Changing Migration Patterns

Dwelling on change after noticing that there are different birds nesting in the chimney this year.

There’s jackdaws nesting in my neighbours chimney. It’s the chimney next to my childhood house, really, but I still refer to it as my home regardless whether I currently live there or not. They make a very specific caw, it cracks and cackles almost, it’s sharp and cuts through the softer jumbled warbling of the other birds mixed in with the buzzing of flies and the distant noise of children playing.

We used to have house martins that nested up around the roof and gutters, disappearing in the winter but returning with the sun, dipping and diving through the air. I haven’t seen them nest here in a while, nor seen one at all recently. I wonder if their migration habits are changing with the climate, or perhaps they’ve moved out of the city to roost for the summer. It’s weird that I haven’t noticed their absence until now - I used to sit on the kitchen side, arms wrapped around my knees, feet balanced on the edge of the sink. I would watch them loop and swirl in the eaves, gliding out over the gardens, over the heads of the other children playing outside. I guess I haven’t sat there in a while, I don’t think my adult body would fit so neatly in the windowsill, but perhaps I also just haven’t been looking as much.

There are lots of things I thought would never change, like the house martins perpetual pilgrimages to our house. Every friendship that grows convinces me through tricks of the light that this one really will be around forever; relationships through rose-coloured glasses speak of growing old, while each new house I live suggests a sense of possible permanence - it can be this way always, if I try hard enough. Every time I go to a new bar or pub quiz, I hear myself saying, “Let’s do this every week!” with genuine intention. It never happens, though.

I desperately crave routine, but the city has other ideas. Nothing is ever the same from one week to the next. I watch the jackdaws come and go, and wonder what they will do to fill their time once the fledgelings have flown the nest. I screenshot posters for events I won’t go to. I wish I had it together enough to be a regular at a local coffee shop. Instead, I flit from place to place nomadically, non-committal to a particular barista’s oat flat white.

There’s a rumour doing the rounds in various smaller scale news outlets at the minute that foxes are beginning to choose to be domesticated, just like cats did all those years ago when they realised life would be easier if a human brought their food to them. I was born with a shock of fox-red hair pasted to my scalp that my mum thought was blood when she first saw me, so I’ve always felt an affinity with the stealthy creatures. I wrote that I wanted to be a fox when I grew up on my homework about future dreams at primary school, and whilst I didn’t quite achieve that, I do now feed the foxes every night I’m at my parent’s house. We may not be one and the same, but we do get to communicate with gentle glances in midnight smokey city sky black eyes. Change comes in ebbs and flows, but sometimes you don’t notice it until it stares you in the face.

Until next time,

Eerie x

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We’re currently living in a period of time that will almost certainly be remembered as a cultural moment; there’s a buzzing excitement in the air that smells like the summer nighttime air when you step outside after pre-drinks, hyped up on poorly mixed g&t’s and that reliable girly pop playlist, stumbling onto the bus to the club sometime between 12-1am. There’s the same words on everyone’s lips and the same songs in everyone’s headphones, walking down New Cross road I am certain I can point out more than five people definitely listening to the same thing as me at this very moment.

You guessed it - it’s brat summer, baby. 

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