Chris Amies art

I suppose the ring ouzel is a kind of mildly exotic blackbird. Turdus torquatus means a thrush with a ring (around its neck). “Is that the blackbird that comes to your garden?” asks my art-club friend, but I don’t have a garden any more, though there is grass outside and trees where hundreds of unseen birds chatter in the early morning, and goldfinches sometimes flock around the vegetation by the seasonal pond – seasonal being when it rains heavily, which it has done so much recently, since the Old Queen died in fact, probably a coincidence.

But when I did have a garden it was all pigeons until the old chestnut tree nearby went down, and then, displaced from their haunt, it became parakeets, Kingston Pigeons as I’ve heard them called. So many that the flock made a whooosh overhead as they flew by.

Once I saw a stag beetle droning over in that same stretch of air. Not nearly so common. And once there was a hawk perched on the wooden structure in next door’s garden, tearing at its kill-it-yourself takeaway dinner.

And all that was nothing compared with the bird life out of my back window in Selly Park, Birmingham. With several kinds of tree back there and a second-storey window I could watch nuthatches, finches of several kinds, goldcrests (so tiny and fast you just have the impression of where the bird has been); and in a great tree opposite the entrance to the road one night, an owl framed in a fork of branches, solemnly hooting to welcome the night.

Hoo? It said. Hoo?

You know who, I said. Don’t need us to tell you.

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Polychromous pencils on drafting paper

29 x 19 cm