As I'm sitting here writing at my window seat, there are a couple of wagtails walking the grounds outside. Literally early birds getting the worm.
I remember the first time I met a wagtail, near the start of the pandemic, when I was breaking the lockdown to walk illegally in Snake Park.
The lockdown in Italy was intense. Like, one person per household may leave the house once per week to get groceries. With a permission slip!
Long walks are load-bearing for my mental health. If I stayed inside in our apartment for too many days, we might have gotten a divorce. So I had to find ways to break the rules without disrespecting the neighbours too much. We were living in a neighbourhood of elderly people who were mostly terrified of the virus and therefore eager to enforce the rules.
I started by taking 4AM walks, saw the town for the first time smudged in seafog, saw a solitary streetlamp blinking intermittently, saw the home-made posters hung in windows expressing solidarity & courage. My bad Italian literacy got something like, “We were born in 1940 beneath the bombs… we raised a generation that will beat this virus too.” I stood there and cried a few minutes, imagining the 80-year old hands painting that banner.
I heard rumours of wild animals invading human territory: wolves, boars, deer encroaching into the streets of town. At 4AM I got to eavesdrop on a lot of owls but I didn't see any cool creatures.
As the lockdown progressed I got more bold, instead of walking under cover of darkness, I found obscure places to explore in the daytime. It must have been around this time that I was introduced to my favourite weekly newsletter: Field Notes from Christopher Brown. He explores semi-abandoned spaces at the edge of suburban expansion, bringing David Attenborough-levels of wonder to urban nature. His stories encouraged my exploring.
I found an enormous park just a few minutes from my house, explored it for weeks. It was once a farm, remnants of wheat fields, big old fig trees, falling over rows of grapevines, berry bushes gone higgledy-piggledy into the olive grove. Someone reclaimed a small community garden in one corner, a cathedral for the local tomato growers (fresh produce being the oldest & strongest religion in Italy).
I met so many creatures in that wild abandoned land. I called it Snake Park after my first close encounter with a wild snake, my foot just a few centimetres away from stomping on him. My childhood in New Zealand conditioned me to have no innate fear of wild creatures, all new creatures are assumed to be friendly. But that snake underfoot pressed a button in my brainstem, a moment of intense vertigo, hyperfocus, the simultaneous urge to leap 3 feet in the air and stay rooted to the spot.
Little streams cross this no-mans-land, artificially straightened into convenient channels. Full of frogspawn, then tadpoles, then frogs, and yes more snakes enjoying the buffet. In the trees I discovered loads of birds I hadn’t previously noticed living in my neighbourhood. Oh you’re telling me there are multiple distinct species of woodpecker here? There are ibis migrating up from Africa!? Eurasian jay, slightly less glamorous cousin of the American bluejay, but still cool af. I saw signs of rabbit, boar and deer, but I must have been too noisy to meet them. Loads of lizards, of course. Wherever you find one species of lizard, if you’re patient you’ll usually find another one or two more species nearby, they’ll just have better camouflage.
I spent hours in one of the little streams, stacking rocks to make a dam, lifting the water level while making an easy footpath to cross. In the water of course are a million invertebrates, bustling near the bottom of the food chain, down where the line between flora and fauna gets real fuzzy.
It was there at the dam building project that I met my first wagtail, walking along the water’s edge like a council inspector with hands in pockets, smartly dressed in black and white, pausing every few moments to bop his tail up and down enthusiastically. I assume he’s just as excited as I am to be hanging out with all the bugs and trees.
It was the lockdown that reconnected me back to a much younger version of me, growing up on a farm, exploring everything, fascinated, involved, unselfconscious, in wonder. In Snake Park I met more butterflies than I can count, dragonflies, milkweed, oak trees, enormous ant highways, cactus garden. The park reanimated my natural explorer curiosity, showed me that my adopted home of Europe is not just a human domain, there are millions of wild creatures here, too. As soon as the civilising stops for a minute, the networks of natural interplay immediately recharge the land with vitality. Life creates the conditions for more life.
So now every time I see a wagtail, for a second I am transported back to that April 2020 scene. He nods at me, I nod back in thanks. Good morning!