Why I keep counting the things that are leaving

Someone wrote to me last week with a question I have been turning over ever since. They had read one of my books, the one that counts the swifts, and they wanted to know how I stand it. Is it not unbearably sad, they asked, to spend years counting things that are leaving? Does it not just wear you down?

It is a fair question, and I want to answer it honestly rather than bravely, because there is a difference and readers can always tell.

Here is what the counting actually looks like, so you can picture it. On a morning in May I stand in the same spot at the corner of the recreation ground with a clicker in my hand and I count swifts as they come screaming over the rooftops. I have done this for eleven years. I know the good years from the thin ones not by feeling but by the small totals in a notebook, and the small totals have been getting smaller. If I told you the numbers you would find them sad, and you would be right.

But the counting is not the sadness. This is the part I could not have explained before I had done it for a decade. The counting is the opposite of the sadness. The sadness is what happens when a thing goes and nobody was watching, so that one day you simply notice the sky is quieter and cannot say when it happened or by how much. Grief with no shape. The counting gives it a shape. It turns a vague ache into a fact, and a fact, unlike an ache, can be argued with, worked on, sometimes even answered.

The counting is not the sadness. It is the refusal to let the loss go unwitnessed.

And I have to tell you, because the letter deserves the whole truth, that it is not all loss. That is the part people who have not done it never expect. The same notebook that records the swifts going has also recorded things arriving. A drain at the bottom of my road, an ugly concrete channel nobody would give a second look, quietly became a place where a grey wagtail now nests, two years running. A flat industrial roof turned into a colony of gulls. The verge the council stopped mowing, to save money rather than to save anything, came up thick with knapweed and then, following the knapweed, with bees I had not seen here in my life. Nature does not read our obituaries. It is far too busy.

So no, it does not wear me down, though I understand why you would think it must. What wears people down is helplessness, the sense that something is happening and there is nothing to be done and nobody to tell. Counting is the cure for exactly that. It is a small daily act that says: I saw this, I wrote it down, it is on the record now, and the record belongs to everyone who comes after me. You cannot save a species with a clicker on a Tuesday morning. But you can make sure that when someone finally decides to try, the years are there in a notebook, waiting, so they are not starting blind.

If you want the honest bottom of it, this is what I would say. I do not count because I am hopeful. I count because counting is a form of attention, and attention is a form of love, and love is what makes you show up on the cold mornings when the total is going to be low and you know it. Go and count something yourself, if you like. A hedge, a feeder, the swifts over your own street in May. You will be sadder some mornings and gladder than you expect on others, and you will never again look at your patch of sky as if nothing were happening in it. That, more than any number, is the thing worth having.