My lockdown spring watch – a photo essay

The Guardian sports photographer Tom Jenkins follows up his popular take on tulips during the enforced break from action photography. Here he talks about how photographing a pair of long-tailed tits nesting in his front garden helped him through a difficult spring

Bum barrels twit on bush and tree
Scarse bigger then a bumble bee
And in a white thorn's leafy rest
It builds its curious pudding-nest
Wi hole beside as if a mouse
Had built the little barrel house."

John Clare, 18th-century English nature poet

Recently, I was told that I was showing classic signs of biophilia" - I had to open a dictionary to learn this meant enjoying the love of life or living systems" and displaying the psychological condition of being attracted to all that is alive and vital. I had just published a picture essay about some tulips that were flourishing in my back garden. I was nervous submitting it - here was a sports photographer, denied his usual fare because of the pandemic, trying his hand at something very different. I was pleasantly surprised by the response, with far more people getting in touch than I've ever had for a sports story.