A World of Different @HayFestival: Cardiff After Hour

My name is Sophie Buchaillard. There are three things you need to know about me: I‘m a migrant, I love the sound of birds singing, and I hate labels.

I have lived in Cardiff: a flat in Roath, a shared house in Cathays, a park bench in Bute Park. I came to Wales in 2001, three days after 9/11.

Before Wales, I’d lived in a raft of other countries and wherever I went, I always listened for bird songs as a way to anchor myself.

And, oh boy! There are all sorts of birds in Penarth. Robins, woodpeckers, seagulls. But most of all, there are a lot of jackdaws. Forty/fifty of them live in the trees across the road from me.

They’re fascinating birds, jackdaws. Did you know that in the 15th century, they were just known as daws. The prefix ‘jack’ was added later by an ornithologist eager to classify with greater accuracy: ‘jack’ means ‘small’ you see. Later, they were re-named as European, Western or Eurasian jackdaws.

The thing I love about them is some are what you call ‘resident’ birds (they stay put all year round), some are ‘migrant’ birds (they move to and from North Africa and Russia, following the seasons and the availability of food), and some are ‘vagrant’ birds. They just wander as they please.

There is an estimated 46 million jackdaws in Europe alone. I read that in the UK their numbers increased dramatically after the 70s, when people stopped hunting them as pests.

They’re monogamous, yet they live in large flocks and practice food sharing. And get that, a jackdaw will give his favourite food to another jackdaw, never the scraps.

Have you heard them sing?

It isn’t pretty, but they do this amazing thing: every night, the flock by our house takes to the air, and they tchak tchak tchak for five minutes, circle about the houses, then settle in the trees and go to sleep. Imagine 40-50 birds taking to the air like clockwork every night. If you’re a Hitchcock fan, then this dark mass taking to the air can be frightening. So I looked it up, and in fact what they do is make as much racket as they can, and when the sound reaches a particular decibel level, they know it is time to migrate. Birds taking a vote, their society led by the needs of the many.

Except, they don’t all go. The resident jackdaws stick around all winter, and the vagrants just - wander.

Vagrancy exists amongst humans too. In French it’s called vagabondage and in the 60s, there was a certain romantic flare about this sort of lifestyle. Romantic, as long as you were a man, that is. If you were a woman, then you were sectioned in a mental health hospital. Writers like the French Colette and the Swiss explorer Isabelle Heberhardt wrote about their own chosen vagabondage in fiction form, so as not to be locked up.

And so there are few stories of women who choose to leave their families behind to wander. I’ve always found that frustrating because I grew up listening to stories of women in movement. My grandmother was this trousers wearing, poker playing, petite woman, born in Vietnam, who regularly drove 12 hours to visit friends, well into her 80s. My mother, in her 80s now, just returned from two weeks in Uzbekistan. Born in North Africa, she has lived on four continents.

I warned you at the start, I am a migrant, and you can hear it when I speak. Or maybe more accurately, I am a vagrant who wandered from country to country for a while and settled in South Wales almost by accident. I am also part of this formidable family, none of whom were born in France apart from me. Yet French is what you hear. I used to think it meant I belonged everywhere, a sort of citizen of the world as Stefan Zweig called it. But in the current climate it often feels more like I don’t belong anywhere at all.

And it got me thinking about the daws. You see, no matter the label: ‘jack’, ‘Eurasian’, ‘Western’, the daw is the same bird wherever she is. What defines her, is a series of choices. Whether to be ‘resident’, ‘migrant’, ‘vagrant’? Where to go? Whether to come back? All of the above, maybe.

But then, what’s her identity? A particular geographical area? Or is she the embodiment of all the places the daws which came before have travelled to and from? The places that make her want to take flight, sing, and decide whether to stay or go.

I am Sophie Buchaillard. A novelist. A wanderer. A jackdaw, maybe. I still hate labels.