Bye, Bye Bare Branches

Today I watched a pair of feisty magpies doing their best to see off a rather large & handsome, but persistent crow. It’s a game they have repeated in the branches of the same tree on and off for a few days now. Their dance is quite an exciting one, but I found it frustratingly difficult to track their progress amidst all the green & luscious leaves.

As I stood in the middle of the road, squinting up & hopping about, oblivious to everything else, two things eventually struck me. Firstly I realised how quickly the little leaf buds had burst & unfurled to form a dense patchwork of green where the sky filled gaps had been. Secondly that if I didn’t move out of the road I was likely to be struck by something else a lot less pleasant… a car perhaps? Not to mention it’s never the brightest idea to reveal one’s true self so theatrically to the neighbours.

Naturally after coming to my senses & my cloak of normality restored I fled indoors to peer out from the safety of my ‘studio’ at the new greenness. Despite the new spring growth obscuring my view, I realised there were far fewer birds just ‘hanging-out’ in the trees at this time of day than there were a few months earlier.

Getting out my sketchbooks I leafed back to the end of last year. I have a signature scruffy sketch of six woodpigeons, just happily sat preening amongst the branches of some ash trees. They were viewed from a good way off & look rather like amorphous blobs, but they are woodpigeons none the less. These birds are in fairly close proximity to one another, but a wider view would have revealed many more in similar positions in other neighbouring trees. Today looking out at the same trees, there are all but two to be seen.

Moving forward to January, the branches, though bare, are adorned with a New Years tiding of magpies. I had managed to sketch a few in the branches of the very same ash trees. I had counted eight to twelve individuals being together at any one time in that line of trees.

So, where had they gone to now? There are certainly a lot of birds about & those I can’t spot I can most certainly hear. They are just all too busy feeding their hungry hoards to have time to just sit & preen in the middle of the day.

Everything is so alive and animated….so busy.

It’s a wonderful time of year, when the last of the branches are bare no more & the sounds of young fledglings fill the air. I literally get lost for hours simply sitting & watching.