It was my mother who left the door ajar. I was 4 or 5 at the time, watching her weed the rockery at home while our resident robin flitted around her in a hesitant dance. And suddenly I found myself pulled into a conversation with echoes back to Eden and those first excited evening reflections on the discoveries of the day.

Eurasian Robin. Not of course the one who befriended my mother, but a distant descendant that accompanied a doctor friend and me through the grounds of Antrim Castle.

A robin. Why was it called that? Why didn’t it fly away like all the other birds did when I was around? What did it eat? Could it understand my mum when she talked to it?

Watching and listening to the birds in our garden, the rare sight of a red squirrel in the Scotch Pines, hunting for mushrooms, spotting the fish in the local stream, collecting and pressing wildflowers (it was legal back then) for primary school, collecting caterpillars to watch their metamorphosis. Folders stuffed with pictures, bird and flower identifications, naming of parts, Enid Blyton nature stories, endless questions and searching along the track of the abandoned railway line for a rare orchid. I even had an ant colony (two sheets of glass in a wooden frame, filled with soil and sand) and spent long hours watching their remarkable industry.

A Red Admiral feeding on Sea Holly, one of the plants that takes me back to my childhood garden

The conversation faded for a time, while something called ‘real life’ took over. It was as if the dance had moved to a distant corner of the room without ever quite going away. Names were forgotten, but the music remained. And then came the digital revolution and the possibility of entering the conversation again, this time through a camera lens. The dance swept me up with it and hasn’t let me go since.

Barred Owl. First surviving digital bird photo, from woods outside Cleveland, Ohio.

I began to take a telephoto lens with me on my travels. Family trips to California, Florida and Tennessee, speaking trips to England, South Africa and Transylvania became opportunities to seek and photograph some of the more exotic wildlife that I had only seen in the pages of National Geographic Magazine or in some of the BBC wildlife programmes. Other fields always seemed greener.

Brown Pelican, Santa Barbara, California

It wasn’t until ‘lockdown’ (an ugly name for an uglier thing) that I began to pay attention to what was around me, and especially to the birds in our garden. I decided to make photographing garden birds my project during those restricted time.

Chaffinches in the snow, waiting for crumbs to fall from the bird feeder.

I’ve never been any good at DIY but I managed to rig up a feeding station and a perch and using our garden house as a hide, I began to document the birds that visited our garden. I was surprised at the variety: in addition to the robin (every garden has a robin) and the chaffinches, we had starlings, blackbirds, siskin, dunnocks, wagtails, house sparrows, swallows, house martins, collared doves, wrens, blue tits, great tits, gold finches, jackdaws, rooks, magpies, coal tits, and some rare visits from redpolls, greenfinches and a brambling. Missing were birds of prey, although buzzards patrolled the fields nearby, thrushes, bull finches, gold crests, long tailed tits and water fowl, as we didn’t have a pond.

The magnificent, multi-coloured plumage of the starling.

Taking pictures of largely static birds (birds on a stick) was (and still is) really enjoyable. But I wanted to photograph birds actually doing something! And so was born the desire to photograph birds in flight.

Thankfully, digital is very forgiving! It took hundreds of attempts before I managed a sharp photo and several thousand before I managed any that had artistic merit. No wonder I had stayed away from bird photography in the days of film!

A siskin coming into land while warning off competitors.

A swallow swooping low over our neighbour's roof in pursuit of the next meal.

We have since moved on, back into suburbia. The large garden is no more. But there are still birds to photograph and a vast coastline along which to photograph them. The conversation will continue!

Conversations with Creation

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