The feathered scrapbook.

I never grow tired of gathering scraps of birds in their movements. It is not birdwatching that I do but something altogether more otherworldly, a glimpse into another way of being on another plane and in a different atmosphere to ours. An utter fascination with the make-up of birds stills my heart and tells me secrets I cannot quite grasp, makes me know that our world is not real, takes me elsewhere.

As I travel, on foot, by bike, gazing out through a car window, the tiny flickers of movements in hedgerows and the huge sweeps and rises of red kites with their artful fan-shaped tails take all my attention. It is not the exotic or the unusual I seek, although the all-seeing impossible orange eyes of owls and the bright yellow orbs of eagles make my breath catch and my heart yearn for a freedom I will never know. It is the tiny intricate lacework of the underside of sparrows’ wings as they veer off into bushes and disappear, the bright eye and ice-lolly beak of the sparrow, its cheerful bounce and rustling through leaves. The birdsong that makes my heart lift and wonder, my lips smile, my feet stop. This incredible gift. I gather the tiny scraps I have been given and store them in my heart.

It is not uncommon for the plump dove-grey vicar of the bird world, the collared dove, to thump into my bedroom window and make me jump in fright. The collision between worlds then is terrifying and heart-rending. When I found one such bird sitting in our garden, unable to fly, I held its warm egg-shaped body in my hands and put it somewhere safe. I took it to the vet. When I called later, they told me it had died. I suspect this was a lie, and though I know a quick death to be preferable to death by fox, still I hated the way man takes precedence over the avian, building through their skylines, cutting down their dwellings, ignoring this other species alongside us that somehow, incredibly, lives entirely in the air, and knows what it is to travel by blue sky and the muscles of breezes. Scraps of wonder.

There is, in the Natural History Museum, the skeleton of a dinosaur from which the bird developed. I long to see it, but fear I would stare and stare and never leave. This strange creature and the life it lives, the worldly travels it carries out every year and yet always knows home, this grower of feathers, this bright-eyed alien. If I were less humanly practical, I would gather birds around me until birdcages hung in every space, and I would let them free to fly around my rooms all day in a whirl of colour, whistles, rustles. To nest in my hair. To be the mad old lady in fairy tales. To watch and watch, and one day, maybe, learn to fly. I will never grow out of this enthusiasm. My scrapbook heart grows and grows, and lines itself in feathers.