Against a backdrop of poppies and bees, the theatrics of life and death play out across the stage of Mark Mattock‘s “feral’d” NW2 garden.

May

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds” — Aldo Leopold

In a parallel world called dawn, long before the yapping dogs either side of the garden start and their owners bark ‘shut up, shut up’ over and over for the rest of the coming day; before traffic hum and sirens; before the first Heathrow-bound tube of humans roars overhead sowing its toxic fallout, a rose-gold rectangle sun materialises on the red-tiled horizon in the warm gloom beyond the garden’s ash trees, still in silhouette. It’s accompanied by a piercingly-pitched ensemble of robin, wren and dunnock. Not quite melodious, but resonant; thrilling. A jam session of trill, shrill and drippy warble. The silent crystal gaps in between just as loud. A shock-wake audio splash of ice-cold water to the face. Blackbird is speaking now too. Morning has not broken, it’s exploding: chain reacting, mushrooming. I need a piss. The clatter of the toilet seat being lifted kicks off the house sparrow chicks not far from the air vent behind the bathroom wall. Their cheeping pleas chime with the echoed trickling. Last year I jammed with the rowdier starlings, and missed them when they fledged.

The retina-scorching photon beam hits me full in the face as I sit back in the patio chair. The rectangle sun is now palpitating blinding liquid light of squirming brilliant turquoises, lemons, and nuclear detonation white; with nebulae of greens and purples. Like some ancient TV sci-fi special effect without the weird noises. I duck and the ray gun beam ricochets off the sliding glass doors behind me and zaps into the giant feral poppy stand that rose from patio sweepings. Momentarily illuminating tiny lucent droplets of crystal water delicately laid along the frills of the grey green leaves, as if they were deposited by some smooth scaleless alien moth during the night. I can now only really see it all in my peripheral vision; this brief exact zig-zag alignment laser-threading burning star to tiny droplet, via roof extension window, glass door, poppies and me. I suddenly feel the garden is incomplete, it’s missing one of those ubiquitous telegraph poles, connecting cables that orb-web across the land, with their yellow warning signs with a black human figure levitating under a flash of black lightning, as if warning of the dangers of enlightenment; “put your ray-gun to my head.”

The ring-necked parakeet in the top of the ash is exactly the same orange dawn-wash green as the new leaves bursting from the fat velvet buds. Its thick stubby plastic red mandibles deftly shredding the swelling knots of leaves to get at the soft green heart-flesh. Its sore, red-rimmed eye outstares me as the grating screeches of its kin ‘soil’ the morning ambience. Late morning, all is heating up. Green-sheen blow flies circle and cluster on the crisp rat pup’s face that the cat strangely left days ago. An inexplicable impulse to look up. Something in the clean forever blue calling from beyond the range of my squinting eye sight, by means yet to be understood, once accepted. I pick up my binoculars and focus straight up. There, dead in the middle of the viewfinder, floating on the surface of a smooth blue planet, that looks like the Pacific side of earth, a tiny little black scimitar star like a lost character from an ancient indecipherable alphabet. Slicing thermal pie rising from shimmering road surfaces and roof tops; a swift, the first swift, over London. “They’re here.” The next day I watched six of them from the bus stop, alerted by their exuberant screams.

As I slide open the heavy patio door, loud exultant bird melody pours in to fill the momentary vacuum, sucked from the motionless blizzard of cow parsley crossing the centre of the garden. Like a morning caffeine rush, spreading from cochlea to cortex to coccyx. I haven’t seen him for a while. I can’t see him now, only the jolting umbels as he hops from stem to stem underneath them, nattering and chattering to himself having been abruptly cut short by me. Migrant chanteur, troubadour, little black-bereted nature insurgent, scrub warbler, rude boy, blackcap. His presence blesses and authenticates the space. He is quintessential icon of hedgerow, lane, spinny and wood. A piercing blast from the wren, still without a mate, perched on the top of a bamboo cane in the raised bed below his nest. The big juicy leaves of first year garlic mustard surrounding the new courgette plants remind me I need to change the weekly organic veg delivery, the garden is lush with spring greens now; just, as usual, not in the raised beds. Hogweed, wild garlic, nettles, dandelion, sorrel… I don’t like the taste of sticky willies (goose grass, cleavers) though.

