I think I've mentioned how as I sit with the robin I see him change size and shape moment by moment. It seems to me that every alteration in his affect (mood/emotion) is manifested simultaneously in his posture and feather-mode. If one were to watch and watch and watch, gaining correspondences from the context and behaviour, one could have a language of robin feelings. And they are very nuanced, sometimes ambivalent - fear and determination, for example, contentment and alertness.
Everything I do, he notices. Have I exposed insects by sweeping, moving a plant, emptying a water saucer? And at once he investigates. At the same time, he is alert for robins in his territory, the alarm calls of other birds - which tend to announce the presence of the cat. Son of Bob then acts as alert in his position. The birds can track the location of the cat by the sounds of all the other birds.
This morning I stood looking up into the branches of the back lilac, where the roosting pouch is, and saw a wren, an especially tiny wren, brave and curious, hopping through the branches. I had a feeling it was checking out the pouch. It was so small. A third of the size of Son of Bob.
After this, a coal tit landed close to me. Almost as small as the wren. Braver than the blue tits.
A juvenile blackbird landed on the fence - you can't really see, but only her head is still baby feathers.
Son of Bob landed in front of me.
And that's when I realised that I perform more than just a pig-on-two-legs-with-a-spade role: I am a human shield. While I am close by, nothing else will encroach. If SoB can counter his fear of me, he can be assured that he has the space to himself. Even the cat doesn't come close as she is nervous out of her home garden.
And as I watched him foraged, I noticed, not for the first time, that he, small as he is, is a natural born predator. No less than hawk or stoat or tiger.
Sometimes, he just kills worms and doesn't even eat them. Sometimes, he eats part of a worm. Occasionally, a whole worm. But he seems to prefer small bugs. He catches them from the fence, flying into it, crashing his beak against the worm in his determination. He catches bugs on the tree, the soil, the path.
His life is the tight-rope between the deaths of other creatures and his own death.
And isn't that, at bottom, what all lives are?
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