John Toal

All those mornings ago, that exuberant song of those first flights lasted only minutes.

And then the garden fell into a deep silence.

But the air was still reverberating with hope and promise.

How could anyone describe an empty nest with a glum face?

Now, this is my first spring as an empty nester, myself.

The cat now lolls in the hush of my daughter's old childhood bedroom.

Yes, there is the joy of watching a young life take shape and find its place in the world, but there's also a counterweight, the ache of missing that trusting little hand in mine, the gentle grief of recognising the changing seasons of my own life, and perhaps, too, a kind of fear.

You see, weeks after the nestlings fledged all those years ago, I decided to clean out the bird box in the hope that the next year another pair of blue tits would make it home.

I carefully removed the box from the fence.

Opening the bigger door at the back, I could see the carefully woven moss, grass and down that created the soft bed of the nest and how it was trimmed with a cosy collar of dog hair.

As I gently pulled it out of the box and into the light, I saw, cupped at the bottom of the nest, one small, lifeless blue tit.

Its head turned to one side, a wing extended, with shiny black flight feathers perfectly formed, a bib of yellow fluff on its chest.

What had happened to this bird on that glorious early summer morning?

As the birdsong rang around the garden, why didn't he leave?

Did he not understand that call, that it was time to fly, that the nestling had to become a fledgling?

Then I better understood the empty nest syndrome.

It is the joy, of course.

It is the ache of loss.

It is the grief of ageing.

But it's also a kind of helplessness.