The birds, bees and butterflies are busy in Mark Mattock‘s “feral’d” NW2 garden.
April
“You’re squawking like a pink monkey bird” – David Bowie, ‘Moonage Daydream’.
The starling is full on freestyling from his skinny ash spray over Sparrow Bush, aiming his primrose dagger beak towards some invisible point in the immense spring blue above. As if taking an oath, earthing or syncing unseen energy; stiff in devotional avian ecstasy, rigid wings flapping like a battered victorian clockwork toy. His greasy paint-specked incandescent petrol-spill plumage of green, blue and purple is almost regal. Spiky wet-look throat hackles quavering. In his deranged eclectic sampling: clicks and clacks of an aerosol paint can being shaken; hysterical yaffles — laughs — of green woodpecker, screeches of parakeet, car alarms, sirens, whoops, whistles, chinks. I’m sitting outside a pet shop with its unhinged ventriloquist. I can hear the spidery keratin claws of the female scratching on the plastic guttering behind me as she shuffles to his show. She’s just above their nest entrance which, whether they realise or not, sparrows have been stuffing nest material into for the last week.
In the barbed wiry tangle of feral rose, bramble and grapevine that is Sparrow Bush, yellow forsythia petals keep dripping like molten metal, knocked off by a pair of cock dunnocks flick-flapping feverishly about like a pair of big brown moths, drunk in the wake of some ripe pheromonal promise. The female they are tailing flits between flirty and feigned modesty as if she doesn’t notice them behind her. One — the most enthusiastic (or desperate) — is her wittol husband. The calmer, shiftier other, hanging back, is her duplicitous ‘bit on the side.’ I witnessed her with one of them earlier this morning from the kitchen window, below on the patio near the nettle bed, before I put the coffee on. Suddenly not so coy, she’d lured him down from the bush with a familiar unambiguous invitation, and when he bounced right up to her, started speed-twerking right in his face. This froze him in some momentary hypnotised stupor, letting himself be patted and slapped by her frenetic tail. He snapped back out of it at the sudden realisation that she’d just done it with her boyfriend; but he wasn’t put off. He just needed to get her to eject his rival’s obvious deposit, as male dunnocks do (see footnote). He did so by repeatedly pecking at her cloaca. The cloacal kiss was blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, as he made the substitution in the belief any offspring will be his. Oblivious of the fact that she may have duped him yet again with a stored decoy blob of non-viable spermatozoa, wanting to keep the genetic information of all her polyandry in the interest of mixed paternity. The unfathomable wonders of nature.
Dirty dunnocks, whose ménages have been thoroughly studied; classic example of polyandrous breeding strategy. The wall of windows beyond the back of the garden shine metallic starling egg blue, the colour of the new dawn sky opposite. The accompanying chorus loud. Bird shapes fly across the skyline yet without form. Portly fox runs along the shed roof. The piercing dawn raucous dominated by wren; with robin, dunnock and great tit. In the distance crow caws. Looks like they’ve abandoned the idea of using the garden nest site in the big back garden ash this year. As the sun lifts the wood pigeon drops from the orange glowing ash crown lacquered with glistening snail slime, as if the boughs are sweaty, into the cold lake of deep shadow cast by the house, turning the soft multi-grey bird hard crow black.
Three dandelion flower heads, in the large pot that my feet are resting on, clenched tight, waiting for sun burst. Behind the serrated leaves snug packed garden snails have glued themselves into place on the pot wall. A magpie slides down a red tiled roof on its shadow, parting with it at the gutter. High above, between the highest twigs, where a pair of long tailed tits pick at the swelling clusters of purple-broccoli-looking ash flowers, a scattering of tiny glowing bodies with stiff forked vapour trails drift like some strange ephemeral high altitude mayflies, silently without direction. Fifth consecutive sunny day, the temperature rising a digit on each.
Right on queue, as I step out onto the warm glare of the patio, a blast of powerful luxuriant mediterranean lyrics spew from Strangle Bush (honeysuckle) as a blackcap crashes the sound stage; loud, brash, complex, cocky. I take the right path, on the sun-soaked side, slowly towards him, disturbing the first hoverflies and greenbottles recharging in the layer of radiated heat on the big green waxy solar panel leaves angled to the glaring sun on Ivy Tower. Pause at the sight of the first fox-furry bee fly at my feet, watch it manoeuvre, as if by some skilled controller, in the green alkanet Pentaglottis sempervirens. Like a miniature hummingbird, it methodically siphons nectar from the ubiquitous plant’s tiny, intensely blue flowers with its stiff, scary, beak-like proboscis that makes it look like it has its sting on its face. The blackcap lights up again, further off, he snuck away. Is he passing through, or will he stay for summer as a female has been visiting regularly the last few weeks? At the far end of the garden under the thorn bushes the first bells of blue hang patiently above the thick bed of garlic and dog’s mercury. I could be in the woods…
I need to brush up on my apidae. (Bees and wasps), on bombus (bumble bees) in particular. The zippy small all-black bees with bulging yellow pollen sacks, whose buzz is a higher pitch, who ignore the new bluebells in favour of the lungwort flowers are? Hairy-footed flower bees (no joke) Anthophora plumipes, which are not quite bumble bees, and they are not real pollen sacks, but hairs. I know the large queen tree bee, right now pulling down forget-me-knots to lick them with her short tongue. Bombus hypnorum, a recent migrant arrival, becoming one of the most common in just over two decades. The first brimstone butterfly — she’s not hi-viz yellow — passes over the thorn spinney, missing the buckthorns I planted specifically for her last year. Moments later the first speckled wood — yes! Then another. This is finally that long-awaited spring day of no return.
