Three's a crowd

So, I mentioned before that a few times, when Tane has been in another garden and has seen me, he has flown over. This is very nice. He's even treated me to a little subsong.

He likes me to dig up some soil so that he can forage and will spend a long time checking it over for bugs and worms.

The problem is that his range is the scrub to the south of my garden while in my garden there seem to be two robins. One is, I think, Tapdance, who is reclusive but loud in her complaints, and the other is, and again I am not sure, Chestnut. I say this because of his behaviour.

He can tolerate me or can be flighty. As he was here!

He seems to subsing a lot in the bushes and so I think it is he who sings in the garden.

Anyway, these two don't approve of Tane visiting. I hear the quarreling: angry spits and ticks, calls, shouts, alarms, warnings and bursts of furious song. I worry that they'll fight and hurt each other. I am saddened that I may not be able to enjoy Tane's company.

Today, in the garden, and again when I went for a trot and stood under an oak tree, just listening, I was reminded of a passage from The Peregrine:

No pain, no death is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man. A red-throated diver, sodden and obscene with oil, able to move only its head, will push itself out from the sea-wall with its bill if you reach down to it as it floats like a log in the tide. A poisoned crow gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on to the descending wall of air, if you try to catch it. A rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis, just a twitching pulse beating in a bladder of bones and fur, will feel the vibration of your footstep and will look for you with bulging, sightless eyes. Then it will drag itself away into a bush, trembling with fear.

We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away. (Baker 2011, 113).

I thought that it's not just that we drive other creatures away by our presence, which we do, but that we seek to seal ourselves off. Our loud noises and bright lights as well as physical and psychological walls and fences keep the world away. It's as though even more than we terrify the world, the world terrifies us. We don't want to be in it but separate from it. I had the sense, strongly, that the world is waiting, ever waiting, for us to pull down the barricades and let it in, let ourselves back in.

Horatio Clare wrote of an experience of being let back in:

For that twilight time we had slipped the separation between us and the world. We were of the mountain, and of the wood, and it was as though the animals, the wild creatures, had allowed it. It was bewitching.

Patrick Barkham quoted that in Badgerlands and he goes on to say, 'Truly being alive to the possibilities of home required a deep commitment to being still and, perhaps, alone in one place.' He's imagining living alone in the middle of the country, but even for twenty minutes, or, better, an hour, with a tree, one can feel that.