On Tuesday, I was walking inside a cloud when I was scolded by a chaffinch. The cloud was formed of blossom, where the blackthorn grows on both sides of the river path, and only in April can you walk into the iridescent blossom-fog to immerse yourself in bird song and bee-buzz and hazy white. Dark thorns are forgotten, when you are in the blossom-cloud; the cold of winter easily dismissed in the blossom-blizzard of the blackthorn flowers. With the sudden arrival in April of five petals of white, the meanest bush becomes a portal to a kind of bliss that my Tuesday-self had sought out, taking a detour from running Tuesday-errands, to walk along the river path and to lose myself in a cloud.  And that is where I was when the chaffinch scolded me. 

It is hard to ignore an angry chaffinch.  I stopped in my tracks, jolted from my daydream, and turned to peer through the petals at her. She was slightly above my head height, hopping from twig to twig, shouting a loud metallic fink fink fink.  Another bird, the male, rallied by her jarring call, came to add a second warning voice pink pink pink. It is then I see the nest; her nest.  It must be tethered in a fork of dark branches, but it appears to almost float in the blossom. It is perfectly round, an expertly thrown bowl. The nest is misty greens and bone whites; only the finest moss and lichen and spiderwebs have been chosen. Thousands of solo trips made back and forth to select, beak-fetch and craft the perfect soft dish for her eggs.   I look again at the chaffinch to see if there is a puff of pride in her chest at her beautiful nest. But when did she realise the nest was a little too close to the path?  After 400 trips to and fro? More? And now she must patrol the path, eyes shining, shouting at walking women who are avoiding their Tuesday-jobs, protecting the perfect cup-nest at all costs.  I am tempted to, but I do not, stretch up on my tippy-toes to peek inside. I want to see how she has lined her nest, this bird of exquisite taste, I want to see for myself what luxury looks like for this chaffinch.  I couldn’t do that, though, to the chaffinch-mother, to cause such panic in her proud chest (and I wonder, briefly, if she might be willing to peck me in the eye).

I think about her rallying cries, her forceful shouts, and I wonder if her bones remember (warnings borne down from generation to generation) the hands of small boys who collected eggs for treasures. I remember being shown my dad’s wooden display box. It had a brass clasp opening, filled with shredded newspaper and his collection of blown eggs, about 30 or so; remnants of a 1940s childhood in rural southern Scotland.  I remember holding the eggs – one at a time, as light as flight – and tracing the speckles and marbles with the tip of my finger while I listened to my dad’s tales of pedal bikes and skint knees and tree-climbing. The boys would go bird-nesting after Sunday School, coming home filthy, with torn clothes, only returning to be fed.  I imagine those countryside lanes (very close to where I now live) as being denser with life than they are today, bursting at the seams with birdsong and movement.  I feel nostalgic for a time I’ve never known, a time when cuckoos called and nobody counted, because they didn’t know yet about the decline that was already in motion. My dad’s generation was perhaps the last to encounter nature without the edgy awareness of the fragility of it all and the shame of being human.  Instead, like little gods, they took eggs from nests, unabashed, for their collections and to trade amongst schoolboys.  And I think of those boys as being more connected to nature than we are now, despite the ease with which they stole eggs from nests or shot pigeons with air rifles, because they knew where to find the nests, they knew that the thrush lines her nest with mud but the blackbird does not, they could identify a bird by the speckles and the marbles of her egg.  My little son and his friends would never stretch a small hand into a nest to bring out a warm, smooth egg of pale blue, but they also would struggle to tell you the difference between a chaffinch and a bullfinch.

My dad had brought out his varnished wooden box of egg-treasures that day because he had become aware of legislation that had made it illegal to own collections, even old ones, of wild bird eggs.  He believed this applied to ones that were collected before the 1954 Protection of Birds Act, like his. So, we all sat round the dining room table and reverently passed eggs from hand to hand, linnet, goldie, bullie, jackdaw, for one last time before the eggs would be disposed of. How they were disposed of, I don’t recall, but there was a solemnity to the occasion that has stuck with me. I can’t remember if there was a chaffinch, or a shelfie, egg amongst them.  If there was, the egg would be off-white and splatted with a reddish-brown, something almost blood-coloured. Perhaps not the prettiest egg, but here, on the river path in the blossom-cloud, I wonder if, with a painter’s brush, you mixed the off-white and reddish-brown together, the exact pigment they made wouldn’t be the dusty pink of the male chaffinch’s chest.  The male bird adds a depth of orangey-pink to the female’s tea-stained feathers. Together, the two chaffinches are all the browns, pinks and grey-blues of: old books on dusty shelves, a shoebox of forgotten treasures, faded sepia photographs, stamp collections.  Dusty story-keepers, light-faded, antique. They are vintage velvet ribbons against the white lace of the blossom.

I continued on my way along the path, leaving the chaffinches and their perfect nest to be swaddled by the blossom-cloud and the sound of the river and the buzz of the enormous April bees.  In a few weeks the blackthorn blossom will give way to leaves, which will form a barrier, along with the thorny twigs, around the little bowl of a nest, gently wrapped in lichen and spiderwebs, and untouched by Tuesday fingers.  It will become a secret, I hope, and the chaffinch can ease her path-patrol.  A blackcap sings from somewhere deep in the blossom-cloud and I walk on.