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How a tiny wild bird helped me confront my…

Hannah Bourne-Taylor article in the Daily Mail

When I was in my twenties, I left my life in central London and moved to Ghana with my husband for his work. Jobless, friendless and with nothing to do, I spent my days alone. Isolation fuelled my OCD like gasoline.

OCD manifests itself in people in different ways like a bespoke parasite that worms its way into a sufferer’s conscious and highjacks their thoughts. The mental health charity, Mind, describes OCD as a ‘disorder in which people have recurring, unwanted thoughts, ideas, or sensations (obsessions) that make them feel driven to do something repetitively (compulsions).’ Obsessions are triggered by fears, often of contamination, portrayed by Jack Nicholson’s character in the film As Good As It Gets. For me, my OCD is triggered by the fear of anything suffering. When I’m suffering myself, from stress or unhappiness, my OCD offers a dysfunctional coping mechanism, refocusing my mind on preventing any suffering around me as though, by helping something else, my own suffering will reduce.

When I was younger, I would turn everything the right way up – tins of beans, books, shoes. It wasn’t to tidy them but to stop them from being upside down because if I was upside down, I would eventually die so I applied this warped logic to everything. Shoelaces had to be carefully extracted from underneath shoes otherwise they would be trapped; teddy bears had to have their heads outside of the bedding otherwise they would suffocate; gates had to be shut otherwise they would run out of energy holding themselves up, swinging on their hinges. I lived with OCD throughout my childhood without knowing that it was a disorder, without knowing that other people suffered from it too. By my late teens I had grown out of the more illogical compulsions and stopped rescuing shoelaces. Instead, my OCD focused on lights and fans being left on in empty rooms, of taps running, of washing machine’s blinking at the end of their cycles, desperately wanting to turn them off. Facts give my OCD oxygen: the annual quota of electricity last year was used up by July in 2021 and with thousands of lights left on carelessly, these truths merge with my intrusive thoughts, blazing through my mind.

Living in Ghana without a purpose, weakened my mind to the onslaught of OCD. After a year of living in the capital city, we moved to house surrounded by an overgrown garden. Amongst the palm trees there was a swimming pool. It looked like heaven and it was until I noticed the insects drowning in the water, unable to get out. Then it was hell. My OCD latched on to my natural instincts to save the insects and galvanised this desire so that it was an obsession. I felt compelled to save every single insect, prioritising checking the pool, scooping hundreds out of the water, making rafts, patrolling like a crazed lifeguard, unable to leave the pool for any decent amount of time. When I started waking up at night to check the pool, my husband got suspicious. I had never told a single person or been officially diagnosed with OCD because I didn’t dare admit that I was, at least partially, mad. I kept my strange secret, intending to carry it to my grave but when my husband started questioning me, I knew he would find out. The idea of him accusing me before I admitted it spurred me to tell him. Through floods of tears, I confessed. ‘I’ve got OCD. And not in a casual way people often joke about it but the sort that beats up my mind,’ I said, wincing, unable to look him in the eye, convinced he was going to leave me. His reaction was a complete surprise. He comforted me, reassured me, invited me to talk about it. I felt a tangible relief, my OCD diluted in the same way as a nightmare doesn’t seem so scary in the morning.

