Non-Fiction
Bush Journal / Zakiya Mckenzie
Image from The language of birds, London: Saunders and Otley,1837, via biodiversitylibrary.org/page/47512262.
Prelude to a Pandemic: December
It wasn’t pretty, the first time I really took note of the birds around me. There I was sitting under a tree with fake eyelashes freshly installed on my face. First time, mind you, and it took more than two hours of me lying on my back on a massage table, eyes taped shut, while a craft lady delicately glued wispy clusters to my lash line as lo-fi hip hop beats streamed in the background. It was the time of titivating; the holiday season always meant new dos for the parties to come. Canerows are freshly etched from scalp, delicate curls controlled into intricate designs that mimic fields of plaited vines. Fingernails become canvasses for feather-like strokes of design and brilliant embellishments that dazzle when you catch them in the corner of your eye. “If you a fly gal—get your nails done, get a pedicure, get your hair did,” said Missy Elliot over the speaker; I left the salon—looking, feeling—like a pretty bird with a completed plume and went to sit on a bench under a tree. That was a fatal move. Another bird, a real one in the tree, shat on me.
It was more horrible than it sounds. The bench I was on was by my child’s school. I was surrounded by other parents ready for school pickup, but no one had seen it happen. I was frantic mentally but I didn’t make a sound amongst the group. I went straight to parents with pushchairs to ask for wet wipes, already using up the paper in my pocket. Miss Bee heard my call. When she heard what happened, Miss Bee looked appalled for a split second before steeling her face, taking out wet wipes, and carefully cleaning me off. She saw that I was still shuddering, so picking up on our shared culture, she switched to Jamaican patois and started speaking with familiarity. This made me forget the tears welling up behind the lashes, and I released my clenched teeth. Fate put Miss Bee and I together that day (just like the anonymous bird that shat on me). Her family is from where my own family live in a small rural community, a village so deep in the Jamaican countryside that town-people would refer to it as ‘back-a-bush’. What are the odds! Miss Bee’s favourite Aunt is someone I’ve known all my life as my Grandmother’s church sister. When I go to Jamaica for my grandmother’s 90th birthday I take photos with Miss Bee’s family and send them back to her in Bristol. We first met and found this out because of a bird, one I never did see or hear. I know nothing of it except what it did to me.
I wasn’t supposed to get the lashes moist or wet for at least 24 hours while they dried, but I didn’t care about being a fly gal right then. I rushed home for a long, long wash.
***
March
As we enter the first spring of the pandemic there is nothing to do but watch the ground open up. In this new season, this new way of life, it is the comfrey that I first notice burst with colour and flying things, its drooping blossoms like purple pepper lights on tall limbs with broad, hairy leaves. The plant is forgettable without the flowers, just a green bush. I might not have even noticed it if I wasn’t forced to stay at home, but there is a constant and slow hum surrounding it. More than a hum, it is a low and permeating zing of bees disappearing into hidden compartments of tube-like flowers. The sound hastens and then all but disappears until they re-emerge to flit to another bloom. I try to follow to find out where they take their nectar, but my eyes are neither quick nor focused enough to see what happens when they go beyond the rosehip. I think they are ground nesters because they always seem to be coming from low, but right now I can’t be sure and I don’t care that much. It would be nice to know the names of things but it does not fundamentally change how I experience them, does it? I can enjoy the zing song, their fluffy black and yellow bodies covered in white powdery stuff, without knowing their names. I can appreciate what I don’t fully understand, because me understanding it does not change how valuable they are to this little patch.
April
There are birds outside, but I’m more interested in controlling the patch because it is one of the few things within reach. I spend a lot of time digging up old plant beds, turning over soil, and dragging out weeds. It is my first year with a garden, and I’ve been waiting for the chance to grow my own food outside. I watch videos on gardening in England and browse through plant care apps while I eat breakfast. I get seeds and seedlings from neighbours and friends and buy a few myself. I think I know what I’m doing.
Inside, ants start to menace the kitchen, a thing I learn about spring with a garden. I never had this problem in my top floor flat. Comparing, it is a good problem to have. So, while I curse them and complain about the nuisance of crawly things inside, I leave sugar and honey in the fridge at night so that I don’t have an even bigger squatting colony in the morning. I imagine they too don’t really want to be inside, but the hunt for spring nourishment has probably pushed them farther and farther towards the kitchen. I imagine that most of the things they find yummy in the garden aren’t ripe for the taking yet. The last of the winter chill will need to disappear before I no longer find them in the house. Until then, they stream in to please their queen, even though it isn’t safe for them.
