It's funny how off-the-cuff remarks ring in your ears for days, weeks, months, years, decades.  I had been experimenting with latch-hooking as I tended my stall at a local arts and crafts market where a rug-making workshop was on offer in the centre of the room.  I held up my efforts and asked the stallholder next to me “What do you think?”  “It’s very you!” came the tactful reply.  What exactly did she mean by that?  Messy, unplanned, a little uncoordinated, random and spontaneous, perhaps?  At home, I combined other bits of “me” into this eccentric piece, encircling it with scraps of old drawings which I stitched onto the canvas backing.  Then I framed my tiny egg-shaped rug in a small glass frame, topping the whole lot off with a scribbled ink drawing of a bird directly onto the glass.  It was very me.  It was like a bird’s nest.  This thought no doubt sprang from the fact that I am currently preoccupied with birds – how their movements and their sounds affect our mood, whether or not we are consciously aware of them. 

On the stillest of days they send us signals.  A feather flutters down onto the ground in front of us as we walk through town, a message from a pilot flying high above.  In the countryside, twigs twitch with the swift passing of an unseen presence and the marsh grass quivers with the movement of ground-nesting birds. 

On the very wet final day of a very wet garden birdwatch weekend at the end of January,  I did my own informal birdwatch, taking the train a few stops up the line, I had a sketchbook with me and drew what I saw of the passing landscape.  As always, a bird flew into every page of the sketchbook.  My birdwatching is always informal.  I will sit down among the long-lensed twitchers at the bird hide, no doubt baffling them with my scribbled annotations of birdsong or rustling reeds as they try to zoom in on the most private moments of moorhen or widgeon to capture the clearest, crispest spyshots.  From the top deck of buses I sometimes record with a dash or a swish in my sketchbook every bird I see from between two towns.  My pen rarely pauses because the birds are there in every moving window frame. 

Whether or not we can tell a stork from a sparrow, their mysterious presence enriches our lives.  Sometimes we’re aware of the fact, sometimes not.  During my lost years when I was lured away to live far from the coast, a call home would be a call to the gulls who would be there, screeching and nagging in the background, wanting to reassure themselves that I was OK.

Even casual bird watchers like me who are less inclined to travel the world for that rare glimpse of a blue-footed booby find their hearts pounding at the exotic sight of a spoonbill, great egret or teal duck on our shores, and our spirits lift at the thought that the Brent geese have flown all the way from Siberia to holiday here with us.  Our stomachs knot up with excitement at the haunting bubbling warble of the curlew – heard on the coast here but rarely seen.

Back to my rag-rugging efforts, this unlikely jumble of scraps have sparked off an oil painting or two (see the first of these at the top of this blog post).  As I attempted to paint my little “love nest”, there emerged from the tangled feathery brushstrokes the shape of an embryonic little bird curled inside its precariously cradled nest.  Red, orange, pink and blue coloured veins of paint, life, nerves, fluttering feathers not yet formed, contained within the egg, and my mind travelled back to a different sort of rug I had studied as I made a series of paintings a couple of years ago, with traditional stylised patterns and ancient motifs, many of them animals, and birds, among them a peacock, and I thought of how we humans feather our own love nests with such woven comforts, working, like the birds, from generation to generation, adapting new materials and shapes as needed.  Perhaps that’s why birds are so important in our lives – we aren’t really so very different to them.

Incidentally, there's a chance to have a try at making a rug of your own at an informal drop-in workshop led by Judy Digby on 15th March at The Depozitory, Nelson Street, Ryde (all materials and tools supplied).