I tell Emma we can’t use the garden now.
‘But we live here,’ she says. I tell her Tos has to do her business out the front.
‘Tosca also lives here,’ she says, as she opens the door to let her out for a wee. ‘The robins have been hanging out in the garden for three months. They know us, they have decided we’re safe. Don’t go changing anything now.’
I huff and grumble, as Tosca comes back in and they return together, to the sofa. I close the door and continue looking out.
The robins have fully claimed the garden as their own and I love it. On either side of the shed is a water butt with a small plastic lid that I have positioned upside down so it collects water. I thought the birds might like these as extra bathing spots and I was right, our robins seem to have taken to bathing in the one on the left, which the small hedge has started to grow around and partially hide from view.
Robins are flighty. They abandon their nests easily – they don’t like it when disturbed or ‘discovered’. Later, we sit on the patio with our Friday beers, catching the last of the day’s sun, and I see the female struggle with our presence. She stops short of going into the nest, she drops her beakful of leaves. We look away and she resumes her activities, but as soon as we look at her again she retreats. I’m worried she will abandon it, late as she has left her nest-building efforts. I worry the garden is too small for us and the robins, that it is we, not them, that should stay away. At least while they’re nest building. But, as Emma says, we live here. We have to rub along together.
In the morning I stand in the kitchen again and look out. I have come to know that I need stand only for a minute or two before a robin turns up, that if they are still nest building, the female will soon appear with an old leaf. I wait. They’ve abandoned it, haven’t they? I wait. Then, quickly, the male shoots into the garden, grabs a sunflower heart from the feeder and shoots back out again.
Tos wants to be let out for a wee and I open the door and go out with her. She heads straight to the ivy and sniffs – she too knows something is happening here – and I shoo her away. I walk past it, as I do every day, to the hedgehog feeding station, to see if the hogs ate all of their dinner (they did), and to retrieve the camera from in front of the bird bath. I wonder if I can fix the camera in front of the nest to watch them without disturbing them, or if the act of positioning it there would be disturbance enough. Perhaps they’ve abandoned it already.
I head back upstairs with tea, feeling deflated. And then I realise – what if they are wise to me standing in the kitchen? What if I can watch them another way? I should be able to see them from the bathroom if I get in the bath and open the frosted window, which – I suppose – might act as a sort of bird hide. I may as well try. I climb into the bath, open the window and wait, heart in mouth.
There are sparrows being noisy in the cherry trees a few doors down. A wood pigeon coo-COO-coo-coo-coos from somewhere else. There’s no sign of any robin but I can hear the faintest pip-pip-pip. A robin? I wait, barely breathing as I tune in to the tiny sound almost obliterated by sparrows. It falls silent again and I relax. I wish I had my binoculars, I could laugh at the sparrows in the meantime, look for other things – chiffchaffs maybe, in the cherry trees.
Pip-pip-pip-pip. I look down and see nothing. Still, I wait, squatted as I am in an empty bath, in my pyjamas. I wait.
The female appears suddenly on the trellis, carrying a leaf. She’s still nest building! Phew. She doesn’t notice me and heads straight into the ivy, and back out again to the habitat pile. I breathe a thousand sighs of relief, close the window and vow to leave her alone. It takes a robin up to six days to build her nest. We are on at least day two, so that’s four more days of staying out of the garden. Can we do that?
Red-tailed mason bee, Osmia bicolor
Also known as the snail-shell-nesting bee, Osmia bicolor is unique among British bees in that it nests in empty snail shells, typically on chalk and limestone grasslands but also in quarries and brownfield sites. I’ve met them only once, on a chalky snail-shelled slope near Cerne Abbas in Dorset, where I spent a few hours watching the females stock their nests.
Similar looking to the red mason bee, females are not strictly ‘red-tailed’ but have a black head and thorax and orange-red abdomen. Males are slimmer and pale brown all over.
They emerge from hibernation in spring and quickly get on with the business of mating, after which the female seeks out the perfect empty snail shell to lay her eggs in. She rolls the shell into the correct position, then makes up to five individual cells within the shell chamber, which she seals with leaves and chalky soil, and even shell particles, chewing them into a sort of pesto. She stocks each cell with a store of pollen and nectar, before laying an egg. Once she has filled the shell she plugs it with an extra-thick layer of pesto, and sometimes goes on to ‘plaster’ the outside of the shell to camouflage it into the landscape. She then flies off in search of grass, which she chews into manageable pieces and carries back to her shell to further hide it.
Only when she is happy with the positioning of the shell, the plastering of the pesto and the extra camouflage provided by the clump of severed grass stems does she move on, often to find a second snail shell to lay eggs in. Are there enough empty snail shells for the snail-shell-nesting bee? You would think not, and I know people who collect shells and drop them off at known snail shell nesting sites, in case they may be of use. Inside each shell the eggs hatch into grubs, which feed on the store of pollen and nectar their mother has left for them. They then spin a cocoon and pupate into an adult, living in their sturdy home until the following spring, when they mate and make pesto and cut grass and lay eggs.
Red-tailed mason bees visit a range of flowers, including trefoils and vetches, and blackthorn and hawthorn blossom. They’re mostly found in southern and eastern England, although there’s some suggestion they’re moving north. They’re not a garden species, so there’s not much you can do to help them unless you live close to a colony and have an abundance of snail shells to drop off for them to make use of. I just wanted you to know that such a creature exists in this fragile landscape we all call home. Such a wonderful creature exists.
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?
