Lightwood Square

And what’s the point of having data if you don’t use it for something?

Admittedly, this may not be the conventional use.

It started innocently enough. We set up a microphone in our garden in Lightwood to find out what was out there. BirdNET began quietly accumulating detections and recordings of the birds and other wildlife passing through, and curiosity did the rest.

Interesting detections were listened to. Unlikely visitors were investigated. Patterns began to emerge. And the Tawny Owls became particularly fascinating.

We already knew we had a local pair, Harold and Marjorie, but the recordings suggested that their nocturnal world was rather more crowded than we had realised. Different voices began appearing. We started comparing their calls and trying to identify individual birds from their vocal characteristics.

Which is approximately where respectable wildlife monitoring ended and Lightwood Square began.

Because once you know that Harold called at 1:30 in the morning, Marjorie answered him, another female was nearby and an unidentified woman called from beyond the gardens... well, those are the facts.
What we choose to do with them is another matter.

And then there is the obvious question:

What does this mean for Marjorie’s marriage?

The wildlife of Lightwood had inadvertently provided the cast of a soap opera.

The birds you meet in Lightwood Square are based on the wildlife genuinely recorded or observed here. The appearances, disappearances, suspicious late-night calling, sudden bursts of activity and unexpected visitors that drive each episode come from the monitoring data.

The personalities, dialogue, motives, romantic entanglements and neighbourhood scandals are rather less scientifically defensible.

So Harold and Marjorie really are identifiable Tawny Owls. Marlboro and Jolene really do have distinguishable voices. The mysterious callers really are mysterious callers.

Whether Harold has some explaining to do is outside the scope of the data.

Around them lives the rest of the Square: Steve and Mrs Steve, the Blackbirds; Batman Smith and the Robins; Gary the Magpie; the formidable Mr Jack Daw; Nigel the Pigeon; Hopalong the Treecreeper; and Lieutenant Colonel Stirling, a squirrel whose precise relationship with the Special Air Service has yet to be independently verified.

Together, their genuine comings and goings provide the events from which each episode is written.

There is real wildlife monitoring behind Lightwood Square, and I take that part seriously. But I’m not trying to turn myself into a scientist. I’m simply curious about the wildlife living around us, enjoy finding out what it is doing, and have discovered that data becomes considerably more entertaining when you allow it to develop a cast, questionable motives and a theme tune.