My grandfather was a bird-catcher. The bird-catcher is an archetype: Papageno is his good-natured personification, and the mythical snare-setter is the wicked bird-catcher. My grandfather was neither the one nor the other, but a lover of nature. In his younger days he also worked with large birds of prey, holding buzzards and sparrowhawks on a thickly swathed arm, and from the spreading plane tree in front of the house he drove off the unruly pigeons by flying a captured kestrel fitted with jesses, and the pigeons remembered this danger for generations.
My grandfather was a true bird-catcher: he made the nets himself, knotting the pocketed mist nets and the clap nets with tools he had carved himself, and then propped them up with hazel sticks by the birds' watering places. He made the cages himself too: the great cage for a whole host of little creatures, which was a true masterpiece: green wooden slats, a fine, even lattice of wire, doors that shut with neat little catches, perches and drinkers, feeders… Then there were the middling private cages, in which he kept his favourites, the nightingales, one to a cage, and the tiny solitary cells that served as lures and were used only for trapping: in these last he set out the call-bird, who with its song summoned its kin, luring them to the snap-net, the little spring-framed clap net. He knew the creatures by their flight: siskin, greenfinch, chiffchaff, nightingale, blackcap, warbler, bunting, chaffinch, bullfinch, hawfinch, crossbill, robin and redstart, serin, goldfinch and redpoll, linnet and brambling, pipit and wagtail, and in winter the waxwing – the familiar incantations of my childhood, for my grandfather often took me with him on his walks in the woods. He caught and ringed birds by the hundred and the thousand, little songbirds and winter wanderers, and when needed, sparrows or pigeons as extras for films. We wrote the serial numbers of the aluminium rings, those broad anklets, into notebooks. They slipped easily onto the slender little legs of the small birds, and the light ring did not trouble them. Before each outing my grandfather threaded the rings onto a large metal hoop, so that he could quickly send the captured creatures on their way again once he had fitted them with their marks. Then we would pore over the registers in the yearbooks of the Ornithological Society, where the numbers of his rings appeared too, for bird-catchers, even in distant parts, reported to one another the numbers read from the legs of recaptured little creatures.
As he grew older, he went bird-catching less and less often. The great birds of prey no longer even held his attention, and then the favourites fell away too, the nightingales, who needed so much care. He no longer used his net-knotting tools, and he gave away the cages and the gear. The great cage remained, with a dozen little creatures in it. They cracked their seed, they sipped their water. At first new little birds still came from the ever rarer outings, and then, more and more often, none came. The old man no longer went out to the woods.
He sat in his armchair, glancing now and then at his birds, who were slowly dwindling. Little birds are short-lived… the dozen melted away, a few tiny creatures lived on in the cage for a long time, and then at last the final little bird, a blackcap, was left alone. Alone, for years. My grandfather could barely look after it any more, but it held on. It too just sat hunched on the perch fitted into the bars of the cage, much like my grandfather in his armchair. Its voice had fallen silent, it could no longer fly, its feathers had grown ruffled as though some illness were tormenting it, yet it was only old age that had ruffled them. And loneliness? The blackcap was a veritable Methuselah by now. My grandfather, too, had lived to a fine old age.
Then he went into hospital, and the blackcap sat there on its perch, hunched and ruffled. The weeks went by, until we received word of my grandfather's death. The next day our old blackcap was lying on the floor of the cage, dead.
I never learnt to knot a net. And I have no blackcap.