Shortly after I shared my secret, we moved to rural Ghana. On the edge of the grasslands in the middle of nowhere I worried that being so remote would lead to the OCD overrunning my mind. But then a tiny wild bird changed my life, not only giving me purpose but altering my perspective on everything. I found a fledgling finch fallen from his nest after a huge storm. Knowing he would die if I left him, I took the finch back to the house and unwittingly began an intense three-month period of raising him. Utterly dependent on me, we were inseparable. The finch slept in my hand and made nests out of my hair, curling the waist length strands up before falling asleep, content, safe. When he was older, we spent every day following his flock so one day he could rejoin his wild family. 84 days of living with a feathered friend on my body every waking hour where the vast differences between me and him shrunk so there were none. Like me he needed security and reassurance and craved affection and although smaller than a wood mouse, his personality lit up the room. He taught me how to embrace every moment. I had no time to engage in my OCD by carrying out compulsions so when intrusive thoughts started to flood my mind about lights or fans being on, I could do nothing about them. I had to look after the bird, keep him safe. I had to feed him otherwise he would perch on my finger and throw his head back, whipping his wings out, calling his shrill hunger call like a matador having a tantrum. I had to comfort him, stroking the side of his tiny face until his head lolled at bedtime, until he was too sleepy to protest, until he stopped nudging me to stroke him more. I put my obsessive energy into a life that really needed me. I got used to dismissing the intrusive thoughts, gradually recognising that the less I carried out the compulsions, the less power the obsessions had over me. By not responding to my OCD, a space was made between me and the disorder, expanding little by little so the intrusive thoughts became quieter, less intense. This practice is very similar to one of the treatments for OCD known as Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). While there is no full cure, there are other treatments too – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and medication as well as other forms of therapy.

These three little letters haunt many people. According to the charity OCD UK, there are three quarters of a million people living with OCD at any one time just in Britain. That’s 12 in every 1,000 people. For over twenty years I felt utterly alone with a burden I could not see or understand, oblivious that so many other people were going through something similar.

Confronting the disorder by acknowledging I had it and understanding how purpose allowed me to push OCD away felt like a revelation. Finding out more about the disorder by reading articles and hearing other people’s stories on charity websites like OCD UK gave me insight which made me feel stronger. I still have OCD. There are times when it pops up like a sinister jack-in-the-box, luring me into its web, but I feel lighter, more in control and far less beholden now that it’s no longer a secret. I feel thankful to the tiny wild bird who needed my help more than I needed to carry out compulsions because he made me deal with my OCD instead of giving in to it.

Fiction

Bert the blackbird

A short story (fiction) published in Daily Express Saturday Magazine and Sunday People magazine.

A tapping on the bedroom window stirred Carol, gradually coaxing her awake.

Turning slowly, she looked at the male blackbird who cocked his head, staring at her. He blinked his orange rimmed eyes and tapped again.

‘Alright, I’m coming.’ Carol sighed, muttering, ‘That bird! What is he expecting? Silver service?’

In her dressing gown and slippers, she shuffled down the corridor of the bungalow she’d lived in for sixteen years with her husband, the last year, alone.

She opened the bag of peanuts, not for her, but for the blackbird. For seventy eight years she had never noticed the birds in her garden. Now feeding the blackbird was how she began every day.

Standing on the patio, she stretched her arm out and uncupped her hand, full of peanuts.

‘Come on then.’ Carol said to the blackbird who had rushed into the bushes. ‘Don’t leave me waiting young man.’

The blackbird hopped from the shadows and flew to the low stone wall. His feathers were sleek, his eyes inky. In one graceful movement, he flew directly to her hand, took a peanut and landed on the ground nearby. Holding the peanut in his bright orange beak, he tossed his head back, opened his beak and swallowed the peanut whole. Carol loved watching the blackbird do this. The movement reminded her of her late husband who always ate peanuts just the same – head back, tossing them in the air before swallowing, down in one.

She shifted her feet, looking down as she thought of him. She had got used to the numb ache of loss but her ears still listened out for him asking whether she wanted a second cup of tea. Her body still anticipated him coming up behind her and putting his arm around her shoulders. If it wasn’t for the blackbird she would feel alone. Yes, she had family and friends, but the mornings felt so quiet, so empty. Those first moments of waking up had always been shared.

She had discovered the blackbird at her lowest. Not directly after her husband died when her days were filled with well wishes and funeral arrangements but when the phone stopped ringing. When everyone else moved on. Then the silence felt louder as time distanced her from him. The bungalow felt huge, the rooms empty of her husband and their marriage that had vanished with him. So she had gone outside, to perch on the low wall, looking back at her past. Until the blackbird broke the silence.

