Lessons from Birds
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By Gen Sandalls
I enter the flock’s habitat, to note a mixed group of corvids scattering at my approach, lifting up like a ragged black cloak roused by the wind. The birds are taking no chances. A split-second intrusion and the ground-foraging of rooks and their silver-naped cousins, the jackdaws, is over. At least for now. They’ll doubtless return after I’ve disappeared, leaving the playground empty once more of people once more.
The job I’ve been tasked with has brought me unavoidably into their territory. It can’t really be helped – almost wherever I walk in the school grounds there is some specific, abiding avian presence. Birds have their places, just as we do. I always seem to be disturbing them, since like guards, or some omnipresent god, birds appear to be everywhere.
Most days, some of my working time is spent marching about the school grounds on missions: to escort students to support rooms, to print papers, to gather pens, to collect books for a lesson; other miscellanea. It’s at these times that I tend to intercept the birds’ furtive-seeming feeding activities. There are birds elsewhere too. Birds on rooftops and birds on fences. There are birds in the rowans and birds in the birches. Birds in the tower-block branches of that goliath coniferous tree which has lived forever outside student reception: through an upper floor English classroom window I see the crescent-winged magpies who cluster about its branches.
Birds are as much part of the school estate as its buildings or its land or its people. Birds claim this ground too. Who is the intruder? Me, I think. Us, with our plans for what were the birds’ wild spaces, their forests, their marshes, their grasslands. Which become our towns, houses, schools.
But the birds are shy to make their presence felt when we’re about. Mostly, they hug the sidelines, occupying high vantage points where they can carefully observe our activities. When we all appear to be safely inside again, they’ll descend to scavenge the cast-off morsels of students’ break-times. Then, they’re safe from the crazed, zig-zagging feet of close to nine hundred young adolescents.
Each wave of birds – the crows, pigeons, wagtails, gulls, and the sky-patrolling raptors - seems to happen as a scheduled, rather secretive arrival, expertly timed to occur between the sounding of one world-ending siren and another. At the ‘bell’ announcing the finish of a break, the students file off to their timetabled rooms, there to fill minds with facts. And then the birds drop down, both one by one and also in a crowd, like raindrops in a shower. To inspect and scavenge what’s been recklessly let slip ground-ward. Scraps of canteen food: some greasy flakes of croissant, a few bite-marked nubs of sausage roll, a priceless gem, sometimes, of crisp, sugary waffle. Someone’s sandwich crust; even the traces of flavour left behind on packaging. The birds leave no scrap unturned. Turning our waste into their flesh and feather.
Being outside to witness these investigations, as I encroach on the birds’ time-shared ground once again, regretfully, yet in some ways gladly - there’s a poignancy. It stabs me in some place between the heart and the throat to see how birds squeeze such mileage from what people throw away. It reminds me, sharply, to appreciate every square meal I enjoy, every mouthful I swallow without consideration of my fortune. Birds in fact, in merely being themselves, offer up unintentional wisdoms. Simple forms of enlightenment which seem every bit as worthwhile as the formal education of classrooms. Often, as I hurry over playgrounds, I find myself caught by the sight of birds. Their quick, feathery lift-offs, their glints and tensions. However fleeting their leaving or my encounter, it makes me wish to slow down. To breathe. To exhale. To saunter, a little. This gives me time to notice birds for longer, to see, to think, perhaps to look for meaning. To admire again their notes of beauty, too. I may be a serial interrupter of birdlife but there are benefits to it. If not to themselves, unfortunately.
It's not only through being physically outside that these little folds of quiet are found. The glass cinema on the world afforded by windows allows for moments of harmless voyeurism that can transport. During times of stress, these feel like essential fragments of distraction. I like my work as a teaching assistant. Working with young people is really interesting yet often a stretch on tolerance. They can pull at your patience as if working at the gluten in bread dough. Looking out from a first-floor, perspiration-inducing computer room on a warm spring day, there’s a couple of hundred black-headed and herring gulls perched on top of the roof of the sports hall, opposite. How tidily they’re all assembled. Different species, yet one coherent whole. An infantry of gulls, all facing forward like kids in a whole-school shot, together one by one by one. Against a slant of glinting aluminium, they gleam Persil-white in the sun. Photo-perfect. They’re art, in fact. A live installation which says that such work doesn’t just exist in galleries, but is everywhere. Taking up space in the real world. Offering a relief, of sorts, which waits only to be seen; noticed.