We bring the Los Angeles sun back with us. It’s the sun we took and warmed up for a week. A week of a pure joy beyond any words; an all too short week that I finally got to spend with my new granddaughter, already half a year old. As I look out at the garden again I just wish I could walk it with her, especially now things have rapidly risen, reachable by tiny hands from a sling. To walk the wild places, like I did with her dad and her auntie. I think she saw the Sara orangetip butterflies we chased, with her strapped to me, whilst she gummed the rim, on the walk around the Hollywood lake on a very hot day. But not the first swallows of the year over the freeway, the sharp-shinned hawk from the balcony, the skien of pelicans passing the giant restaurant windows overlooking the pacific, or the monarch butterfly gliding north on sunset. Soon though.
A blinding full moon blazing through my eyelids woke me before it sank below the roofs, not long before the sun began its ascent opposite. I closed my eyes again, shading them with a corner of the duvet. Was I still in LA or back in the cabin? It could have been the moon over the marsh burning brilliant cold in the pre-dawn, before the indigo sky started to pale pink at its edge over the eastern oak bank. This moon glowing behind the naked ash crowns was much nearer and massive; not a dream. Then I remembered. But held on to the vision of the garden below stretching across an empty wild, all the way to the horizon, the beautiful illusion sustained with a few crystal notes of an early robin filling the teeming void, as they did there. I feel the bump of the ripple passing through me the moment I spotted the two limp entities hanging like big soggy petals from the nylon netting, from the flat top of the flower pot cages left forgotten in the patio corner since last summer. A ripple that has travelled across space and time to now, at a once-around-a-planet hertz, to an electric involuntary small-breath-held spine tingling now. A thrill ripple. An overwhelming sense of relief ripple.
And hope that it will be followed ripple. Like it has every year since I caught that first orange tip, my first butterfly, in the net I made from coat hanger wire and my mum’s tights, a vision vivid to this day. Or waking to the fresh emerged adults in the box on my bedroom windowsill, in a new bedroom, before going to a new school, that would never replace the world that I and the boomerang-shaped pupae I brought with me had had to leave behind. Nothing provocatively screams spring so loud, not even the first cuckoo, or the first swallow, than the first male orange tip: he’s Ziggy, a little ‘a-lad-in-lane,’ snow white tan, shock of orange, yellow and black camo skirt that makes a green that isn’t there. Flirting over adoring starbursts of cow parsley and nodding little white cluster crowns of garlic mustard with its heart shaped leaves. Flitting promiscuously from ladies smock to forget-me-not with drooling proboscis. Effeminate, delicate but oh so fucking loud. His girl a bit bigger, sans orange, just a bit of heavy mascara at the tip of her forewings and a little centre spot. They share the same skirt and eyeliner. An hour later this year’s first are ready, wings stiffened and flight muscles warmed in the sun; a pair, male and female. I unzip the nylon tube and release Adam and Eve into the garden. I’ve reared a few orange tips nearly every year since that first memory, recently able to collect a few eggs each season from the garden. Last year was near apocalyptic for butterflies, the alarm ringing early by the frightening lack of orange tips. This first couple were reared from eggs collected last April in the lanes of the land I’d left behind all those years ago. Perhaps you’re smiling now? I am. Time.
A shimmering shaving of electric morning sky flits over the umbellifer forest; the first holly blue butterfly; more spring. A comma is searching out nettles, she pauses on a leaf, scratches it with her feet, tastes it, it’s good, she leaves a tiny ribbed egg on the serrated edge. A peacock butterfly sits spread to the sun, its gaudy, heavily maquillaged eyes stare in dead doll-eyed indifference, on the wood panel of the raised bed. It flicks its wings with a discernible hiss when I approach to close before it bolts. Three more orange tips have squeezed out of their weird art nouveau pupae. All female. A speckled wood keeps disappearing when it alights on the bare hard foot-pressed and paw-patted path to bask, materialising again to assault passing bee flies. Watch the robin, beak full of insecta, at the top of the heavily pruned buddelia that looks like some trendy curving tensiled gibbet, watch the cat below him, waiting for it to reach a safe distance before entering Ivy Tower for the hundredth time today to feed the week-old chicks.
