Shetland’s garden birds

Like so many of us, I’ve been spending a lot more time at home lately than usual. There’s a silver lining to that particular cloud, and it’s one I suspect a lot of people working from home have been indulging in – I’ve been paying closer attention to the birds that come and go outside my windows. Who needs EastEnders or Corrie when you’ve got the lives and loves of a tribe of sparrows to follow every day?

Chatting to friends down on the British mainland I realise that I am lucky to have those sparrows – house sparrows numbers have fallen, precipitously, in Britain over the past few decades. It reminds me that I sometimes take my Shetland home for granted – there is wildlife as well as qualities of life that persist here, whilst diminishing or lost elsewhere.

It was both birds and a chance for a better, different life that brought me to Shetland in the first place. I had been an avid birder, and visiting the islands annually, for years by the time I decided to come and sink permanent roots here. I traded life in small Kentish village for a home that sits on a peninsula that points, like a finger, from Whalsay across the sea to the Out Skerries and, beyond the horizon, towards Scandinavia.

The location was no accident or rather, it was a happy one insofar as I could not have wished to find a home in a more auspicious location. While Shetland still has plenty of house sparrows, many of the garden birds folk on the British mainland are familiar with are absent as resident birds here. It took me almost 20 years to see a blue tit arrive in my Whalsay garden…

That bird would have hatched in some deep forest far away in Norway or Sweden and, migrating to warmer climes for the winter, had been swept by easterly tail winds across the sea to Shetland. As I write, I know from local social media that many others came with it and, even now in the early New Year, are tucked safely into other Shetland gardens. Shetland folk have a keen eye for an unken, or unusual bird, and will often pick up the phone to call one of the local birders to find out what lost waif they’re seeing beyond the kitchen window. Happily for me, my island home is particularly blessed for rare birds turning up on my doorstep, sometimes quite literally – birds of species that have been seen in Britain maybe just a handful of times beforehand.

Rare birds have, down the years, been found all over Shetland, even in the heart of Lerwick, our main town on the Shetland mainland. That said, the eastern side of the islands is the first land that tired migrant birds, running on the last of their dwindling energy reserves after a flight that may have stretched back to Siberia or beyond, catch a glimpse of. Shetland must be a welcome sight indeed.

Some days, in the autumn, when the wind is blowing from the east, birds can rain down from the skies. There have been days when goldcrests have fallen like confetti, landing exhausted on the rain-spangled backs of bewildered sheep, and redstarts have lined up in their dozens to roost at night on the windowsills of my crofthouse. Moments like that feel as much a blessing as a wonder of nature.

With those common migrants come the rarer birds, the ones that arrive singly, if at all. The peninsula upon which my home sits was where the first collared flycatcher and red-flanked bluetail believed ever to have been seen in Britain were found, in the early 20^th century. They were, as was the way back then, shot – their bodies sent to the national museum in Edinburgh, confirming their identity and their place in the ornithological history books. A bird that was seen, but not collected, was an empty record in those days – as the saying went at the time, what’s hit’s history, what’s missed’s mystery…

Times have changed. Subsequent flycatchers and bluetails have been met with a more benevolent welcome. We shoot birds with cameras now, if at all. My camera lives in readiness beside the window that overlooks my small, enclosed garden at the front of the house. It’s taken years to get trees established in what, when I first moved here, was bare, exposed grass growing on a shallow skin of soil stretched thinly over the knuckle of rock that forms the spine of the peninsula. Years, and much patience – trees grow slowly here, set back by the short summer growing season and the ravages of salt spray and the wind. They need to be cosseted when newly planted, and encouraged like recalcitrant teenagers as they mature.

But now those years of nurture and patience are paying me back. The hardy willows, sea buckthorns, fuchsias, hawthorns and rowans in the garden act like a magnet for migrant birds and, amongst them, the sorts of rarities that bring other birders hastening to the island to catch even a fleeting glimpse of them. Their names are redolent and evocative. Some, like steppe grey shrike and Pechora pipit, hint at their faraway origins. Others commemorate long-ago ornithologists who discovered the species in their native lands - Blyth, Pallas and Radde all have warblers that bear their names. Those names are poetry and history bound together, but for the keenest of birders, the ones who make a pilgrimage here every autumn hoping to see their like, they offer the promise of dreams fulfilled.

Birders love to see new birds, and they usually keep score of those on a British life list – a tally of the species they’ve seen, over the years, in the bounds of Britain. I gave up keeping one of those many years ago – it became meaningless once I moved here, and focused instead on seeing what I could find from the windows of my home. After a flurry of birds in the early years, when everything was new, it grows only incrementally now, a few new species every year, if that.

There’s a pleasure in that. I never know what’s just around the corner. I could open the curtains and find an American golden plover has pitched down in the fields that surround the house. Glance across to the byre to find a hoopoe walking, bold as brass, amongst the small flock of hens I keep for their eggs. Find a red-breasted flycatcher darting around the rose bushes after insects. Or see every bird in the vicinity take to the skies in panic as a white-tailed eagle cruises, with intent, down the island.

One day, though not just yet, there will be a snowy owl (as shown in the main banner image)...

I live in hope. The birds see to that, whether they’re rarities or everyday sparrows. We take our hope where we can find it, these days and, come what may in the human world, the birds will still be coming and going.