The Sea-gull’s Tale ~ knowing when or if to intervene

The Sea-gull’s Tale ~ knowing when or if to intervene.

The place where I live is rich in wildlife, but where I work that
wildlife is mainly confined to a slice of nature that most people
would prefer to ignore or destroy. Rats, foxes, pigeons, the
occasional rabbit and most of all sea-gulls scurry, flap or scuttle
their way around the school, and the seagulls seem to take great
sport in splatting on cars or people.

I have great admiration for all of these loathed creatures because they survive on the fringes of our lives and in some cases, share space with us. 

The gulls are getting to be very bold and aggressive, as the students
often leave food lying around and the resulting mêlée
is loud and often violent.

Right now, the juvenile gulls are in the process of fledging and fending for themselves. This is not a kindly process. The parents will often drive their young away, with rather shocking attacks. Gulls are
omnivores, devouring the dead of their own and other species.

I witnessed such an attack from my classroom the other week, where twoadults mercilessly stabbed their beaks at a youngster, ripping feathers from his head. I don’t know if the chick was theirs or not, but they wanted nothing to do with it and I feared they would kill it.

On Saturday morning, I saw it again, and intervened to prevent the
adults killing it. The bird shot me a look and scuttled away, and the
adults took to the sky circling like vultures. Returning that
evening, the coach scattered dozens of gulls, including young ones
still in their brown plumage; the ground was thick with them and the
air full of the raucous cries.

Today my boss came to find me in the staffroom, summoning me to the front because there was a sick bird. Don’t ask how I’ve ended up being the Florence Nightinggale of the animal world in the eyes of the people I work with, but it would seem that I am the one who gets called if there’s something needing to be done with a living being other than a human.

Outside, among the throngs of students (who reminded me of the gulls at that point) I was directed to a corner where a juvenile gull huddled. It was the same young gull, a wound on the side of his head. I called him closer so I could see the extent of his injuries. He came to a foot or two away and let me look before scuttling away. The wound was healing, as far as I could see. But short of somehow grabbing him and subjecting him to first aid, I could do no more. The RSPCA would do nothing as a gull is a common bird and considered vermin by many. I couldn’t catch the bird and just kill him; he had a chance of making it if he stayed away from his own kind till he grew stronger.

I stood for a minute or two, eye to eye with this wary bird and felt
sadness that I had no power to help. I gave my verdict that there was nothing to be done and the bird would probably be fine, and the kids seemed reassured by this, but I felt I had somehow failed.

You see, that one bird is special. I identified with it, poor persecuted
bastard, driven from the nest and fending for himself in a cruel and
uncaring world. I felt protective and yet totally helpless. It came
when I spoke to it, showing both intelligence and curiosity and some
basic trust. 

There are times when you can help in a situation and there are times when any help you may give will create a worse situation, and right now, I simply do not know if I am doing the right thing in doing nothing.

I need to trust not only that my own life is unfolding as it must, but
also that the same can be said for those around me, whether they are friends, family, colleagues, strangers or even just scruffy, beat-up
juvenile seagulls. And that means learning when intervention is a
good idea and when it is not, because getting involved in something
that I am not supposed to be part of subverts not just my life but
that of others.

And yet, my instinct is that when compassion is evoked, then intervention is both right but also inevitable.

Swallows Wings and Sparrows Falling

 

Swallows wings and sparrows falling:

a little of what goes on in the psyche of an over-sensitive soul.

 

I was walking along the road, heading off to the post office with a small parcel to send to my father, when I noticed the swallows over head. To me there is something about the swallow that approaches aesthetic perfection and seeing them in the sky above me brought a sudden and entirely unexpected surge of tears. The angle of the wings, the clarity of the colour against the blue of the sky and the sheer purpose-driven perfection of their flight was all at once impossible to bear. Beauty is sometimes unbearable, because of its fragility, its brief perfection and my own impossible aims to emulate it. I’d have like to have been physically beautiful. In my dreams I sometimes am, but in those dreams, there is always a mirror that tells me the ugly truth.

I chase beauty in many forms: seeking to create it in my own head, either in terms of what I write or in what I feel. Perhaps that’s why I am, for lack of a better term, a bit religious. If I’d been a little less self conscious, I might have become a stalker of beautiful people, gazing at them like impossible works of art. Actor Johnny Depp has eyebrows like swallows wings; the curve and the line of them cut across his face like the wings of the bird cut across the sky. If I’d been a little shallower, I might have believed that this beauty made certain people somehow qualitatively better than others.

When it comes to the books I read, that quality of beauty draws me too. The intense experience of reading prose so smooth and delightful, even in describing both tragedy and horror, that it is not like reading at all but more like living the story, is a rare and wonderful one. There’s not many writers who can do that for me.

