Each month, Rachel Lambert – foraging guide, artisan maker and award-winning author – will be writing a journal for us, reflecting on the changing seasons and observations on nature and the landscape around us. Rosyansow is the Cornish word for wanderings or ramblings, an apt name for a thoughtful conversation about what’s in season in nature right now.

For the month of August, in celebration of our first ever Bird Month, she has written about birds.

I have a confession, I don’t know my bird songs very well. I can tell a blackbird, a pigeon and skylark, but after that my tuning in can be a bit ‘off’. Though I do know beauty when I see it, and I spot it everywhere with birds!

Here at The Gardeners’ House this August we’re celebrating beautiful birds; their colours, shapes and much more. Trawling through the archive, Emily the archivist pointed me in the direction of a whole pile of wonderful books that celebrate birds.

A book on birds from the Gardeners’ House archive

Just a stone’s throw away in Marazion is RSPB’s Nature Reserve, which is the largest reed bed in Cornwall. This is a wonderful place to spot a wider variety of birds in a protected area, in fact, over 250 different kinds of bird species have been recorded here over the years.

Great Black-backed Gull (www.rspb.org.uk)

What are your favourite birds to spot here in Cornwall?

I love the sight of solo Curlews on the shoreline, I delight in a covey of Oyster Catchers in flight, then there’s the winter murmuration of Starlings in Penzance town, but the daily coo-coo of Pigeons equally softens my heart.

Curlew (www.rspb.org.uk)

Many of the birds we are used to seeing here in Cornwall are on the decline. Oyster catchers are on the amber list of birds at risk, and the Great Black-backed Gull and Curlews are both on the red list. If we want to continue to enjoy birds in our lifetime and beyond, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) recommend a whole host of ways we can all reduce our carbon footprint to help curtail climate change and help birds. From switching energy supplier to decluttering our digital storage to save on energy, see the whole list here – Tips to Reduce your Carbon Footprint by Lowering Emissions

Delving into the archive here at The Gardeners’ House we’re reminded how species loss is not a new thing, but can come about for different reasons. In Johnothan Couch’s book ‘Cornish Birds’ he writes of the bird Storm Petrel (Oceanodroma Leucorhoa) and the first ‘specimen’ that was taken in Cornwall in 1831;

‘found dead this morning at Penellick (Penelick) near Pelynt; kill’d I suppose by last night’s Storm. This is the first to have been recognis’d in Cornwall.’

 

Recognising beauty in birdlife

There are many birds I could focus on for this blog, from beautiful seabirds to exotic birds that occasionally grace our county. But I want to give some attention to common birds that we may hear or see daily – the blackbird for example, or pigeons.

In the archive there is a beautifully illustrated book called Pigeons and People by George Ordish and Pearl Binder which traces the relationship between people and pigeons over time. The authors seem to make an art out of paying attention to the exquisite beauty of pigeons. For example, they dedicate pages to the variety of feral pigeons found in towns and map out their colour variation;from grey or black pied to blue, light blue chequer, mealy to dark blue chequer.

Image credit:  pexels-creapattern-187589-596792

At The Gardeners’ House birds have been celebrated, observed, created then admired again. These beautiful bird mobiles at the Gardeners’ House have been throwing out equally beautiful moving shadows that can remind us all of beauty in the simplest of things.