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.
I leave my friend Andy a garbled voice message about needing to be here for this momentous day. He is remarkably understanding, says he gets it, he knows how much this means to me. Emma comes home from the gym and I explain that I need to be here, and does she mind, had she planned a special day alone with Tos? ‘Of course not,’ she says, although I suspect she probably had.
The robins largely stay out of the garden. Emma takes me plant shopping and buys me foxgloves, Mexican fleabane and plume thistle (Cirsium rivulare) to fill gaps and plant around the pond. Back home, I start arranging and then planting while she plays ball with Tosca. Then I send her out for provisions so we can have beers in the garden followed by burger and chips when we get hungry, just like we might if out with friends. We don’t listen to music, our ears are cocked for the distant pips from the most excellent robins. We have a happy day, the happiest day. Our precious world is home to five more robins.
When they first dispersed I thought that might be it, that I wouldn’t see the chicks again, but they’re not too far away. There’s one behind the shed and another in the log pile in the twitten just outside the garden. I listen to their calls throughout the day, watch the parents return to check on them and feed them, reassure them that they’re still being cared for in the big wide world. ‘Are you alright? Do you need anything?’ The garden is still the parents’ territory too. They still perch on the bee hotel, still take mealworms from the water-butt bath. I am terrified about the chicks’ first night unprotected from cats, squirrels, foxes and crows, but I’ve done my bit. I can’t wrap them in any more cotton wool, I have to let them be wild. But to have helped them reach this stage is huge, after at least three years of failures. In a spring of few insects and dry soils, in a neighbourhood plagued with high densities of cats, squirrels and corvids, I have helped five little robin chicks fledge their nest. It’s quite something, even if I say so myself.
I’ve been in the garden for most of the day, for most of the weekend. As the sun retreats behind the trees I dismantle the cage around the nest and finally take a closer look at where the chicks have been growing for the last two weeks. How did they fit in it? It’s small but so perfect, the most beautiful grassy bowl. Of course, it’s not quite empty – the sixth, perfect egg sits there, unhatched. I reach in and pick it up, the tiniest ball of speckled treasure.
Epilogue
I never found out where the pond was that the toads came from. I asked more neighbours but got nowhere. Eventually, after searching Google Earth and finding no leads, I found a local history page on Facebook, the type of group where old people reminisce about sweet shops and post photos of roads and buildings in days gone by.
‘Does anyone remember Woolworths?’
‘Ooh yes, we used to go for penny sweets after school on a Friday.’
‘Does anyone remember the rag ’n’ bone man with his horse and cart?’
‘Oh yes, I broke my foot once and he gave me a lift to hospital!’
It’s a nice group, soothing, amid the noise of everything else. And full of people who might have remembered toads.
I ask if anyone who lived in my road or neighbouring roads remembers a pond. I tell them I know there was a pond in the park until a child drowned and it was filled in, but that I don’t know where toads might have been breeding since then.
People write back, mostly to say they don’t remember anyone having a pond in the neighbourhood but confirming that there was a pond in what’s now the park.
‘My dad was best friends with the kid who drowned.’
‘My uncle tried to save him.’
I start to think I may have opened a can of worms.
But then I get more. I’m told a nearby road is named after a brook that used to run all along here from the Downs, that there were farms with ponds where car dealerships now stand. I don’t get dates but I’m beginning to build a picture of the landscape of the area before today, when life was a lot wilder. If there was a brook, a large pond, a farm with ponds, this area would have been wetter than it is now, with plenty of opportunities for toads and their frog and newt cousins. As the patchwork of habitats was gradually taken, they would have been squeezed into ever-tighter habitats but somehow, remarkably, the toads have survived.
I’m always upset when I hear of rivers and streams that have been buried underground; living things that no longer see the light of day. Where are the fish that used to spawn in its pebbles, the dragonflies that used to lay eggs in the weed? Were there kingfishers along this stretch of water, were there otters and beavers and swallows? My toads have a space to breed now but they deserve a better landscape, they deserve a proper home. Come the revolution I will be there, with my pickaxe, fighting to reclaim the old East Brook.
Gulls Allowed continues. We meet for drinks and make plans for how to deal with Drone Bastard next year. Lin has written to our MP and we are looking at trying to get the law changed, so that those who fly drones are not allowed to use them to deliberately disturb wildlife. I suspect we’ll need a change of government to see this through but we will wait, we’re not going anywhere. (Neither, sadly, is Drone Bastard.)