May
The pandemic begins to haunt. I haven’t instated a strict news blackout yet. Instead, I am inside-out with deep fear, lingering grief, and worry. The news updates are all gloom and sadness. The air is heavy with everyone’s breathy sighs. The wind pangs with unrested, vulnerable people. It sits over us like the film on top of milk when you warm it up. Fragile, membrane thin, easily pierced and disrupted. Other times it is like thick cream rising to the top, keeping everyone bogged down. Everyone around me is worried how they will eat, sleep, and take care of themselves and family.
Ahmaud Arbery’s name enters the news stream. In the mornings when I write, his name bleeds through the pen before my mind registers the inky spilling. I sit outside for hours, because inside reminds me of where he can no longer go to rest. His body can only rest in the dirt now, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The worms will guiltlessly do as they please and here I am with the chance to still dig the dirt.
The currant leaves spread out and cover where the berries will eventually turn from a creamy green to red. I’m fascinated; from a bird’s eye view you can hardly see the fruit, but lift up a limb or crouch down beneath one and the branches are full of bunches of bright gems. The birds get louder by the day so I try to see who the visitors are. I pull up a little bird spotting guide and it doesn’t take long before I notice them coming into the cherry tree. It is now starkly in the sky with dazzling white blossoms speckled pink. It’s so very pretty and I don’t understand how more of us aren’t trying to save England’s tree cover; these beings have little chance if we make no amends for the damage we humans have caused.
In the first spring of the pandemic, the first spring in which I had a garden, the first bird that I identify correctly is flitting in the berry bramble. It is blueish-green and white, with a head that seems a bit too big for its body. It’s a blue tit and that’s all it takes for me to have something to do—watch and name the birds.
June
By June I know all the ones I’ve seen. I don’t see the blue tit again but a great tit comes singing a few days later. Homemade bird feeders are filled with seed and fat balls are hung to invite hungry flyers. It is now house sparrow central. I think I even know some of them separately—there’s a male that comes by himself almost every day, and sometimes with two other birds. Is it a nuance of lockdown? I wonder if I would have noticed the different ones if we weren’t staying home, if I wasn’t sitting in front of a window overlooking a wild patch every day. Or would I have even cared? The question feels existential because global protests within a pandemic will do that to you.
The highlight of my birdwatching is seeing the dunnocks do confusing things. Once I see two of them in a peculiar dance after the rain. One is standing firmly as another pecks and pushes at its bum. I think the pecker is helping the other get rid of something annoying on its backside, maybe a wet leaf or a jutting feather. I take a video of the funny scene and post it online, naively pointing out a buddy helping a pal. My go-to girl Megan messages to say this is not a friendly grooming exercise but a sort of foreplay. My clumsy guess is a hallmark of my experiences with English nature spaces—I often have no clue what I'm looking at, but I love to look nonetheless. This time I’ve been inadvertently voyeuristic; I have recorded a male dunnock pecking the sperm of another male from the female’s cloaca before they mate. I learn that female dunnocks are mostly polyandrous, a rarity among birds (and humans), and can mate up to 100 times a day with her different guys. Before a new session, the male will try to get rid of sperm that is not his to better the chances of baby birds with his DNA. These males are in competition so will try to outshine each other (like humans), but dunnocks also work together for the greater good. It is common for two male dunnocks to look after the chicks of one female since the baby birds may be their own. The lady of the nest is well taken care of; I think of her as a lady of leisure. I settle with the knowledge that dunnocks are exemplary birds with exciting personal lives. I say a quiet prayer to ask to be reincarnated as a girl-dunnock at some point in the future. They come in by the flock; one day I count nine. They are feeding on the ground and some of them are spreading their wings and doing a little wiggle. It seems like they are demanding to be fed. These are regular scenes after a rain shower. I even see a blackbird and I am able to identify it by the yellow circle around its eye. That fact is now etched in my memory. I like to think that it is the same one that came back a month later to check for things to pull from the ground again. I see a robin for a fleeting moment too, and I wish it would stay longer so I could see more fluffy orange in the plum tree. The plums haven’t ripened yet but the cherries are piercing red so I climb one Sunday afternoon and strip the tree. I share them among friends and neighbours because there’s no way we will eat that much.
July
I finally feel a little more relaxed with life under lockdown. The weather is better and I see people I know outside. We still call each other to randomly remind ourselves that a pandemic is raging. When I’m in the garden in the early mornings, I sometimes can’t tell if what I hear is the hum of bees and flies rising with the morning sun or cars in the distance as the city reopens. I am still scared.
