Morning has broken

There are only two things keeping me awake at the moment – diet coke in extreme quantities and my neon orange nails, which give me a mild shock every time I catch a flash of them. Note to self: if in doubt, always go mint green. It’s currently 8.56am (we’re all about precision here at E&T) and I’ve been up for 5 and a half hours, and am oscillating between feeling very smug and completely shattered – after all, what did you do this morning? Listen to a dawn chorus as the sun rose over London? No? More. Fool. You.

Yes, this morning was the launch of 152 Wild Things to Do, and Mark’s ingenious idea to celebrate it with a dawn chorus event seemed less ingenious and more insane as I navigated the N205 in the early hours of today. There were actually a surprising number of people up and about Old Street at 4.00am, and I was particularly impressed by the suited man stumbling home whilst on the phone to his wife, ‘Yup, I’ve just left the office darling, it’s been manic.’ 

The morning did not start off well: having gone to bed early, I woke up every half hour due to sheer terror that I was going to sleep through my alarm clock, when I looked out the window it was raining, and when I finally got on the bus, shaking with nervous exhaustion, the bus driver asked me if there was something wrong with my face before driving with excrutiating slowness towards King’s Cross. But get there I did, and after meeting Elysia outside Camley Street (regular readers will know that she promised to come last week and I waved it off as one of those things you say after a couple of glasses of rose but no, no – at 4am I got a call saying she was en route, complete with thermal vest) we met everyone else round the campfire where Phil Paulo and other London Wildlife Trust members were cooking up a feast of strong coffee, bacon sandwiches and sausage rolls.

After brief introductions from Mark, Carlo Laurenzi, CEO of LWT, and Jean-Dominique Mallet, CEO of Veolia Environmental Services UK, we split into two groups and headed off for a gentle hour-long meander around the reserve listening to the different birds as we went. Amongst others, we heard blackcap (chilled out and in full swing), blackbird (stressed out and alert due to presence of a nearby sparrowhawk), greenfinch (as the name suggests - very green), coot, wren, reed warbler and robin (angry and territorial).

Mark Pearson and David Lindo headed up the tours and both being incredibly keen ornithologists, it was hard not to get swept away with their enthusiasm and sheer knowledge on the subject. I found out that robins are so territorial that they count any other robin a threat, even their own young. For this reason, baby robins have a different plumage to the famous red breast (brown and spotty, FYI), so that adult robins can’t identify them as one of their own and force them out of the nest before  they’re ready. Robins in fact are so aggressive that they have been known to physically attack other birds, sometimes actually killing them - all a very far cry from the cuddly festive mascot we know and love.

Bird facts aside, possibly my favourite moment of the walk was when we stopped to look at some geese and their goslings on the canal path, just as a cyclist cycled past. Because they had their young with them, the geese were instantly on guard (at risk of making them sound like the Three Musketeers) and started to surround the cyclist hissing and spreading their wings. Given that the cyclist was only out for a gentle bike ride at 6am, this was probably quite enough for him to deal with as  it was - but the fact that 20 strangers then sidled out to watch from behind the trees must have made it all the more surreal. (The cyclist escaped, by the way, cleverly using his bike as a shield. Genius.)

Back to the campfire for more bacon, exclamations at the fact it was still only half past six, and photos courtesy of Julia Hamilton photographer extraordinaire, and then it was straight into the office, only stopping en route to pick up several thousand litres of DC. We’ve since discovered that a piece on the launch by Patrick Barkham will appear on the Guardian website later today, and everyone from BBC London to The Ecologist want to feature the book itself, so we’re very happy – on a professional level at least. From a personal point of view, I am making an urgent appointment with some sort of face doctor (if indeed such a thing exists) as I have just seen the aforementioned photos and sadly it seems that bus driver may well have been on to something. Ah well – call me sentimental, but a few unflattering shots seem like a small price to pay for getting the opportunity to listen to early morning birdsong in leafy Camley Street, a secret garden of calm in the heart of our amazing city.