by lucy hicks beach ~

Lockdown has got me into Tits. Sadly, no, this period of time hasn’t been the lesbian awakening TikTok promised me, but I have found a different kind of infatuation.

My Dad once told me that one of the best holidays he had been on was a bird-spotting one. For a man with such an adventurous travelling history, I was quite underwhelmed by this idea. Bird-watching is for the old, the sedentary and those with a life so boring that counting flying animals serves as a distraction from its mundanity. It certainly was not for a man who has climbed volcanoes and had close encounters with lions. As more bird-feeders line our windows, and our house has started to fill with more copies of the RSPB ‘Pocket Guides to British Birds’; I had begun to resign myself to the idea that, like the many men who have come before him, Dad was settling into a future that involved him staring out of his window and texting me to let me know how many times he had seen a Robin.

This began to change at the beginning of the March Lockdown. Distraught to have been ripped away from my final year of university, I finished my degree from the kitchen table. As I sat down each day to write, I started to become aware of the birds that arrived at the three feeders that hung outside the window. Whilst it is mostly occupied by Blue Tits, small birds with yellow tummies and blue quiffs, I began to take notice when something less common came along. My working day was becoming punctuated by the comings and goings of Nuthatches and texting my Dad to ask about the differences between Long Tail Tits and Coal Tits. When a Chaffinch crashed into the window as I listened to McFly, I sat and watched it until it flew away again while I cried. I was steadily slipping into becoming a  dangerous combination of the old man I feared my Dad would become and the isolated, friendless graduate that haunted the summer of 2020.

Perhaps this makes me sound like a loser. In fact, I am pretty confident that this confirms my status as a loser. However, having spent the last eleven months living with my parents, and with very little sign of that changing, I have had to find ways to settle into that. I am lucky that I get on really well with my Mum and Dad, but very few people in their mid-twenties would pick housemates in their fifties and sixties, and visa-versa. Whilst my fascination with the birds at our window started because of the mundanity I had previously labelled as belonging to men over a certain age, it has continued to bring me joy beyond being a break in my generally very boring day.

Staying in the same spot gives you access to a deeper knowledge of your surroundings, and it has been weirdly wonderful and satisfying to get to know the habits and personalities of the birds that come to our window. Blue Tits are the most regular visitors, coming either by themselves or in little groups, often followed by Great Tits, who are slightly bigger with black crowns. They often arrive in pairs, dispelling the large groups of the mouse-like Long Tail Tits who arrive in gangs of at least ten. The solitary Robin doesn’t often come to the feeder but watches from a nearby fence, while the two dusty blue and orange Nuthatches arrive together only when the feeders are free. Every few days some Goldfinches appear, and even more rarely, a fluorescent Kingfisher arrives, watches for a few moments, then disappears back into the woodland. The chaffinches have been a bit hesitant since the McFly-window crash of last summer.

In a time when the world feels unbelievably bleak, this animal activity viewed from my kitchen has provided such unexpected joy. As I wrote that last sentence, I saw a pair of Robins sitting together on the fence for the first time and I gasped. Some people might tell me to get a life (that ‘some people’ being my sister), and although I might agree, as I would love nothing more than to be sitting in a pub with my friends, I am also so glad to have found not only relief, but also excitement in what surrounds me. If I can’t be in a club, then what a joy to sit and watch a Wren pecking for her food on the water surface.

I hope that when life starts to gain momentum again I take this feeling on with me. This time last year I certainly wouldn’t have thought that I would be strangely obsessed with Long Tail Tits. A lack of social contact might have made me slightly unhealthily attached to these birds, and I promise I would still like to go clubbing again one day, but I am so glad to have found a minor distraction from the awfulness of the world that isn’t just scrolling through Instagram. My Dad might be a loser, but it’s definitely not because of how much he loves birds. Finding a little bit of joy in nature does not make things less sad but maybe allows us a bit of comfort while we make our way through it. No wonder that the RSPB is one of the most donated-to charities in Britain. Birds are fucking brilliant.