The starling, up and down the same dead straight line along the left side of the garden from whatever food source it’s discovered to its nest in an old swift hole in the eve of the house two doors along. ‘Poliosis’ the blue tit — he has a pure white primary and white-patched head cap — every few minutes in and out of the nest box at the back, his partner at the same rate. I don’t know where the third robin nest is exactly. Goldfinch tunes cascade from the ash tops like iridescent soap bubbles from which the complex and delicate lyrics burst. High altitude screams of swifts. I suddenly realise the absence of the crows, and their caws that always complete the scene. The goldfinches scatter in twitters. The ominous loud rattle of a pair of magpies approaching. I look up at the old abandoned crow nest. Remember how much they hate each other, the feuding and vendettas going back years…

May 2020. I truly love this bird. Slick black king, kinsman, crazed weather vane. Rousing me every morning for the last couple of months, keeping my shit together in the new claustrophobic dystopia. Roaring, posturing, like some sable-plumed bull from TV aerial and king-twig across the rooftops and sanguine gardens of conformity. Fierce, free, free-willed, wild. His queen incubating their future in the canopy of the tallest ash in the garden-cum-sanitorium. Hours sitting with them each day since the announcement of lockdown, from dawn to whenever. In the almost shocking peace and tranquility it’s been intimate, revelatory; listening to the constant tender love chat between the monogamous pair. Soothing, consoling. Watching how they passionately enforce their no-fly zone above, around and below the nest. Literally scare crows; warning, threatening, chasing, smashing into any perceived danger entering their airspace: magpies, jays, gulls, sparrowhawk and poor dim mad-eyed wood pigeons. How picky they were about selecting nest sticks, clearly testing twig properties, looking like they’re measuring them before snapping them off. I never see one picked from the ground. The magpies who slip in every now and again do exactly the same. Under the pure plague-cleansed skies, crossed occasionally by the city’s peregrines and even a kite, in the crows’ invisible bio-dome, and boucherie, the smaller feathered fauna thriving, unwittingly, in the misconception: dunnocks, robins, blackbirds already on second broods. Only the wood pigeons have it hard. Both crows never miss stooping at the nearest one when leaving or returning to the nest. It looks opportunistic, like a fox passing a warren.

Then one clear bright early morning the false feudal utopia comes to an end with a menacing, mettlesome chakka, chakka, chakka. Like the helicopter attack scene in Apocalypse Now, magpies approach from over the roofs, bouncing like giant pied dragonflies with butterfly wings. Their machine gun chatter jamming the air waves. The tormenting haggisters (old English name) crowd rush the ash canopies, bounce from branch to branch taunting, hounding. Irritable. Iridescent metallic tails flicking, wings flicking, can’t see how many because of the new foliage. The two crows stand firm together, shining with convincing aggression and fury over the nest, arched forward, body pumping in rage, screaming hoarse, raw; tails splayed wide, rapidly fanning. The chaotic chorus of caws and chaks becomes deafening. Wound-up simmering crack-brained corvids facing off. “Come on then.” It comes. Does it come! Full blown melée of unbelievable violence: of slicing feathers, stabbing, pecking, plier-grip beaks. Grabbing and slashing curve-bladed claws. Crashing leaves, twigs, branches. Wing slaps, smacks, flaps. Rasps, groans, roars of plucked pain. I hear more than see. It goes on in bursts for ten whole minutes, spills out into adjoining gardens, then the frenzied magpies turn on each other and chase off over the old creosoted fences. The female crow is left circling the ash like some hopeless fruit bat, her tail feathers all ripped out. Did she have to be pulled from the nest? The male returns from behind the last magpie, still pumped. Slicing through the airspace like a ragged kite in a gale, a lacquered black paper jet still patrolling, now pointlessly. Fuck! I cautiously approach the tree. On bare hard dusty earth directly underneath the nest a grotesque, pitiful little corpse. A pin-feathered headless chick, a miniature stubby-clawed dinosaur with a neck stump glistening red raw protruding from greasy wrinkled peeled back skin. The first metal blue bottle is already tasting for the best fold to lay its eggs in. During the rest of the day the grieving pair repeatedly returned to the nest. In the following days magpies find and empty the blackbird nest. They have chicks too. As I sit writing this the tailless female crow is taking sticks from the old nest, I don’t know where the new nest is.

I pull up a chair, from the shade into the midday heat and glare, up to reading glasses range of the large clumps of alkanet that grow against the two sunny sides of the first raised bed. It heaves with bees. I was going to pull much of it up thinking it’s a bit smothering, the nectar to plant mass ratio not qualifying it for its current status. WRONG.

It’s phenomenal. Bumblebee guide book: white-tailed bumblebee, tick; tree bumblebee, tick. Buff-tailed, garden, early, common carder, red-tailed; tick, tick, tick. Gender appearance, size variance within each species confusing. Each with its respective tongue size syphoning sweet nectar from the tiny white rimmed centre of the tiny blue florets. It looks as if each bloom replenishes rapidly. Honey bee worker numbers building, no idea where they come from. Between the two raised beds the bee hive I bought years ago sits empty. Apis mellifera is a domesticated animal, a hive full of them in this particular little ecosystem would be devastating; no nectar for anything else. I glance up to check the dome of red fur just poking over the canopy of giant lobed leaves of hogweed (the aroma of which is ‘pig urine’ hence the name). Attached to it a ragged chewed tail like the one reunited with Fantastic Mr Fox after its recovery from Farmer Bean. It’s the butt of the vixen drinking from the small deep pond hidden in the foliage that I always forget is there. It’s too hot and dry and she’s too thirsty to worry about me yards away, probably thinking she hasn’t been noticed. Most of the time she and her cubs aren’t. I was watching them at 5am this morning, from the crow’s nest view of the bedroom window. Four ultra-hyped cubs racing, chasing, up and down the two paths through the dense foliage, sharp turning and skidding cartoonishly where they fork. The aerial view like drone footage in an Attenborough epic. They emerge from a tunnel in the far right corner under the wood panel fencing; I don’t think it’s the actual den entrance. They spend a lot of time lounging in that corner under the thorn bushes while the vixen chills of the shed roof above them. Their nocturnal rampaging uses the camera trap batteries up in a single night and the cat needs therapy. But you’d hardly know they were there, they disturb little of the vegetation. Incredible.

