Glimpse of a landscape fashioned by birds

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/21/glimpse-of-a-landscape-fashioned-by-birds

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Although I am in my 50s I still take a child’s pleasure in climbing trees. This particular ascent, however, had purpose, because a hawthorn formerly trapped under a sallow thicket has been steadily freed by felling operations. One last large willow branch had to be severed before my overtopped bush could move into the sunlit uplands of the open glade that I have created around it.

There are four hawthorns and one small holly honoured in this fashion. They receive preferential treatment partly because they are rare on my patch, but also because I cherish the idea that they are bird sown. I like to imagine the scenario that explains their presence in a sallow jungle: the fruit-filled blackbird, perhaps, that returned night after night to roost and deposited the undigested hawthorn and holly seeds that it had eaten during the day. Out of its shower of creative manure there eventually arose my new bushes.

Once you are attuned to this avian tree propagation, it becomes part of the detective’s pleasure in unravelling nature to find other instances of the same process. There are excellent examples in our garden, because the blackthorn hedge I planted 15 years ago now has an understorey of elder and holly breaking out along its length. They are almost certainly the work of our garden thrushes and, rather than grubbing them out, I leave them to their own devices so that our garden is a creative process shared by its various owners.

Our whole village is liberally speckled not only with hollies but with houses and even local farms named after them. So, in a sense the birds have helped shape the cultural texture of the parish as well the physical landscape.

In this island kingdom we are so accustomed to the notion that we own and can stamp our authority on all its parts, yet beyond our superficial gaze, there is still another landscape fashioned by birds and trees. It is in this sense that I also think of my tree climbing as a political act in the service of a wilder republic.

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