But when it comes to daily life, both the visual beauty and the beauty of the world beyond it combine to make it hard for me to leave the house some days. The swallows today made me shed a few tears of over-brimming emotion; a little uncomfortable but nothing drastic. A day or two earlier, something a little different but still avian nearly undid me completely. As I walked home with my dog, she pulled me to the side of the road to show me something. In the gutter, there lay a young hen sparrow. I picked her up and she lay floppy and unresponsive in my hand, her body warm and fluffy and her little feet remained unstiffened. There was no blood and no sign of injury. I breathed on her and stroked her head. Nothing. She was perfect but she was gone.

I took her to the little bed of shrubs near the shops and lay her there. I wasn’t sure if she were dead or just stunned. When I got home I told my husband about it and he told me that sparrows, especially young ones will faint if frightened. Literally, they faint, pass out and become unconscious with fear or alarm.

“She might well have been alive,” he said.

There’s a passage in the Gospels (Matthew 10: 29)  where Jesus says about not a single sparrow may fall without the Father knowing and caring about it.

Perhaps it was meant to be that I picked her up from the dangerous place she had fainted in and put her somewhere safe to recover. But it’s my love of beauty that means I haven’t gone back to see if she’s still there. I want her to just have fainted and to have recovered and flown back to her family.

The Bird Dream again

I had a late night last night waiting up for my husband to get back from Brussels; he’d set off before midnight on Thursday night and had endured the journey from hell, so I wanted to be sure he was home safe before I went to bed. This meant that we could sleep in this morning, no alarms, and I often find that the dreams I have on this sort of morning are both memorable and interesting.

I dreamed I had found two injured birds and had one in each hand. I have quite small hands and though neither bird was big, it was hard to hold them without crushing them. Each had a duff wing, but as I held one, I realised it was getting better, so I allowed my hand to open. I expected the bird would either fall to the ground and still be unable to fly, or for it to fly away completely. It did neither. It fluttered a short distance away and then it came back to perch on my shoulder. I don’t know what happened to the second bird as I woke up then.

Now given what is happening in the waking world for me, I can only take this as a very positive dream.

Resurrection Birds

I’ve had a version of this dream a good four times in the last six months and it’s begun to bug me.

Yesterday morning I dreamed that my husband had pointed out to me a pile of black feathers, clearly from a sparrowhawk strike on a blackbird. There is a sparrowhawk that does visit our garden, which made a strike on a starling while I was standing abour four feet away last week. The suggestion in the dream was that I might want to save the feathers to use for some craft work, to decorate a dream catcher of something of that ilk; I pick up and collect feathers for that purpose all the time. I scooped up the loose and damaged feathers only to discover I had a live, intact blackbird in my hands, his beak gaping wide like a chick demanding feeding. I’ve handled a lot of wildlife in my time and I find wild creatures often trust me and so in the dream I asked for a handful of bird feed and with the bird in one hand and the seeds in the other, I allowed the newly restored bird to feed, watching it pick out the golden kernels of maize.

As I said before, I’ve had this dream before, with variations. A bird(almost always but sometimes a small animal) that was indisputably dead, returns to life when I hold it.

I don’t know what to make of it, even having had it several times. I know what I’d like to think it means but I almost daren’t hope. I’d value thoughts, even though this may prove misleading if I follow them too closely and not my own.

Quiet Day Blues

I used to be able to have a regular ‘Quiet Day’, that is to say the day retreat from my usual daily whirl, taking place at a local retreat house. I used to manage to go a couple of times a year, although the full retreat was something I haven’t had since I was about seven months pregnant with my daughter(and that’s a story for another day: virtually the only woman at a Roman Catholic abbey retreat house for a completely silent retreat. I found it immensely helpful. I’m not sure about how everyone else felt about my presence though.)

We went to a variety of retreat houses around England over the years, from Laund Abbey in the wilds of Leicestershire, various abbeys and convents, and the small retreat house of the Sozein Trust. This poem was written at Morley Retreat House, in Derbyshire, in late February and despite the persistent cold of the Midlands, the birds had decided Spring had sprung and were making the most of a pause in the bad weather.

 

Quiet Day Blues

This was supposed to be a quiet day;
But now I’m being deafened!
The creaking floorboards,
That loudly patterned shirt
Were bad enough.
But
The birds won’t shut up.
I’d not realised how quiet Winter was
Until the birds conspired
And declared it Spring
Despite the chill and damp.
It’s raining but they don’t care;
All around me specks of fast-moving feathers
Zoom and dart
Chirp and fight
Till I am exhausted just watching.
So much for quiet thoughts:
The time for that was Winter,
And now they sing, It’s Spring, it’s Spring.
Time for action again.
This was supposed to be a quiet day;
But now I’m being bullied
Into the future,
By birds!