I get home in the evening. “The cat got into Ivy Tower, then he vomited them all over the carpet…”. Robin chicks. Apex predator and total fucker. Strange, because he eats every last bit of whatever he catches. Leaves no ‘little presents.’
Mornings are on another planet. 6am, pink wash leaden sky. Rain dimpling the puddles on the glass table. Rain water streaks in tiger stripes down the ash boles as if they’re pissing themselves without embarrassment. The rising rampant green: vivid, luscious, riotous, promiscuous, delicious. Through the mis-en-scène that is the kitchen window a giant lost chlorophyll world of salad. Garnished with wet petals: gobs of dandelion, splats of primrose, spatters of campion, clusters of alkanet, smears of bluebells, sprays of cow parsley, bursts of garlic. At the edges, drippings and sprinkles of ground ivy, forget-me-nots, dog violets, herb robert, garlic mustard. The hawthorns bowing under the sheer weight of sparkling water, everything else pert and proud, crunchy even.
In the earthen ware pot yet more dandelion flower heads, poised menacingly like Medusa’s snakes rising from the rosette of razor wire leaves, ready to pop into immaculate afros of precious time as soon as it’s light and dry enough. The male robin has caught a stocky pale moth. The smashed insect’s scales smudged on the bird’s forehead. From the top of sparrow bush it launches over to the bent buddleia, where it has alighted hundreds of times in the last few days before delivering to the chicks deep in the ivy. It pauses, it remembers, it flies off. I can’t help projecting the profound sense of loss into the aloof little head and its expressionless pin-head eyes. Wet fox shakes the loose diamanté of water droplets from her rusted fur as she rises stiffly from a wet nap in her secluded spot on the far shed roof. Her frequent presence keeps the cat inside more than he wants.
The cat is suddenly a squirrel clawing frantically up an ash bole, the loud rustling of crisped ivy leaves, panic, indignation; the fox just rushed him from across the roof but gave up when he climbed beyond reach. The cat is stuck. A magpie arrives to mock, maybe seeing a possibility. Maybe the cat is raiding another nest? It alights just above and behind the cat. The freaked out cat, all hackles and claws, eyes wide, ears flattened in semaphore for a raging ‘fuck off,’ grips to the tree as if it’s clinging onto a bucking horse. It is no nest raid. The pied corvid knows the cat is compromised and from just inches away it mocks and scolds, pulling cantankerously at the dead ivy twigs, taunting like a football hooligan grabbing and throwing plastic café chairs. The cat turns at risk to the bird determined to attack it. The bird hops to next tree. The cat is making its predicament worse, which surely was the magpie’s intention. I’ve seen the crows messing with him many times before; they clearly get off on it.
The wren is screaming his syrinx raw yet again. He completed his nest a month ago, but still daily adds to it, if he’s not still calling desperately for a female, the snug tight dome swelling incrementally. That loud piecing shrill must carry a considerable distance, especially in the early mornings. I feel for him.
Extreme violence breaks out again in the garden boundaries. This time it’s the two male dunnocks in Sparrow Bush. It’s not about territory!
A small bat hawks above the garden at sunset. There is something incredibly intimate about watching a small bat frenetically hunting, miming, in perfect silence.
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Footnote:
‘The dunnock possesses variable mating systems. Females are often polyandrous, breeding with two or more males at once, which is quite rare among birds. This multiple mating system leads to the development of sperm competition amongst the male suitors. DNA fingerprinting has shown that chicks within a brood often have different fathers, depending on the success of the males at monopolising the female. Males try to ensure their paternity by pecking at the cloaca of the female to stimulate ejection of rival males’ sperm. Dunnocks take just one-tenth of a second to copulate and can mate more than 100 times a day. Males provide parental care in proportion to their mating success, so two males and a female can commonly be seen provisioning nestlings at one nest.’ (Wikipedia)
Glossary:
Wittol – a man who knows of his wife’s infidelity and puts up with it.
Cloaca – (Latin: “sewer”), in vertebrates, common chamber and outlet into which the intestinal, urinary, and genital tracts open.
Cloacal kiss – Birds reproduce using their cloaca; this occurs during a cloacal kiss in most birds. Birds that mate using this method touch their cloacae together, in some species for only a few seconds, sufficient time for sperm to be transferred from the male to the female.
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Mark Mattock. Artist. Photographer. Publisher. Rabbit Fighter. @the_rabbit_fighters_club