HAVING cared for many birds over the years, I came to the decision to call a halt when my three aviaries started to fill to bursting point and my haven for birds was becoming a bird hell.
I only have 20 birds left now, mostly pigeons who are much too old to scavenge for a living. But as they die off one by one, it never ceases to break my heart.
Up until yesterday I had three aviaries operating. The back one had just one rook in residence. I rescued it after finding it as a fledgling, floundering in the road by Foryd Harbour in Rhyl. It had been hit by a car and had lost feathers, particularly from its wings. For this reason he had to be kept until he was able to fly again.
Unfortunately it was the end of the summer and being such a young bird I worried about its ability to fend for itself, so I decided to keep it over the winter.
I hate to use the word “it” to describe this bird, but I never knew its sex.
In my second aviary I kept a young female fledgling blackbird, brought to me after she had been mauled by a cat. She too had to stay with us because she wasn’t ready for release until autumn.
Winter passed and the time came for me to release them. About half way through April this year, I cut a large hole in the mesh of each aviary, big enough for each bird to let themselves out.
My thinking was that if they went out on their own, they would be more inclined to come back for safety and food. Every day I checked tentatively to see if they were still there, and felt relief that they had decided to stay.
Then yesterday, I was sat going through some papers and found some old photographs hidden beneath. One was of my late dad who died in his fifties. Like a bolt out of the blue I remembered that he had died 28 years ago on this very day, June 1, 1980.
Then my thoughts turned to my birds and I suddenly remembered that I“d forgotten to take food out to them.
It was about 10am. As I approached the rook’s aviary, I sensed something was wrong - it was strangely quiet. My heart sank when I realised he’d flown.
I should have felt joy but I just felt a horrible hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
So much so, I cried.
I then checked to see if I still had my blackbird and heaved a sigh of relief that she was still there. But that joy would soon be short-lived: a few hours later, while hosing down the pigeon’s flight, I heard the noisy “chip - chip” of a blackbird swoosh past and realised she too had taken flight.
I was inconsolable after that! I cried so much my eyes began to resemble a bull frog.
The problem with me, is that I want to wrap all my charges in cotton wool. I stifle the poor things. But what I couldn’t understand was why they both reacted to the call of the wild on the same day? They’d flown from different aviaries, out of sight of each other.
So not only was I feeling down because I still miss my dad, but on the anniversary of his death, my two young birds make a bid for freedom. That evening, I prayed for a clear sign that they would be okay.
Now I know this might only be coincidence, but later that same night Paul McCartney was appearing in Liverpool, so I watched some of his live show on TV.
I have to say I’ve never been a big fan of the Beatles, or Wings, so I watched it because Bob was insistent.
Halfway through his set, Paul sang a song called “Blackbird”. I listened in amazement at the words, because they could have been written for my birds.
The lyrics sang of mended broken wings and the freedom these birds had been longing for and was now happening.
The song kept repeating the words, “All your life, you’ve been waiting for this moment to arrive, blackbird fly..”
I have to say, it gave me a strange sort of comfort. Could this be the message that I’d prayed for? I guess I’ll never know for sure. But nobody can deny that all four events happened on the same day, and that has to be more than pure coincidence.
At least my birds have been given a second chance, not so the pile of birds I found piled up on the edge of a field near Bodfari after they’d been shot to death by some moron who had used them as living targets.
These birds would have had chicks waiting to be fed, so not only did this person kill around 40 parent birds, he would have killed closer to 100 when you include their young.
Now you might think that crows are a farmer’s pest, but not if a farmer friend from Trefnant is right, when he told my husband Bob (who was then a shooter) that you never kill crows because they are the farmer’s friend.
They eat all the beetle-type bugs and grubs that can spoil crops. Crows. like other scavengers. will only attack animals when they are either dead or weak. It’s nature, unfortunately.
Meanwhile I have my own broken heart to heal, and a lesson to learn, that I am not cut out to take in baby birds.
I have too much difficulty letting go.