Out he came one morning, hopping along in the dappled shade under the bushes. Head down, eyes fixated, the blackbird moved busily around in the fallen leaves. Normally her husband cleared them but they had laid there all winter and now in spring, looked like a brown carpet. Shuffling through the leaves quickly with both feet, the blackbird darted after insects, spending hours rootling around. Carol’s eyes widened as she watched him. He was always busy. He pulled worms out of the soil, heaving. Stepping backwards, the blackbird carried on pulling before ‘pop’, out the worm came and down the worm went, gobbled up.

Carol began to notice other birds: blue tits in the apple tree and the robin who sang with his head tilted towards the sky. Within her small garden, she found companions she didn’t have to put a brave face on for. She could just be, without well intentioned questions or sympathetic looks.

Sometimes she would sit there with the newspaper while the blackbird foraged, hopping right past her slippers. One Saturday she read an article about a game called ‘first bird of my day’ where someone had started posting on social media the name of whatever bird they saw first in the morning for other people to share their first bird. She began to play it too, realising it made her notice, made her look forward to each morning. To start with her first bird had been varied. There was a pair of collared doves who roosted in the boundary hedge; a wood pigeon who cooed on the telephone wire; jackdaws on the roof. But as she spent more time in the garden, it was the male blackbird who was always there first. She began muttering to him about all sorts of things, reminding herself to add peanuts to her shopping list.

‘I’ll have to think of a name for you.’ She said as he landed at her feet.

About two months before, one frosty morning, Carol had watched the blackbird hopping along the flowerbed but the soil was frozen solid. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to get to the worms, she had scattered bird seed along the low wall. Having some of her husband’s peanuts still, she had added them to the mix. The blackbird had come straight away. Hopping along cautiously to start with, within a week, he had become less wary. Within a fortnight, actively picky. Within a month, darn right spoilt. He stopped even looking at the seed, eating only the peanuts. That’s when Carol had decided to try hand feeding. She had the time. She had learned that time spent with the blackbird stopped her from thinking about other things. She didn’t think about the past with her husband or the present without him. Most of all she didn’t worry about her future. The blackbird kept her in the moment, pulling her attention to him, to his satisfaction of eating the peanuts. At some point he had started anticipating his breakfast, tapping on the window. It had made her laugh, reminding her of her husband who had often looked at her with hopeful eyes at the thought of a cup of tea. Like the blackbird, he had been the silent but sure type. Someone who knew his own mind but a man of few words.

‘Fine,’ Carol said. ‘I’ll call you Bert, after him,’ smiling as the blackbird took another peanut. Head back, tossing it up, swallowing, down in one.

Hannah Bourne-Taylor, author of Fledgling

Pangolin Patrol

Pangolin Patrol

Here’s my podcast on rescuing a pangolin from a bush meat market and releasing it back into the wild. Pangolins need guardian angels and anyone can be one.

Listen to the podcast on audio by clicking on this YouTube link. Or read the article below and scroll down to watch the two short (2 mins) videos.

Did you know that a baby pangolin is called a pangopup? And that female pangolins have one pangopup at a time that clings to the top of their long, scaled tails. Foraging for ants, up trees and on forest floors in Africa and Asia, there are eight species of pangolins – the only mammals to have scales. They are strange, curious looking animals, their plate-like scales intricate and regimented like a fir cone, an artichoke, a fern – some sort of imaginary moving plant with beady eyes. A creature that looks as though it has been created by the forest itself, their genus name ‘Manis’ was chosen by the 18th century zoologist Carl Linnaeus from the Latin for ‘spirit’ because of its obscure and otherworldly appearance. With no teeth, just a very long tongue and a defensive instinct to curl up into a tight ball, their modern name comes from a Malayan word ‘pengguling’ that means ‘one who rolls up’. When they are in a ball, their scales spiral into a pattern and shape like an ammonite and as still as a fossil, desperately patient, they stay cocooned, only uncurling when the threat has gone. There are three species in Ghana, although the giant pangolin is thought to be extinct. The other two – the long tailed and the black bellied are critically endangered just like all pangolins across the world. Hunted for their meat and their scales, their future is bleak. Although there has been an international ban on the pangolin trade from 2017, according to a 2020 report on wildlife crime for the UNODC, in the last five years over four hundred thousand pangolins have been killed for their scales.