The garden is warm and shaded as the trees reach their height. Apples start going rosy and the fuchsia plant is regal purple and hot pink. Fox geranium blooms again, but I notice it less than I did when it was one of the first flowers of spring. There is a green finch in the plum tree for at least an hour one day. By now Megan has lent me a pair of binoculars and I wouldn’t have seen the finch without them. I may have heard the singing, but would not have seen the little thing, camouflaged in the green. I wonder how many other birds I’ve missed because I could not see them perched high and far in the bush. I put out bird seed for small ground feeders one morning but it is a wood pigeon that finds the food. It stays in the garden until lunchtime. It leaves and I try again but it returns with a friend. The next morning I’m up extra early and there is a pigeon napping in a tree. I wonder if it is here because there’s less food waste in the city with less people around? I don’t know, but then I think the same about rats and mice and don’t want to think about it anymore. I don’t put out the seeds like that again because no small, dainty bird will come to eat if pigeons are hogging the feed.
I think about the very first birds I knew to be in the garden—the two hens I had when I’d just moved in. I didn’t have to deal with unwanted pests then. Now, neighbouring cats use the beds as a litter box at night. When I go for walks, I look at people picking up poo from their pooches and I wonder why cat owners aren’t made to do the same thing. Then again, city pavements are treacherous catwalks when even just one dog walker does not account for their own shit.
My efforts to grow veggies are a failure because dotish, slimy slugs make it impossible. They eat every seed and every seedling. Left uncontrolled, every vegetable shoot is gone to them. I give up on growing food in the ground and get wildflower seeds. The slugs and snails feast out on these shoots too. Now I look at the sad bed and feel a bit of despair. It is such a small strip but I have little power over it. Can I control what I don’t understand, and is this a metaphor for my life? Next year I will forget the fandangle and frills and focus on the things at hand.
These days it is these birds in the trees that offer the kind of thing I want to feel about here and now. The time in the sun is so fleeting now, but the birds still sing melodies pure and true. I think there are less of them. But maybe that’s because it’s been a hot few days. There are birds flying in the sky but I don’t know what makes swifts special yet, so I don’t know if I’m looking at them or just regular Bristol city flyers. The comfrey is flowering again. There are bees like there were at the start of spring, fewer this time, and it’s because of me. I trimmed the bush, not knowing it would bloom again. I’m a little sad because I could have had more pretty flowers to look at and bees to hear. Maybe if I’d known the name sooner and known how to care for it, I would have done it due diligence.
As we get to the end of the month I realise that the summer isn’t as fun to watch as the spring here. Spring has these incredible reflections of our own life cycles and mental swings. Winter makes us forget the bright and beautiful, the striking and wonderful colours and layers that shoot out when the weather is just warm enough for the different plants to wake up. Spring is soft and slow, understated in its attractiveness until it bursts into noise and rhythm and tint and texture. Summer sun will always be extra special, but in England it is hit or miss—you may or may not get a real summer. Summer here isn’t even as good as December in Jamaica. It is hard to build confidence in its ability to be summery with any consistency. I don’t blame England for its climate, but I do feel that the gods gave it this weather out spite.
Now, when the cherry tree begins its late summer slowdown, I start to think about all the fallen leaves I’ll have to rake up soon. They’ll be a nuisance, crispy brown on the ground. I’ll look outside and hate how ‘ugly’ it looks and hate that I haven’t gone outside to clean them up all week. The treasure of the summer is the trash of an impending autumn. Summer’s shading is fall’s shedding. I will hold the memory of spring and the vigour of summer like a snowball stored in a freezer by a child from their one snow day.
I won’t forget the spring.
The magpies make ten different birds that I see in my garden in the first year of living with it. In fact, they were probably my first guests; what I thought was a big long-tailed tit in November was likely a magpie. They come to my garden almost every single day now to chatter and hang out in the cherry tree. Sometimes they try to eat from the fat balls but they are far too big to perch comfortably and thus stay mid-air, flapping while they pick a few bites. Sometimes they are mischievous and try to steal things hanging around the garden. They can sometimes be found picking about the ground too. I don’t mind that they are crows; I can’t do anything about it anyway and I don’t want to get rid of them. I learn that magpies remember faces and have been known to protect other species when they sense they are in danger. They are intelligent and they do no harm other than startling me with their flinchy ways. I think they have a bad rep because of their voice; because it is almost as if they know what we are saying, can sometimes mimic us and prattle back to show our own insecurities and lies. I prefer them to the bird that shat on me.