Max and Otto's Letter

To the descendants of Mr and Mrs Blackbird,

What is life like for you now?

We watched your great great grandparents from our window each day. Saw them hopping about the garden, collecting materials to build their nests and feeding from our lawn – insects and invertebrates in the Spring, berries and seeds in the Autumn and Winter. We helped them by scattering seeds out and leaving plenty of water in dishes placed around the garden, as the summers got hotter and the heatwaves arrived with more intensity each year. We watched with delight as their neighbours, the thrushes and the squirrels foraged happily with them.

It makes us hope that we humans saw sense in time to ensure that you still have enough water. Did we act quickly enough so that your summers are bearable? It makes us hope that the earth isn’t parched and concrete-dry, and the soil remains rich and soft. We hope that an abundance of plants still grow and disperse their seeds to give you enough to eat. We hope that the trees and shrubs are full and healthy, to provide you with shelter and a safe place to sleep. We hope that the air is fresh and clean for you to breathe.

We wonder, were we able to rein in our strange human obsession with neatness and uniformity soon enough to stop the rising tide of artificial grass installation, so that the insects are still able to flourish, and so that bugs and bees still have places to sleep and crawl and breed and hide? Did enough of us leave our lawns to grow long, and let the wildflowers grow? Do you still see butterflies? Do the hedgehogs still snuffle by?

We wonder, do you still have someone to scatter seeds for you in the weeks where there are less to find, and someone to watch you from their window each day…?

From Max and Otto