciding whether they were going to or not, or perhaps egging each other on. The female is frantic because she’s organising the flock – at least three are out of the nest, which means one or two remain. Does she settle them down, as a mother would: ‘Here, take this mealworm, stay hidden in this patch and call me when you need to.’ Does she see to one before moving on to the next? They are such good parents, tackling this, as with every other process of nesting over the last few weeks, with military precision and care. They’ve really thought this through, or at least it seems that way. From nest building to feeding to this amazing process that’s unfolding before my eyes, they have done such a brilliant job. Perhaps it’s instinct or maybe years of losses to predators that has made them such amazing parents, willing to take no chances. There’s one in the trellis – check; one in the herb Robert – check. I take Tos for a walk before the heat of the day makes the pavements too hot for her paws, and when we return two hours later the parents are still herding their young, still bubbling and pipping, still frantically feeding. I watch the last fledgling cling to the trellis, having presumably just left the nest, before it flies off to a distant garden. I open the door and walk into mine, as the bubbling and pipping rolls into the next street. Gone, just like that. I can’t go to London today, I don’t want to miss this.