Flashes of loose style jink the air over the monochrome terraces of learning. The red kites’ V-tailed, leisurely swivel, the magpies’ rainforest sweep, the tiny wagtails’ undulating bob. In a decade as a secondary school teaching assistant, rather than feeling immured to the almost constant presence of birds, I’ve become keener than ever on being around them. Inside views offer portals but outside has become fundamental. The school’s birds, even in their domesticated faithfulness, lend its grey, gum-stained grounds some essential frisson of wildness. Within and without buildings there are always birds, birds. They’ve become my unknowing companions, my escape and my pleasure. Though I love education, I like my work and I like the company of people, how fragile my fondness for it all might become without the sense of difference birds, like a glow of moss colonising bare rock, offers me. I learn that diversity isn’t just important but a primal need. Difference and bio-diversity as well as human uniqueness. Life shouldn’t be all inside, planned, proscribed. One needs outside too. Other animals. The elements and their unpredictability. We need more than just us.
And what would this place be, without its birds? A stock school province. Terrain of hard-core. Groups of plain brick buildings. Steel fences. Padlocked gates. Even with the entirely laudable purpose and ideals of such a state school, it can still give the impression, in poor weathers, of some institution of correction. Some might argue for that anyway. And though there are trees, and flowerbeds, there’s nothing that animates the property quite like birds. When birds come to land, descending from their urban eyries, a certain brand of vivacious joie ne sais quos accompanies them. Their arrival instantly alters the perception of an environment. Even the meanest concrete district brightens as non-human life comes to occupy it.
Another English lesson: we’re learning about Odysseus’s fabled voyage and discussing whether his mythical exploits could be considered ‘heroic’. Mid-discussion, my attention wanders, roused by a rabble outside. A hail of screeches first announces them, and then, a hint of birds through a lens of glass at the top half of an external door confirms the arrival of Black headed gulls, their strident tones unmistakeable. With their matching blood-red bills and legs, their cloud-grey upper wings, and with the male birds sporting a smart chocolate-brown perfectly-fitting balaclava in the breeding season, they’re as elegant-looking as they are discordant-sounding. I catch a sneaky glimpse of the flock. They’re all wings and screams and eagerness for the edible detritus lingering on the asphalt outside the languages block after last break. I find myself thinking an obvious thought. That it’s the birds, really, with their steel wills to survive, competing with each other for whatever scraps of food, or scraps of place, we may deign – or not - to leave for them, who are the real heroes. Facing the odds, every day of their lives, they have to make it work, or they die. To witness those fleeting bits of bird existence which, aesthetically striking to me, are about the physical grind of survival in an often hostile environment, feels a privilege as I occupy abstract worlds between centrally-heated walls. Daily, I interrupt the birds. I trespass upon them. Shallow it is, on my part, but having these opportunities to spot them mid-flow, in their precise, flighty, bird-perfectness, feels like being offered a kind of light. One which, for all that I admire the wonderful imaginary places and ideas we invent as people, is indubitably brighter, greater and wholer than that image of the sparkling, sunlit Aegean sea being beamed onto our classroom screen.
Living in the semi-rural borderland between the English counties of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, Gen writes creative non-fiction on human connection with nature, place, with an interest on ideas of ‘home’. She writes and has written on nature for local publications. Gen works as a teaching assistant at a secondary comprehensive school. She enjoys the way that education can shape and enhance our knowledge of the world we live in: a world shaped by people yet still wild at heart. Gen has studied sociology and creative non-fiction writing. Her historical blog writing can be found at natureshabbington.wixsite.com/gensandalls. She is planning some future writing for her new website at gensandalls.uk.