‘Everywhere I went, I looked for solace in nature’ … Helen Harris, by the River Lea in east London. Photograph: Rebecca Black After her husband died in January 2023, something strange began happening on Helen Harris's daily walks. Birds started coming remarkably close, hopping alongside her, chirping and appearing to accompany her when nobody else was around. For a woman newly bereaved after 35 years of marriage, the encounters were impossible to ignore. But was there something more to them — or was grief simply changing the way she saw the world? Helen had walked on the heath near their home with her husband for years. His illness eventually stopped him joining her, and by the time he died, she had already been walking alone for six months. The birds, she insists, had never paid her any attention before. It was tempting to wonder whether her husband was somehow sending a message. But she quickly dismissed the idea. He had told her before his death that he was certain there was no afterlife and considered belief in one irrational. And he certainly would not have chosen a bird as his return to the world. He admired big, powerful animals and, if given the choice, might have appeared as a towering stag, a moose or an elk emerging from some gloomy wilderness. Then came the robin. One evening, it followed her home, hopping alongside her for an unusually long time. In a moment she later described as foolishness, Helen stopped and quietly told it: “OK, if it’s you, follow me home.” The robin immediately flew away in a sudden flutter of wings. Three months after her husband's death, another remarkable encounter happened in France. While climbing the stone staircase to her room in a village in the foothills of the Alps, a young magpie suddenly appeared on the banister beside her. The bird was less than two feet away. It squawked, flapped its wings and bounced up and down, making such a fuss that the encounter became deeply disconcerting. Helen still does not know what had upset the magpie. But she knew one thing: experiences like this had never happened to her before. The encounters changed the way she looked at nature. She began noticing everything from strangely shaped mushrooms to the clicking sounds made by sun-warmed gorse bushes. She was not suddenly carefree. She was still deeply sad. But walking, something she had always needed to do, acquired a new meaning. During that first year alone, she searched for solace in nature and kept moving whenever she could. Walking on the heath or travelling became a way of coping, while staying still could make the pain feel even worse. Eventually, Helen realised that walking in nature with someone you love can leave you partly separate from the world around you. Walking alone, she felt more completely part of it. Perhaps that explained why she noticed the birds more. But she also wondered whether they sensed that something was wrong with her — that she was, in her words, a wounded creature. Back home, the strange companionship continued. Another robin regularly tries to catch her attention through the glass garden door, while the same urban fox — identifiable by a scar on its forehead — sleeps in her garden. A mouse repeatedly crosses the garden path at 8.30pm, always in the same direction. Above it all, green parakeets fly home through the urban dusk along their familiar routes. Then came another extraordinary sight. During the most active night of the Perseid meteor shower, Helen woke at three in the morning and saw three shooting stars through her open bedroom window. Someone later told her it was a good omen. She did not see it that way. For her, it simply happened. Yet these seemingly small encounters have coloured her experience of living alone for the first time in 35 years. And as Helen walks through the woods, she sometimes imagines her husband laughing and rolling his eyes at the story she tells everyone: that after he died, the birds started behaving strangely towards her. A moment that changed me: my husband died – and birds began behaving strangely towards me
