Blackbirds or Pigeons

 Blackbirds or Pigeons

I turned to the woman on the seat behind me as the bus waited at the traffic lights. We had recognised each other. She normally remembers my name, which is flattering. On this occasion I also remembered her name.

"Are you coming home from working at the pharmacy?" I asked, though it was mid-afternoon on a Saturday. 

" No! From the gym." she told me, and now that I noticed it, there was a touch of pride as well as of tiredness in her voice. 

"A therapeutic workout?" I suggested, to which she grudgingly assented.

What is life for, after all? You work till you are tired, raise kids, grow old and die. She helps people already, by dispensing medicines, but would dearly like to become a qualified counsellor, and listen instead to people's woes. It is amusing how small a shift in perspective will change a chore into a calling.

"And I should like to travel", she told me. 

I mused a while. Should I tell her about the blackbirds and the pigeons? Would it amuse her, lighten her load?

A number of bird species live in or near my small garden, and carry on their business there.

Robins, wrens, dunnocks, tits and sparrows flit about, more or less unseen. I occasionally glimpse fluttering wings, or hear a snatch of song from deep in dense foliage. Starlings strut about on the ridge tiles opposite, chattering their comments on the scene below; but they seldom come down to the garden. So, it is mostly the larger birds that concern me here; the blackbirds and the pigeons. 

I have often watched a hen blackbird picking raspberries off the canes I grow in two giant pots against the sun-soaked fence. She crouches on the flag-stones looking up at the canes above her till she finds a ripe berry, then leaps up and snatches at the fruit to fly off with it in her beak. I am fairly relaxed about her depredations. When I go down and take a look, I find no fruit worth picking; nothing except tiny, unripe, fragments. She must be hungry. Perhaps she has a nest-full of chicks nearby. 

The male blackbird is often seen on the lawn, ear cocked as though to hear the rasping noise of subterranean worms, or swooping low across the lawn, with a long, thin, worm in his beak; further evidence of hungry nestlings. Blackbirds are territorial. Each pair has its garden, which they must defends against poachers. Hence the valiant singing with which the males fill the gloaming (that evening stillness between sunset and nightfall). Blackbirds strike me as good parents. 

Not so the pigeons. I have never seen a hungry pigeon. They always seem well-fed, and idle; showing only a dilettante's interest in a poppy seed on the flagstones or a couple of ants on the lawn. They are strong flyers and can feed anywhere in the parish. I resent their sleek plumpness, seeming to be perfectly aware that they are now a protected species. And I resent even more the amount of time they spend love-making. I don't mind when they sit quietly 'kissing'; it seems touchingly human. But I dislike their posturing and crooning and, above all, the noisy flapping of their wings as the cock repeatedly tries to tread his hen.  Or when he indulges in showy combat with rival cocks.

  "But the essence of life is finding food, and rearing a family" I suggested, "like the blackbirds. Not just strutting about making love, like the pigeons". 

"Humph", she retorted. 

"Swallows and swifts are great travellers", I mused. "There are almost none nesting here this year, but I saw great numbers of each last week, in Croatia."  

"I would really love to travel", she repeated.