Watch a video of me releasing the pangolin

In Ghana pangolins live in Atewa forest in the south of the country. Steep sided hills and ridges are covered in a swathe of dark green, broken up by low hanging mist that lingers. Scented blossom spills out down the valleys. Atewa is a collection of treasures from over two hundred species of birds to endemic plants and insects but Atewa’s own existence also hangs in the balance. As well as its animals being poached, it is illegally felled of its trees and mined for its gold and bauxite, facing an onslaught of human obstacles. But for now, there is still a forest and within it, there are still pangolins. I know this because I am walking through Atewa with a pangolin, amongst the trees, my body dripping with sweat, here to give the forest back its most precious animal.

I have walked up and down steep tracks, first a muddy vermillion road and on, cutting into the forest down animal trails – lines made from antelope, porcupine, civet cats – a slither of compacted earth running through the trees. As I have walked, I have begun to understand the forest – that it is a being of light and shade, a creature of dappled patterns of greens and golds accenting pockets of black. A thing of stillness that provokes an instinct of feeling eerily away from everything that I know because deep inside the forest it is noise that is proof of existence, not motion. Still and loud is a combination that speaks of a strange imbalance, of skewed reality, of a hidden truth that my human brain scrambles to understand. A truth that is seeping back into the pangolin, telling it that it is home as it hears the layers of sound build up from the forest floor to the canopy way above us: whistles and squeaks, some ongoing some sporadic; constant humming, buzzing, whirring – noises that spring from vibrations of all pitches like a spice mix of sound. No one noise dominates. Instead, they fight each other, simmering down to a rhythmic background tune like standing on the edge of a fairground.

I catch my breath, watching the only movement other than me – a blue diadem butterfly. Named after cornflowers for its blue coat, it has a wingspan as wide as my palm. It flits past my head and down to the ground like a falling leaf, settling on a vine in front of my feet. A delicate bright piece of the forest that stands out in an iridescent gleam. The pangolin is the opposite. Each scale is the colour of the darkest brown leaves fading into the golden tone of the sunlight that is seeping through the gaps in the trees. Its scales are made from keratin – the same material that nails are made from. Each one has the forest’s earth under it – fragments of home that it took with it when it was kidnapped by hunters and put in a plastic bag on the side of the road to be sold and eaten.

In Ghana main roads act as moving supermarkets: hawkers weave in and out of the traffic with silver bowls on their heads, selling everything from shrimp kebabs to phone chargers, giant snails to mirrors and maps, Bibles, washing detergent, fire extinguishers. Bush meat is also sold. On the fast road between the two main cities in Ghana – Accra and Kumasi, little grass rooved huts pop up every now and then. On tables or being held by the sellers, there are dead 7kg cane rats, known as grasscutters, antelopes and civet cats laid out, dripping with blood, pools of maroon dotting the ground. Amongst these wild animals are pangolins. Despite being illegal to hunt, they fetch the highest price out of all the bush meat. Considered to be a royal delicacy, they are eaten for special occasions or by those who can afford them. There is a darker trade in Ghana too where buyers hoard collections of pangolins to sell their scales for Chinese medicine. Ground up in to powder and put into a pill, the scales have no proven health benefits but just like rhino horn and moon bear bile, the demand overrides scientific fact.

