The week we moved in, a song thrush sang and our new neighbour knocked out the martin nests from under his eaves. The following spring, I located the thrush’s favourite song perch in a garden orchard and seven martin nest cups filled with birds on houses close by. A generation on, as we prepare to depart, the orchard is paved over, our local martins gone, all gone.
In a quarter of a century of living here, we have lost four parents, a brother, coal tits and chaffinches. Common terns fly over no more, passing trade once bound for a river that no longer feeds them. Red kites count among the additions, and I daresay our successor may imagine that they have always been pinned to the sky above their house. Little egrets, once unthinkable, are a dazzling white miracle, every time. Both of these arrivals feature large in the national discourse. But in my last months in Bedfordshire, I have thought a great deal about the other noteworthy changes in bird populations so specific to a locality, drawn out and observed over decades, that simply do not make any public record.
