Fake Tree and Starlings

Me and Rose went out walking in Lower Horsebridge, or was it Upper Dicker? There were fields all around but they were mostly inaccessible and the public footpaths were dead ends. There was a fake full sized pine tree in an enclosure with some electricity generators. Only when you were at the foot of this ‘tree’ could you tell its branches were jutting metal pipes and the trunk was a tall metal pylon of some sort with the grain painted on, and that was the strange thing, because you can’t see the grain of a real tree when it’s a tree; it’s covered in bark, isn’t it, and that’s why it looked weird from a distance, though I didn’t realise it at the time.

We saw a few green woodpeckers as they swooped down to feed in the grass, and along the only footpath that wasn’t a dead end, ‘the cuckoo trail’, there were quite a few small birds in the hedges – chaffinch, many sparrows, robins, goldfinch, and in one particular bush there were some peculiar calls, harsh and digital and loud. I peered into the twig matrix. An old man walking two scrawny puppies stopped to talk to us. He was one of those old men who always stop and talk to people. I carried on scanning the hedges and espied a light brown bird, maybe slightly bigger than a blackbird and it had a streak of yellow feathers in its tail, rather like a greenfinch but it was too big for a greenfinch and didn’t have that stocky mini-parrot finch-beak.

We later realised that the calls we heard in the bush were from a starling. One distinctive part of their repertoire is the glissando, starting from a high pitch and swooping down. The rest comprises less recognizable clicking and squawking. We saw quite a few starlings around after that. Through the binoculars you can see their speckled colours, the fading summer iridescence of the males.