This hour of my life...

Today marks the start of the 2019 RSPB Birdwatch, and we encourage people to take part on the National Cycle Network routes. This morning, I wrapped up and headed to NCN1, the Roseburn Path behind Haymarket, thinking I'd maybe do an hour but escape if the rain started - I stayed out for 2.5 hours despite the rain starting! The path is a disused railway line so perfect for birds, providing a variety of habitats, food, song posts and cover - this morning I counted 23 species in all, including a grey wagtail, bobbing confidently around the cutting, and a treecreeper mousing up the tree trunks. Many of the smaller birds were gathered at the access ramp to Ravelston Dykes...goldfinch, long-tailed tits, siskin, greenfinch, so many bullfinches, and two species which squeezed my heart tight - a goldcrest and a brambling. Goldcrests are my favourite - tiny wren-sized birds with a fiery yellow stripe on their head...indeed Tennyson wrote of one that became trapped in his room, as a 'Golden-crested wren'. Despite being so tiny, they migrate across the North Sea (in Tennyson's day, it was assumed by hitching a lift on the back of owls or woodcocks) and sometimes make landfall in huge numbers....in 1982, 15,000 landed on the Isle of May. The brambling (Fringilla montifringilla....what a fabulous name) was the first I have ever seen. They breed in northern Europe and Asia and migrate south for winter, often in large flocks, like the goldcrest. I only saw one of each today, but each was enough to raise 15,000 emotions, along with the rest of the colourful secret world of the high tree tops and deep scrub. The nature writer Simon Barnes wrote of the Birdwatch recently "You start off in a noble spirit of self-sacrifice: I will give this hour of my life to the RSPB. And then you discover that the hour is in fact a gift to you." He's not wrong.