Helen Fowler Writer

Birdsong lightens the early-morning mood here at the top of one of Edinburgh’s seven hills; we’re close enough to open fields and woodland to hear chirruping singing out ages before any of us are even close to waking up and getting out of bed. I might as well confess I only know about the birdsong as an unexpected benefit of the odd sleepless night.

Astral forget-me-nots

It’s at nighttime that I sometimes shuffle outside onto our small balcony to gaze up at the stars. They’re a garden of astral forget-me-nots, a place where free spirits can gambol and play, where earthly worries dissolve and evaporate in the immensity of sky, space and darkness.

Today I had to look up the timings of the first bird warblings, since I was fast asleep when they were actually happening. They must have begun about the same time a thunderstorm was exploding over the city, it was an hour and a half before dawn proper, which broke here in Britain at about half four.

Metaphorical

For the curious among you, this half hour or so before proper dawn is known as the civil twilight, a wonderful phrase that I shall try to remember, since it clearly has great metaphorical potential to describe anyone struggling with legal difficulties, manners, depression or witchcraft.

An all-night stretch of ‘civil twilight’ occurs occasionally in places such as St Petersburg, where, from late May to early July, the locals sometimes stay up all night to celebrate what they call ‘the white nights’. As a young journalist I got to experience a white night in Russia myself; it felt otherworldly, fabulous, risky and exciting. Everything you’d expect from a Russian novel, in other words. In a similar but lighter vein, the French talk about a someone who hasn’t slept a wink all night as having ‘une nuit blanche’ (‘white night’).

Sailors navigate using stars

Before we get to the civil twilight, though, we have to negotiate something called the nautical twilight, when it remains possible to navigate at sea, since the brighter stars and the horizon should have become visible. At this point, mariners can use the position of well-known stars to navigate, despite the poor visibility.

Any more twilights? Well, yes. The third and final one is known as Astronomical Twilight, the darkest and earliest of all three and so-called because only professional astronomers have the kit to see what’s happening in the sky at this point. To ordinary people, the sky still looks utterly dark. But although the human eye can’t see any afterglow from the sun, professional astronomers can view galaxies and nebulae at this time, the latter massive, glowing clouds of gas and dust in interstellar space. They’re mysterious places, nebulae; astronomers have worked out they act as nurseries for new stars as well as the equivalent of spatial retirement homes for older ones.

Looking for a mate

Blackbirds, robins and thrushes are among the birds to sing loudest first thing. They put us all to shame, really, waking and singing from about 3.30am in the morning on a summer’s day like today. You may have already guessed why. . . Yes, correct, it’s to impress the females, these boys want partners, so they sing out loud to attract one.

Birds don’t waste a moment in the attempt to warble the loudest and show off to any other birds they fancy. Reading about bird life I was reminded of an Italian boyfriend from years ago who regularly sang to me when we were on the tube. But never, thankfully, at 3.30am.

Badgers mean business

Our house has attracted all sorts of beasts, not just birds. Once, by random chance, I saw a badger trotting purposefully across our front garden; an unforgettable sight. Powerful, muscular, set close to the ground. At the top of their particular food chain. Easier to understand now why all the animals in The Wind in the Willows were so scared of him.

A few years back, some mice made it into the house; an experience that ended with my husband taking them many, many miles away. We have some newer arrivals too; a couple of roe deer have taken to grazing on our seedlings and pretty much anything else they fancy too. They’re beautiful to watch, elegant and long-legged, but have no manners, those deer. We won’t be having our favourite soup this year after they devoured all the seedlings last month. Shutting the front gate is helping keep them out, but this particular vegetable, sadly, remains off the menu for this year.