Happily, despite his efforts, the gulls on the factory roof successfully raised their chicks. And Lin has recruited me as a gull rescuer. She texts me when she hears of gulls that have fallen off roofs and we head out together, me with oven gloves and her with an umbrella to protect us from their dive-bombing parents, and help them out of the road and back on to a roof. Sometimes I have to go on my own and I have further recruited neighbours with loft conversions so I can lean out of their Velux windows and deposit chicks directly on to roof tiles. Sometimes, if the weather is bad, they have to stay with me for a few hours, much to the irritation of our ever-patient Tosca.
Pete from my local rescue centre has asked me to show him how to raise butterflies and I’ve asked him to teach me how to rehabilitate birds, like robins, when they fall or are taken from their nest. Our nature-loving community, like my ivy, continues to knit together and grow.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my wonderful agent, Jane Turnbull and my editor Julie Bailey. Once again, they took a chance on a half-formed idea and gave me the time and space I needed to work with it. Thanks especially to Julie for working so tirelessly to make everything shipshape and on time – I was so pleased to work with you again. Thanks to my patient copy editor, Elizabeth Peters, who asked all the right questions, and to Charlotte Atyeo for proofreading. To my illustrators, Abby Cook and Jasmine Parker, who have brought the book to life, and to Rachel Nicholson, Lizzy Ewer, Katherine Macpherson and Sarah Head at Bloomsbury, who have given my book wings and sent it out into the wide world. This book would be nothing without the amazing work of this team of brilliant women.
Thanks to my fact checkers: Emily Robinson (amphibians), Richard Comont (bumblebees), Richard Fox (1976), Ann Winney (hedgehogs) for your time and advice, and to Alex Lees, Hannah Bourne-Taylor and Susie Howells for making sure what I said about your respective projects was exactly right. Thanks to Choel for letting me write about the hedgehogs. Thanks to the many neighbours for letting me mention them and for Pete and Gayle Foggon at Sompting Wildlife Rescue and Ann Winney at Hurst Hedgehog Haven for trusting me with precious hedgehogs to release into the garden, and for letting me write about them, of course.
Thanks to my gull friends for the laughs. If one good thing has come from the activities of Drone Bastard, it’s been getting to know you.
I am so grateful for Emma and Tosca, who make me laugh, and for the emotional support of friends Andy, Jo, Eli, Becky, Helen and Humey, who were happy to talk, or not talk, about my bloody book. Extra special thanks is due to the wonderful human that is Melissa Harrison, who took time to read the whole manuscript while busy on her own projects – the book is so much better for her input. And to my family: thank you for letting me continue this strand of our story.
This book has been challenging to write, and I wrote myself into many ridiculous dead ends. One day, by chance, Kath Moore phoned me as I was staring out of the window wondering if I should just tell Bloomsbury this had all been a mistake, and said, ‘I want to know what you’re doing.’ I want her to know that those words changed the course of the book and its journey to where we are today. I’m not sure I would have continued writing it had I not picked up the phone.
30 Million Gardens for the Planet
We live in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world thanks to years of agricultural intensification and a demand for cheap food. Since the turn of the last century two of our bumblebee species have gone extinct, along with 97 per cent of our wildflower meadows (go figure). Since the 1970s we’ve lost 67 per cent of our common moths and 40 million birds. Some 80 per cent of butterflies are in decline, while a conservative assessment of insect numbers generally suggests 60 per cent have disappeared in the last 20 years alone – this, I feel, is very conservative: when did you last clear insects from the windscreen of your car? There are efforts to re-establish hedgerows and field margins to give space back to nature, rewilding projects that aim to return landscapes to the living habitats they once were. Good things are happening. But, on the whole, we continue to slash and burn. We continue to bulldoze through ancient woodland and greenbelt, to fill rivers and seas with human excrement, pesticides and pollution. Still we transform little pockets of living space into joyless car parks. Still we ignore the needs of hedgehogs and countless other wild species, to the detriment of all of us.
Climate change and habitat loss pose the biggest ever threat to life on Earth. Most species can’t adapt quickly enough to the changes that are happening and we will see many extinctions in our lifetime. These extinctions represent a heartbreaking and completely avoidable loss, but also they will make life harder for those of us who are left. All species on Earth are part of a series of ecosystems that keep life ticking over: the pollinators that provide food while ensuring the next generation grows the following year; the earthworms and other soil fauna that keep the soil healthy so we can grow food in it; the beavers that keep rivers clean so we may drink the water. These are some very basic examples of the amazingly complex webs of life that have evolved on Earth over the last 12,000 years, which we are destroying with our collective reluctance to transition away from fossil fuels.
