Parrot Fashion: My Dad Lived on a Park Bench and Said the Dawn Chorus Means Fuck Off My Patch

My dad lived on a bench. I mean that literally. He was an alcoholic, a tramp and a violent nutcase. Same bench, morning to dusk, watching the world go by with a roll-up on his lip and a bottle of VP sherry, or can of Special Brew, whatever, any super strong drink would do, and an opinion about everything. He'd have been classified as a nuisance today probably. An obstruction. Back then he was just a tramp in the park, part of a big group of tramps that lived in Kings Cross, London.

The park had birds. Course it did. Parks have birds. But my dad had a relationship with his park birds that went beyond the usual chuck-a-bit-of-bread-and-walk-on arrangement most people settle for. He watched them the way some men watch football. With proper attention. With commentary.

He loved the dawn chorus. Everybody does, don't they? It's one of those things you're supposed to love. All those voices going at once in the early morning, this great swelling cathedral of sound rising up out of the trees while the light's still blue and the dew's still on the grass. Beautiful. People write poems about it. People set their alarms early to hear it. People sit in country houses with their binoculars and their expensive waterproofs going oh isn't nature magnificent.

My dad had a different interpretation.

"You know what they're actually saying, don't you?" he'd tell anyone who'd listen, which was mostly me. "Fuck off my patch. That's it. That's the whole song. Every single one of them, all morning, just telling every other bird to fuck off their patch. Beautiful, ain't it?"

He wasn't being cynical. That was the thing about my dad. He found it genuinely funny and genuinely beautiful at the same time. The comedy and the wonder weren't in competition for him. The birds were having an almighty verbal punch-up at the tops of their voices, and the result was something that made humans stop in their tracks and feel moved. He thought that was brilliant. He was right.

I've been thinking about him a lot lately because of the parakeets.

If you've spent any time around Stanborough Lakes, or anywhere in that wide green belt that runs across Hertfordshire and into London, you'll have heard them before you saw them. Bright green, loud as argument, moving in loose gangs through the trees like they own the gaff. Ring-necked parakeets. Not from here, originally. Nobody quite agrees on how they got here, escaped pets, film set escapees, Jimi Hendrix releasing a pair in Carnaby Street in 1968, depending on who you ask. However they arrived, they stayed, and they bred, and now they're everywhere.

And people lost their minds about it.

Not in a good way. There were newspaper columns. There were letters to the council. There was the specific kind of outrage that the English reserve for things that weren't here before and now are  that particular tightening around the mouth, that sharp intake of breath, that well they shouldn't be here, should they, not really. "Coming over 'ere, nicking all the worms." The parakeets were eating the other birds' food. The parakeets were too loud. The parakeets were taking over. What about the native species? What about the sparrows?

"Poor old cock sparrow, he don't get given a tree."

What about the sparrows.

Here's what I noticed, spending time out at Stanborough and around the parks where my dad used to sit.

As far as I can see, the sparrows are fine.

The sparrows are still there, doing what sparrows do, being small and brown and cheerful and chaotic, nesting in hedges and having dust baths and generally getting on with it. The parakeets came, the sparrows noticed, and then everyone carried on.

The trees were big enough. The worms were plentiful enough. There was room.

What there wasn't, as far as I could see, was the catastrophe that had been promised. The sparrows hadn't been replaced. They'd just got new neighbours. Loud, green, dramatic, drama-queen neighbours with no volume control and a tendency to arrive in groups, but neighbours, nonetheless. And if you sat there long enough, which he did, you'd see them more or less ignoring each other. Getting on with the business of being birds. Which is largely eating, shouting, and trying not to get eaten.

My dad would have loved the parakeets. He'd have found them hilarious. He'd also have spotted, straight away, the thing that the letter-writers and the columnists and the people with the hateful look in their eyes seemed to be missing entirely.

The sparrows' problem was never the parakeets.

I don't do politics in my writing. That's a rule I made early on and I've kept to it. But sometimes a thing presents itself so plainly that looking away from it feels dishonest. So bear with me, because I'm still talking about birds.

When I was growing up, there were men in boots and braces who would have told you, very confidently and very loudly, that the problem with working class communities was immigration. Other people coming here. Taking things. The sparrows' problem is the parakeets. That was the argument. Dress it up how you like, that was always the argument.

The boots and braces are mostly gone now. The argument isn't. It just got better dressed. Suits and ties. Proper grammar. A website, a spokesman, a policy document. Same argument though, if you look at it straight. Still telling you the sparrows' problem is the parakeets. Still making sure you're watching the other birds instead of watching the sky.

Nothing changes. And everything changes.

What my dad understood from his bench, watching his birds, was that the real threat to the sparrow has never come from the other small birds squabbling over the same patch of grass. The real threat comes from above. Always has. The sparrowhawk doesn't care what the sparrow sounds like or where its ancestors were from. The sparrowhawk just wants its dinner. The sparrow that's busy watching the parakeet isn't watching the sky. And something is always watching from the sky.

I'm not going to spell it out any further than that because I said I don't do politics and I mean it. But I will say this: the people who have always most enthusiastically pointed the working class at each other, who have built careers and movements and whole political identities out of making sure the sparrows are looking sideways instead of up, those people have never, in my lifetime or my dad's, gone hungry. They have never lost a job to someone who arrived by boat. They have never had their wages undercut by a parakeet.

There's a particular morning I keep coming back to. I was maybe fourteen. I'd nipped into the park to see him but didn't really have anything to say to him. I just nodded at him and sat down in silence for a while.

Then he said: "Listen to that."

I listened. All those voices. Overlapping, competing, rising.

"Beautiful," I said, because it was, because even at fourteen with nowhere particular to be I could hear that it was.

"Cunts the lot of 'em."

"None of 'em want to share, all telling each other to piss off," he smiled.

He wasn't wrong. He was also describing something I've spent a long time since trying to put into words. That you can hear the same thing two ways. That beauty and conflict aren't opposites. That a song is still a song even if what it's saying is get out of my tree. That small birds fighting over the same patch of ground is not the problem. That the problem, if you're a small bird, has feathers and a wingspan and is currently circling very patiently very high up where you're not looking.

He died aged 62, probably on his bench. But I think about him every time I'm near those parks. I think about him when I hear the parakeets going off like small green car alarms through the trees at Stanborough. I think he'd have incorporated them into his theory without missing a beat. Just more voices in the chorus.

The dawn chorus hasn't changed. There are just more singers now.

And whatever they're arguing about amongst themselves, the sparrowhawk is still up there. Still circling. Still very patient. Still waiting for everyone down below to stop watching each other long enough to forget to watch the sky.

My dad saw it from a park bench with a roll-up and a can of super strong larger. I'm not sure what's taking everyone else so long.