Hiding in plain sight

You don’t have to go to far flung wildernesses to experience the wild. It exists everywhere and in tandem with us; all we need to do to enter this wild world  is look.  This weekend I witnessed something lovely which proves the point.

I’m not going to reveal the exact location to ensure the safety of the protagonists; sufficient to say that the action took place in a thronged urban park very close to my house. During a busy event which saw stalls set out under the lovely old plane trees flanking the park I noticed in one of the trees the angry rattling alarm call of a Mistle Thrush. This, I thought to myself, could well be the bird who’s dreamy song I have often heard from our back garden, and I began to circle the huge trunk in hope of seeing the bird.  I was not alone – another woman had noticed the sound too and we resolved that one of us would see the angry bird. In fact, we saw so much more.

All of a sudden I could see what was hiding in plain view – a thrush, sitting boldly upright in the fork of the tree a scant twelve feet above our heads. Big as it was, it soon became apparent that this was a juvenile bird still in the nest and it’s parents were flying about the tree fitfully, making that rattling sound.  As we watched in amazement a parent bird suddenly flew in, stuffed a cherry into a gaping beak and vanished as suddenly as it had come. This flurry of excitement revealed three chicks in the very much outgrown nest, who quickly settled down so that only the very tops of their heads were visible.

I wish I’d taken a picture to show you exactly where all of this was taking place. Directly below the tree was a plant stall and a busy path on which families were walking to and fro. Ten yards to the right is an extensive and noisy children’s playpark and ten to the left, a community centre where youths lounged drinking orange juice post football practice. This spot is always busy, and yet I wondered how many people had ever noticed this nest sitting in the open on the broad tree fork just above head height. The Mistle Thrush is supposed to be a shy bird, and yet here it was confident in it’s own invisibility in an environment where people mostly just scurry past, head down. I’ve heard these lovely birds singing from busy intersection street lights in the most uncompromisingly grim and urban spots, traffic thundering by, the most sordid of human dramas enacted below.

They have adapted admirably to life alongside us; there is something poignant and oddly touching in how the nest appeared to be made largely of frayed nylon rope and strips of plastic bags. I turned to my friend and said that if there hadn’t been an event happening they may well have left the nest this very day, and shortly afterwards while a knot of us chatted and watched, one of those birds did take a momentous leap and left the nest, flying safely to a branch in the same tree.

These wise birds have inhabited this park for years and I had always wondered where they nested. Turns out they hadn’t even been hiding from me. The woman who had joined me in looking for the birds told me that she’d seen Mistle Thrushes nest in plain view on the front of the Town Hall and it seemed to her that she was the only person who ever noticed, noisy and large though these birds are. I started to wonder – how do they do it? I don’t mean how do they go un-noticed; human preoccupation would easily account for that. Rather how can they make their home in such seemingly threatening environments, with all the cars, pollution, humans and noise – how does it not drive these shy birds crazy? Perhaps they do that truly urban thing of shutting out all that does not immediately effect them – the human world is as invisible to the thrushes as their world usually is to us.

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