Our Feathered Enemies

I reckon I’ve got one of the best commutes in London. My journey starts by cycling over Horsenden Hill, a lovely wooded area where you can see woodpeckers and occasionally dogging, I then join the Grand Union Canal near Perivale and cycle along the towpath for about 6 miles before having to join the rush hour properly at Scrubbs Lane and avoid death at the hands of the morons in metal cages on wheels, one of whom dislocated my collarbone for me a couple of years back. The hazards of cycling on London’s roads are pretty obvious, I’ve ridden a motorbike and cycled through this town for the past 6 years and have realised that the only way to stay alive is to assume that everyone else is blind, retarded and trying to kill you, but even on the towpath there are dangers lurking where you least expect them.

A fried of mine now lives in Perth, Western Australia, and is a very keen surfer. He frequently regales his friends back home with, often quite tedious, tales of the latest wave he ‘dropped in on’. A while ago he got quite emotional after he ‘dropped into’ a wave and found himself surfing alongside a small pod of dolphins. Obviously this is an amazing and beautiful thing, but when you read this after cycling to work on a damp Tuesday morning, knowing that you’ll be returning home in the miserable darkness of a British winter, a touch of the cynical and bitter can come through in your response. To that end I penned a reply about how as I ‘dropped onto’ the canal towpath on my Trek Soho that morning, two ducks had been bobbing gently on the water, they had both stared at me, and one of them quacked. As connections with nature go, there’s no real reason why my duck encounter should be any less spiritual than my friend’s dolphin encounter, but there’s something about ducks that’s just not quite as romantic. Perhaps it’s their sheer commonness. On an average journey to work I will see lots of ducks, I’ll also see plenty of moorhens, Canadian Ring Neck geese, swans and usually a heron. This is my rush hour: avoiding the bottle necks of various wild fowl and pedestrians along the Grand Union Canal towpath.

Over my years of using the towpath I’ve come to notice the tangible difference in character of the various species of water bird that inhabit this particular stretch. Moorhens are the stockbrokers of the canal; panicky, bickering idiots. From a distance they could be romantically perceived as graceful, demure creatures, shy by nature, carefully nurturing their young in as unobtrusive a manner as possible. This would be a fiction. To see the moorhen’s true nature one must only cycle past one as it feeds along the side of the towpath. Once out of the water moorhens apparently lose all sense of direction and as you cycle towards them, slowing, and perhaps ringing your bell to give them fair warning, they will ignore you completely until you are within about three metres, they will then eye you suspiciously, make their odd hooting, squeaking sound a couple of times, and continue to feed albeit in a slightly more hurried manner, as you come within one metre of these little black drama queens they will automatically, and this happens every time, elect to scamper, squawking and flapping straight across the front of your wheel. Never, never, will they stay on the side of the path where they were, they will always make a mad dash across your path presumably seeing the other side of the towpath, be that the water side or not, as the safer option, despite the ninety kilos of man and machine bearing down on them. Moorhens are thick, thick and annoying.

Then there are the geese. They think they own the canal. They will quite happily hang out in gangs of six or seven, spreading themselves across the towpath, shitting, honking and generally being quite anti-social, and then gives you evils if you deign to cycle anywhere near them. Frankly I feel less intimidated by the occasional gangs of hoodies lurking under the bridges of the Grand Union than I do when one of these long-necked gits hisses at me for trying to avoid him. They’ve got a fucking canal to swim in! Do you see me, diving into the canal and invading their space? No you don’t, because I’ve got some manners.

Swans: don’t even get me started on swans. Don’t be fooled by their ethereal beauty and their tendency to appear on the covers of bad valentine cards, and yes, that thing they do where they ruffle up their wing feathers does make the whole world appear to be in soft focus, and as for making a heart shape with their necks whilst courting, I mean, the worst Mills & Boone author couldn’t have made that up, but don’t let the flashy bastards pull the wool over your eyes. When they’re doing that heart thing with their necks they’re not whispering sweet, watery nothings to each other, they’re planning their next attack on a toddler. We may all have grown out of the belief that a swan can break your arm with its muscular neck, but the swans haven’t. Find one of those making itself comfortable in the middle of the towpath on your morning ride to work and you better start looking for alternative routes because they’re not going to get out of the way.

And finally the heron. I don’t really have much against the heron to be honest. There’s usually just the one on his own and I sympathise really that he was cursed with a panicky nature but the inability to take off quickly. Just this morning one of these leggy chumps flapped laboriously onto a railing aside the canal to try and spy something living in its festering depths only to discover me approaching at a steady pace. His startled eye clocked me too late and by the time he’d crapped himself, unfurled his great canopy of wings and fallen off the railing in order to take flight I was already long past him.

I love my commute to work, I really do, and I’d rather spend that early part of the day in the company of some bolshy birds than with the homicidal maniacs who inhabit the roads, but still, the beauty of nature often clouds our vision of how ill-tempered it is.