The cat is eating a great tit, I don’t know which one, there’s still a pair busy in the garden, collecting wool again an hour later from the raised bed mulch; maybe he did them a favour. Still a fucker though. Late afternoon the thunder arrives loud and flashy. Rumble and splatter. Desperately needed rain pounds the green and fills the air with lush scents, aromatic blends of pig piss, garlic, mint, earth, fox, nettle, honeysuckle and elder. The patio becomes a shallow lake. The garden drinks deep and long. A poppy bud has split, oozing arterial blood red. A burst heart pumping, pushing. The crumpled petals fill like a new butterfly’s limp wings. The wren still screaming for a lover. I look up from my book twenty minutes later and the poppy is free, soliciting attention, billowing like an upside down skirt. I could have watched it all in slo-mo, it reminded me of the cabin, watching the briny tide water creep up the mud channel with the same almost discernible speed. The grease-paper-thin, scallop-shaped petals buckle from the down draft of the approaching white-tailed bumble bee. It crash lands on the pale green pouffe shaped pistil, then falls off. As it writhes in the ruff of stamens with anthers that look like tiny powder-dusted morels, it keeps buzzing like a tiny electric toothbrush to shake loose the pollen which it collects, mixes with saliva and packs tightly with its mandibles and forelegs into the pollen baskets corbicula on its hind tibias. A skinny marmalade hoverfly (Episyrphus balteatus) tentatively approaches, delicately, patiently moving with precision over the activity like a spying drone gathering data with its large red compound eyes, or it’s meekly just waiting for the bee to leave. Hypnotised by dancing gnats; dipping and diving diptera. Miniature bungee-jumpers in tiny tutus bouncing with ballerina grace. In and out of the sun pools over the riot of chlorophyll which is pulsing neon phone-screen green and hard shadow of flailing ash branches, some heavily laden with pompoms of winged seed — an ash mast year. Everything a dappling luminous kaleidoscope of leaf greens, petal flecks and spots of lurid campion pinks, ranunculus yellows and ox-eye whites as the branches chop, chop, chop at the evening rays. The dazzling motion rendering everything dimensionless and without perspective, while a boozy blackbird dribbles his intoxicating liquid notes. How familiar, how reassuring… Is it? Or delusional? My little edenic ‘wildlife garden,’ or metaphorical life raft, life capsule, bobbing in a dying ocean, towards hostile phobic shores, as I read yet more on the insect holocaust scientists are screaming about from around the world. Imminent catastrophic system collapse, even in the remotest places. The latest soul-numbing apocalyptic warnings. A cosmos of the brightest red flashing warning lights with eardrum-bursting bells and buzzers three sixty. Media tumbleweed in a hurricane that we dodge and duck. Rewilding? See RAGE. See revolution, see rebellion, see resistance; revolt, rise up, reconnect… wake the fuck up.

One of the magenta foxglove spikes nearest the kitchen window suddenly jerks, catching my eye. A fidgety fleck of white sharpens focus… Jenny! It’s a white feather pincered in the beak of a wren gripping to one of the drooling bells, the bird almost invisible against the background… Jenny! Where have you been? Are you the one I saw with him back in march? What happened? I watch the feather cross the garden, over to Ivy Tower, it vanishes with mouse-like movement into the waxy leaves climbing the ash bole. He’s done it, almost two months; every, and sometimes all day, of what seemed futile calling.

Jenny answered. He never gave up hope. Female wrens once they’ve made their choice help finish the male’s cock nest, lining it with hair and feathers. Does she know how hard and long he persevered? A few days later I check the nest, it looks disheveled, as if it’ sbeen attacked. I gently poke my finger into it; eggs still there. Stand in the kitchen wait for Jenny to return. No signs. Was she pulled out of the nest while brooding? The following day I watch the male perch repeatedly at the entrance and resume calling, I can’t help projecting that it looks like utter despair and apoplectic RAGE.

He still won’t give up.

“I have learned you are never too small to make a difference.” — Greta Thunberg

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Mark Mattock. Artist. Photographer. Publisher. Rabbit Fighter. @the_rabbit_fighters_club