A bird in the hand

I've grown up with a fear of birds. In the same way that my fear of the telephone derives from a film, my fear of birds perhaps commenced with Hitchcock's The Birds which I saw at a young and malleable age.

While I'm an opponent of totalitarian laws which prevent people from meeting en masse, I sometimes wish we could impose such laws on birds. Every time I see a bunch of birds together I can hear their tweets of mischief. The word flock gives me the heebie jeebies. Give me a bird in the hand any day, two birds concealed in a bush are clearly plotting. Reading a children's book - the Winter of the Birds - where metal birds attack a town - didn't aid me to overcome my fears.

And though I don't want to give FUP a bad name by calling birds sinister, it hasn't helped matters that beyond the realm of film and literature, I've had real life examples of bird-attacks. On my trot home from the school bus stop, magpies used to swoop during a year long nesting season. My aunt has a small, diamond-shaped piece out of her nose where one of these magpies got lucky.

I'm sure the Paris pigeons have singled me out as a worthy victim as they fly directly towards my nose. Although several people have assured me they do exactly the same thing to their button and snub noses, I'm not convinced.

But i'm no cowardly lioness padding around on kitten paws, when we were in Portugal I organised our road trip so that we could spend a day on the Ilha Berlenga. This is a very small island ten kilometres off the coast of Portugal and only a dozen or so fishermen are permitted to live there because the island has been declared a natural reserve for thousands and thousands of seabirds.

The boat trip only takes an hour but I knew something was a-twitter when someone in charge handed out plastic bags to every one of the 150 or so passengers, without discrimination. Plastic bags for the small, the fat and the bony. The initial heaves of the sea were greeted by whoooos and cheers from everybody, as the boat rocked from side to side like one of those rides people take for kicks at Wally World.

Within ten minutes the whooos had become blurps and it was no longer just the sea that was heaving. Not many people were spared, it doesn't matter how pretty you are, on this boat you would join the throng of happy upchuckers. As one wise father seated in front of me said to his son at the start of the ordeal: the aim isn't to try not to be sick, but to see if you can be the last person to be sick.

I was simultaneously laughing and crying as all around me I could hear the sounds of sickness of all shapes and sizes. Amid the mess, a couple of youngish lovers embraced and kissy coo-ed, oblivious to it all.

When we arrived the little boy in front of us proudly held up his heavy bag and asked Havi: how much did you vomit? No time to admire the crunchy brown rock and green sea just made for swimming, the heap of bodies just off for the boat filed for the toilets, listening to the piping exclamations of the young couple who had embraced for the whole journey: It's beautiful! Wow! as they hiked off for a round of frisbee on the beach.

But in any case, I must admit that i'm feeling rather loveable as I think it mustn't be hard to love someone like me, who only purged a little bit.

I'd read that we could expect to see puffins, cormorants as well as seagulls. But we only saw seagulls, thousands upon thousands of them, many more than the fiesty birds that attacked Hitchcock's school.

Here birds rule the roost and people are their subjects. We were required to stay on the marked pathways and not stray on to the bird's turf. Happily most of the people that came over on the boat clung to the beach and H. and I had bending pathways all to ourselves, transported to a primitive place where all that existed were birds and one rabbit. We even came across a platform which served as a flying school with twenty or so baby birds being taught to fly by a couple of professional gulls.

This post really just needs to be filled with twitters, squawking, flapping, and crowing to show you what it was like to be in Bird Land. A tension, a feeling of foreboding, like we're all just preparing for something to happen.