"Tart!"

 ‘Tart!’ she shouted

It hadn’t started there, back in the days before internet shopping as we know it, I had bought a bird-feeder from the RSPB. It arrived, and guess what, it was huge. 6 feeding stations measuring a whooping 1.30 m.  A few weeks later my sister, Bex, came to visit... in deep conversation, our attention soon turned to the birds on the feeder. Neither ornithologists or twitchers, we noticed there was a variety of visitors. "Blue tit!” "Great tit" "spadger!!" began to punctuate our conversation. 

"Coal tit!! Bex then cried.

"Are you sure?" I said.

"Of course, look at the colouring, he’s got a black Mohican! … either that or it’s the blue tit changing hats every time he pops into the trees!?”  

Needles say we fell about laughing. Much hilarity ensued, imagining said blue tit in a dressing up box.

Suddenly Bex shouted ”tart!”...  I shot her a questioning look. She pointed to a dunnock sat on the fence. 

She then told me the story of the ornithologist who was the first to identify that female dunnocks were not the passive, shy, submissive partners of the bird world that most male researchers had assumed! Bex is the wiser of us two, a PhD student at the time, she was far more fluent in the gendered bias in storytelling. As she explained it took a woman to change our understanding of the dunnock’s mating rituals amused and challenged my own understanding in equal measure. Bex proceeded to tell me how the female dunnock flirts with potential mates, luring them to copulation, then chasing them away after pecking at their genitals. She then hunts for another mate, only to repeat the process. Quite literally the tart of the bird world. 

We didn’t leave it there! "Look she’s got fishnets on!" came next! Continuing the dressing up box theme, we soon had said dunnock star of her own burlesque show. By this stage, helpless with laughter rolling about on the grass, adding increasingly surreal twists to the plot. The tart didn’t come out of it well.

A few weeks later a book arrived for my birthday. A bird book! I opened it, and with exquisite joy, turned the pages to increasingly loud gwarffs. Bex had painstakingly cut out hats from countless magazines, gluing them with humour on the heads of the birds pictured. My favourite is still the hawk wearing a motorcycle helmet!! 

Last year I sent Bex a ‘for the pun of it’ badge set, and this year I got a card with birds in party hats... the gift just keeps giving.

And yes, there’s a point of methodology here, may I refer you back to the post on storytelling? When a woman, till then denied a voice in a male dominated conversation, observes the world with a different sensitivity the storytelling changes - sometimes radically.