so crowded it semed there could not be room for one more bird – yet all the eggs were still not hatched on the islands which now were filled with green, so that the patiently sitting birds could no longer be seen through the binoculars of London’s bird-watchers. And every day, while the earlier-hatched broods became gawky and lumpish attempts after the elegant finish of their parents, freshly hatched birds scattered over the water.
On an arm of the lake where a bridge crossed over, a water-hen was sitting in full view of everybody. The water is very shallow there. A couple of yards from shore, the water-hens had made a nest in the water of piled dead sticks. But not all the sticks were dead. One had rooted and was in leaf, a little green flag above the black-and-white shape of the coot who sat a few feet from the bridge. There she crouched, looking at the people who looked at her. All day and half the night, when the park was open to the public, they stopped to observe her. They did more than look. On the twiggy mattress that extended all around her, were bits of food thrown by admirers. But these offerings caused the poor coots much trouble, because particularly the sparrows, sometimes thrushes and blackbirds, even ducks and other non-related water-hens, came to poke about in the twigs for food. The coot – male or female, it seemed they took it in turns to sit – had to keep rising in a hissing clatter of annoyance, to frighten them off. Or the mate who was swimming about, to fetch morsels of food for the sitting bird, came fussing up to warn off trespassers, but still the sparrows kept darting in to grab what they could, and fly off. Even the big swans came circling, so that the little coots looked like miniatures beside the white giants. Much worse than bread was thrown. All the lake under and around the bridge became laden with cans, bits of paper and plastic, and this debris lay bobbing or sagging on water which already, after only a few days of powerful new summer, was beginning to smell. Now the summer was really here, and the park crowded, grass and paths were always littered, and the water smelled worse every day. Particularly where the coots were. That sitting of coot eggs must have been the most public in coot history. Yet they had chosen the site, built the nest. And they went on with their work of warming the eggs, till it was done. Admirers loitered on the bridge through the last days, to shield the birds from possible vandals and to prevent cans being aimed at the birds themselves, and also to catch, if possible, the moment when a coot chick took to the water. I am sure there were those who did see this, for the attention was assiduous. I missed it, but one hot afternoon when the bridge was more than usually crowded, I saw a minute dark-coloured chick floating near the nest, with a parent energetically foraging near it for bits of food. The sitting bird lifted itself off the twig mattress to stretch her muscles in a great yawn of wing, and there was a glimpse of white under her: an unhatched egg, and some shell. There was another chick there too, disinclined to join its sibling on the water. The swimming parent fetched slimy morsels for the one on the nest. He, or she, took the fragments and pushed them into the chick’s gape. The swimming chick was crammed by the swimming parent. It looked as if the swimming bird was trying to make the waterborne chick venture farther from the nest. It kept heading off, in the energetic purposeful way of coots, and swinging around to see if the little chick had followed. But the chick had scrambled back to the nest, and disappeared under the sitting bird. The swimming bird went off quite a distance, and got on to the bank by itself. On the bridge was a threesome, a tall pretty girl with a young man on either side. They had been watching the coots. She said: ‘Oh, I know, he’s gone off to see his mistress, and she is going to have to feed her babies herself.’ ‘How do you know?’ asked one young man. The other laughed, very irritated. He walked off. The girl followed him, looking anxious. The young man who had said ‘How do you know?’ followed them both, hurrying.
All afternoon, the birds took turns on the nest, one swimming and fetching food for the other, and from time to time a chick climbed down off the great logs of the timber platform he had been hatched on, and bobbed and rocked on the waves. Meanwhile, all the surface of the lake around the nest was full of every kind of swimming bird, adult, half-grown, and just hatched. In such a throng, that one minute coot chick was an item, precious only to the guardian parents.
Coots are strict-looking, tailored, black-and-white birds among the fanciful ducks, the black swans with their red sealing-wax bills. They have a look of modest purpose, of duty, of restraint. And then one comes up out of the water to join birds crowding for thrown bread, and the exposed feet are a shock, being large, whitey-green, scaly, reptilian, as if they had belonged to half-bird, half-lizard ancestors, and have descended unaltered down the chains of evolution while the birds modified above water into the handy, tidy water-hen shape – a land shape, it is easy to think. Yet the coot is more water-bird than any duck or goose. If you stand feeding a crowd of birds, and there are gulls there, they will swoop in and past, having caught bits of bread from the air as if these were leaping fish – the gulls will get everything, if you aren’t taking care of the others. A tall goose will stand delicately taking pieces from your fingers, like a well-mannered person, then turn to slash savagely another competing goose with its beak: after the gulls, these geese provide for themselves best. The ducks, apparently clumsy and waddling, are quick to snatch bits when the geese miss. But to try and feed the coots – for which, sentimentally, I have a fancy – is harder than to feed shyer deer in a zoo when the big ones have decided they are going to get what is going. First, the water-hens have to get up on the bank on those clumsy water-feet. And then their movements are slower than the other birds’; the coots are poking about after the bits when the others have swallowed them and are already crowding in for more. Yet, in the water, there is nothing quicker and neater.
That long public sitting succeeded, at last, in adding only one coot chick to the park’s population. One afternoon there were two parents and two chicks, busy with each other and their nest among the crowds of birds; next afternoon there were two coots and one bobbing dark fluffball.
But the nest was there, with bits of bread still stuck in the twigs. And there it stayed all summer, and all autumn, and although the green fell off, or was pecked off the sentinel twig, nest and twig are there now, in winter – so perhaps in the coming spring the same or another pair of coots will bring up another family, in spite of the staring ill-mannered people and their ill-judged offerings, and their cans and their plastic and their smell. But the twig platform will certainly have to be refurnished, for as soon as the coot family had left it, it was found most convenient by the other fowl to sit on, and play around; and the twig that had rooted and stood up was a good perch for water-venturing sparrows. There never were so many sparrows as last year: you could mark the season’s increase in population by the contrast between the young birds’ tight shape and shiny fresh-painted look, and their duller shabbier parents. Where did they all hatch? Apart from those of the water-birds, and a shallow fibre nest that was exposed, when autumn came and stripped the chestnut avenue, woven on twigs not much higher above the path than a tall man’s head, so that the sitting bird in its completely concealing clump of leaves must have been inches above the walking people – apart from these, I saw no nests save one on the ground, among bluebells and geraniums and clumps of hosta. The bird was sleekly brown, and watching me, not over-anxiously, as I watched her from the path a yard or so away. She sat with her warm eggs pressed to her spread claws by her breast, and saw possible enemies pass and repass all day, for the days it took her to get the chick out into the light. Yet, like the coot, she had chosen that exposed place to sit, near a path, just behind the Open Air Theatre. Perhaps, like the foxes that are coming in from the country which hunts and poisons and traps them, to the suburbs, where they live off town refuse, some birds are coming to terms with us, our noise, and our mess, in ways we don’t yet see? Perhaps they even like us? And not only people – a few yards from the sitting brown bird was a place where somebody was putting out food for stray cats. There were saucers of old and new food, and milk, and water, bits of sandwich and biscuit, under the damask roses all the summer, and the cats came to this food, and did not attack the sitting bird – who, perhaps, used this food when the cats were not there? It is possible that she put up with the amplified voices and music from the theatre because of its restaurant, not more than a few seconds’ flight away, just the right distance for a quick crumb-gathering before the eggs had time to chill. There must have been many other nests in that thick little wood where the theatre is, and many birds calling that patch of the park theirs. Certainly, each year’s production of A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, good, bad or indifferent, offers marvellous moments that are not in the stage directions, when an owl hoots for Oberon,