Rusty and Flit

   Rusty and Flit

    The kids were up at the crack of dawn again this morning, twittering non-stop, especially Rusty Junior; ‘can we go yet dad, can we go yet?’ I’m Rusty, by the way, (ok, get the jokes over with, I’ve heard them all before). My other half, Flit, or ‘her outdoors’, as I like to call her, she says he takes after me, but I don’t see it. For one thing he never stops moaning, complains about everything; dad I’m too hot, dad I’m too cold, dad I’m hungry, dad I’m thirsty. Wait till he’s flown three thousand miles and then has to cross the Sahara Desert. That’ll give him plenty to complain about, let’s see how hot and thirsty he gets then.

***

    Mind you, it’s not entirely his fault. The noisy nuthatch neighbours don’t help, whistling and trilling till all hours. I won’t miss them while we’re gone. It’s alright for them, it’s not their food supply that’s getting scarce, it’s not them that have to fly half-way around the world every year just so as they can eat. Bloody evolution. We drew the short straw there alright.

***

    They’ve been stockpiling food for weeks now; seeds, nuts and berries, hiding them in nooks and crannies all over the place. That said, I wouldn’t want their diet for all the flies in Africa. Imagine eating that squashy, sour…urgh, it doesn’t even  bear thinking about. To make it worse, they’re complete show-offs, walking head-first down tree-trunks like it’s the most natural thing in the world; they know we can only dream of such a thing.

    Then there’s the jays, always scrarking and up to no good, the magpies too. Then the woodpeckers join in with their awful yaffling. They never seem to shut up. There isn’t a minute’s peace to be had.

***

    It’s been another chaotic summer. I got back late again this year. Last year I got comfortable in Spain and stayed longer than I should have. This year I was blown off course as I came up the coast of Africa and I wound up somewhere over the Atlantic. What am I like, eh? I think I even saw Madeira at one point.

***

    It wasn’t a good start, but as luck would have it, when I finally landed back, Flit had already got most of the renovation work finished and the nest was almost like new. I helped with the finishing touches; added a bit more mud to the foundations and collected a few feathers to finish the lining.

***

    We ended up making good time and by the end of May Flit had laid our first clutch of six eggs. One of the eggs didn’t hatch, I’m not sure what happened there, but anyway, by early July I was hurtling around, busting a gut trying to fill the gapes of one nest-bound mate and five ravenous youngsters, while Flit sat around incubating our second clutch.

***

    And now here we are, on the verge of another nightmare journey. They say that kids grow up too quickly these days. Well, in our case, they haven’t much choice; from egg to independence in three months. I kid you not, three months from blind, naked and helpless, to fully-feathered masters of the air, able to pursue and easily catch the fastest, most aerobatic flying insects, strong enough to take-on their first long-haul flight from our summer home, here in northwest England, to our winter retreat south of the Sahara.

***

    It’s not a journey I look forward; I often have bad dreams in the days leading up to departure. They usually involve Flit and all the kids being caught and killed by a flock of Eleanora’s falcons that carry them off to their nests to fatten their young on ours. I wonder how they even sleep at night.     

***

    I’m staying behind for a week or so this year after Flit and the kids have left. I told Flit I wasn’t quite ready, needed to put a bit more weight on, I said. She thinks I’m a bit of a hero, setting off on such a long journey alone, but the truth is that, after last year, I’m ready for some me time. We’d barely reached the English midlands and it was ‘are we nearly there yet, are we nearly there yet,’ and I had them in my ear for nearly six-thousand miles.

***

    Well, that’s it, they’ve gone, and I have to say it’s all gone very quiet around here. You could hear a pine-needle drop. I got a good seven hours last night, the silence was delightful. The magpies and jays have spread out across the countryside foraging for food, the woodpecker too, his tuneless yaffles now a distant echo. Even the nuthatch neighbours have stopped all their din. Heaven.

***

    I don’t know if I’ll manage a week of this. It’s like a morgue. No, I think a change of plan is in order. I’ll just have a couple of days; have a good feed, tidy the flight-feathers up, and I’ll be off.

***

    So, here I go, one last look at the peaks of the Lake District, already growing their white winter caps, and I’m away, over the vast shifting sands of Morecambe Bay, under a leaden English sky, hurtling south. If I make good time, maybe I’ll catch them up.

***

    I’ve never been so hot, hungry or thirsty, and I’ve barely started on the Sahara. Whose stupid idea was it to stay back. I hardly found anything to eat until I got to France. I’d managed to pile on the weight and was a whopping twenty-two grams; over three-quarters of an ounce. Now I’ll be lucky if I weigh half an ounce.  

***

    Last night I dreamed I was brunching on huge, juicy beekillers, tail-brushed from a buffalo’s back end on the baking African plains, while the nuthatches back home froze their follicles off as they sheltered from the pelting sleet in a snow-encrusted tree hole in a world free of flying insects.

***

    And that was all I needed. It spurred me on, and today I joined Flit, Rusty Junior and the rest of the family in Namibia, and we spent the day buzzing over the plains, gorging on assassin-flies and bluebottles put up by grazing zebra and wildebeest.

***

    Four long months and I’m starting to think this winter will never end. It’s far hotter here than in summer back home. The food’s good, granted, and there’s plenty of it, and the youngsters are all independent now, but you can only take so much sun, only eat so many delicacies. You can only have so much fun.

***

    Last night I dreamed of home. The nuthatches were singing sweetly to each other as they re-plastered the entrance to their nest-hole; the woodpeckers, yaffling joyously and living up to their name; clouds of midges, glistened like diamonds in the spring sunshine as I sliced through them on scimitar wings.

***

    This morning when I woke there was great excitement in the air. Thousands had gathered on every branch of every tree and shrub for as far as you could see. We decided I’d fly back with Flit this year, so we joined the throng, did some mutual preening, and we all took to the air in a cacophony of twittering. It’s a long and treacherous journey. Let’s hope we don’t get separated, and that I don’t run into any freak storms or lose my bearings.