There are some organisations determined to give a voice to the pangolins and fight to save not only these animals but the forests that they live in. One of them is A Rocha, a conservational NGO in Ghana that agreed to take me on a pangolin patrol. They are the reason why I am in the middle of a forest with a pangolin – a group of conservationists determined to make a difference. I went with Daryl Bosu, the Deputy National Director who conducts regular patrols, educating the sellers and confiscating the pangolins. He explained that many of the sellers have bought the pangolins from hunters, both groups often not realising the pangolin is a protected species. Kept alive, the pangolins are put at the backs of the stands, stored in bags or hidden within the middle section of old car tyres. Without food or water for days they slowly weaken, unable to stay in their defensive ball, hanging limply when the sellers hold them by their tails, their long tongues falling towards the ground. It is a pitiful, heart breaking sight. But they can recover. Pangolins rescued in a bad state are housed in cages overnight, sometimes longer by Daryl’s team, supported by conservationist and researcher Ransford Agyei, who sprinkles honey nearby to attract ants – the pangolin’s main diet and rehydrates them. Ransford then releases the pangolins back into safer places within the Atewa forest reserve in the hope that they will not be recaptured. This is an ongoing battle.

Earlier this morning we found a single pangolin. It was surrounded by the sounds of human whistles and shrieks, engines, cars speeding past, radios blaring. Sounds that would have been as unfamiliar to it as the rainforest sounds are to me now. When the seller saw our car pull over he rushed to present the bush meat, ready to barter for a good price, his hands filled with flattened and smoked, rigid and blackened grasscutters. Another seller came up holding a dead and bloodied royal antelope but Daryl asked whether there were any pangolins. The first man nodded, explained he could not show the pangolin straight away because it was illegal and went back to his stand, reappearing with one in his hand. Daryl got out of the car. The pangolin, tightly curled up, looked like an inanimate object, something easily dismissed as not being a living creature, let alone immeasurably precious – a species that has survived for over sixty million years that is now on the brink of extinction. The seller held the pangolin in such a casual way, in one hand by his side as though it was a football. To the seller it was something that could help fund his own family so he could put food on the table and pay for the education of his children.

This video shows the rescue process and release

For the moments where Daryl intervened, diplomatically arguing the pangolin’s cause and stipulating the law, I forgot to breathe, my eyes locked on to the ball of scales in the wrong hands. Human hands that contributed to the pangolin’s label of the world’s most trafficked animal – the very saddest crown of all. As Daryl explained that he would be confiscating the pangolin, another car pulled up behind us. Inside was a man specifically asking for pangolins – someone who was not asking to save one but to eat one. I watched the fate of this single pangolin being fought over, its death row trial being conducted on a tarmacked road in the middle of Ghana as though it represented the fate of its entire species. This time, the good guy one. Daryl got back in the car with the pangolin. We drove down the road and pulled in at a garage – a dirty, noisy concrete place that smelt of petrol – somewhere that I would never expect to see a pangolin. Carefully putting the pangolin in a cage, Daryl handed it over to me to release it with the help of Ransford who would show me a safe spot in the forest.

Now, far away from the road, the pangolin is almost safe. Ransford is up ahead of me, disappearing into the green. I follow him weaving in and out of the trees, climbing over fallen branches and moss-covered rocks. I am slower, careful not to knock the pangolin in the cage. An urgency is mounting inside me, keeping me moving in the sweltering heat. A determined feeling to get the hell away from other people. As the distance lengthens, that feeling founded in anger, is changing. Hope is beginning to billow out of me in whisps of tears and smiles, a concoction of emotion that hints at the depth of the plight of the pangolin. I step away from the narrow path, avoiding the golden orb spider and its web that sits like a taut hammock between two trunks. Ransford is waiting for me to give me a nod of approval before walking away. This is the release spot. I lift the pangolin out of its cage, holding it in my hands. Still in a tight ball, it is fluttering slightly, its scales going up and down as it breathes, its tail moving a fraction. For a moment I look down at the pangolin, a creature of curious beauty that represents both the wonder of the natural world and the struggle it faces as the wild inadvertently butts heads with humanity. I put the pangolin on the ground in amongst the carpet of dry leaves, not far from a small stream. Giving it one last look, a round burnt-caramel stone on a bed of leaves, I turn, leaving it alone. Here it will eventually uncoil, its life unravelling back into the forest where it belongs.