This Birding Life

by Stephen Moss

  Crossing the pond to North America, I would love to join the forthcoming expedition in search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Last seen back in the 1980s, this huge black-and-white bird is now almost certainly extinct, though there is just a chance that a pair or two may be clinging on in the swamps of Louisiana.

  Alternatively, I could head for Cuba, where Ivory-bills have also been reported in recent years. If I failed in my quest, the consolation prize would be my third choice, Bee Hummingbird. At less than 6cm long, and weighing just 1.8 grams, this Cuban endemic is the smallest bird in the world.

  For my fourth species, I would travel south to the world’s most bird-rich continent, South America. With almost half the world’s birds to choose from, it is not easy to pick just one, but the world’s largest parrot, Hyacinth Macaw, would be hard to beat.

  East now, to Africa. Last year we visited The Gambia on honeymoon, when the only disappointment was that we did not manage to see Carmine Bee-eaters. Of all the world’s bee-eaters, this is arguably the most stunning, with its elegant shape, decurved bill and deep-red plumage.

  My sixth and seventh birds both come from regions I have yet to visit: South-east Asia and Australasia. In Asia, the birds of paradise are unbeatable, and the one I would most like to see is the bizarre yet beautiful Wallace’s Standardwing. Australasia is full of equally unusual birds, including a stunning range of parrots, kiwis and the amazing lyrebird. But I would travel a little further, to New Zealand’s South Island, to look for the Takahe. This giant relative of the Moorhen was once thought to be extinct, until it was rediscovered in a remote valley during the 1950s.

  For my eighth choice, I shall simply pick the next new species I see, whatever it is. Whether I am in Britain or some distant corner of the globe, seeing any new bird is always a thrill. And knowing that there are well over 8000 species out there I haven’t seen is the only motivation I need to go out and look for them.

  Car park birding

  OCTOBER 2000

  I know it’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to admit in the Guardian, but I like car parks. Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about the multistorey variety or those vast concrete spaces at out-of-town shopping centres. My favourite car parks are in rather more rural settings: at places such as Stodmarsh, Titchwell and Minsmere, some of Britain’s best-known hotspots for birds.

  The reason is simple. Sometimes the best views are those you get the moment you open your car door, or when you’re about to turn the key in the ignition and leave. It may be the constant presence of human activity, but birds in car parks often seem tamer and allow closer views, than those on the actual bird reserves.

  Last November, my partner Suzanne and I went out for a Sunday afternoon walk at Stodmarsh, in the Stour Valley in Kent. The car park was full of bird activity, with flocks of Goldcrests and Long-tailed Tits foraging in the surrounding bushes, calling to each other as they went. In contrast, the reserve itself was deathly quiet. Six months later, at exactly the same place, a Cetti’s Warbler competed with a Wren and a Whitethroat to see who could sing loudest. No prizes for guessing that the Cetti’s won.

  If you want to catch up with another loud songster, the Nightingale, just visit Minsmere in the last week of April or the first week of May, and stand on the edge of the car park. You’ll soon hear the song of the poets’ favourite bird, and if you hang around long enough, you have a good chance of seeing it as well.

  Another RSPB car park, at Pulborough Brooks in Sussex, provided me with fabulous views of a nesting Nuthatch. I was leading a beginners’ birdwatching course for the Field Studies Council, during a particularly wet spring weekend. As the rain finally stopped, the bird popped in and out of its nest hole, just a few feet above our heads.

  Supermarket car parks can be just as good for birds. Flocks of Ring-necked Parakeets regularly fly over the Richmond branch of Waitrose on their way between the River Thames and Richmond Park, while Asda, on the Norwich ring road, occasionally plays host to flocks of Waxwings, winter invaders from the north.

  But these are eclipsed by the rarest bird ever seen in a supermarket car park: Britain’s first and only Golden-winged Warbler, discovered next to Tesco’s in Maidstone, back in February 1989. This tiny bird, hardly bigger than a Blue Tit, had presumably arrived from North America the year before, swept across the ocean by autumn gales. Why it chose to make its home in such unusual surroundings we’ll never know, but it was much appreciated by a crowd of several thousand avid twitchers. Unfortunately, I never got around to seeing it.

  The magic of car parks works on the other side of the pond, too. This spring we visited Cape May, North America’s finest spot for migrating songbirds. At least, that’s what we were told. In fact, migrants were few and far between, but one did perform beautifully: a fine male Prairie Warbler, singing its heart out in, yes, the car park.

  And my most memorable car park sighting? Probably the flock of Tristram’s Grackles at En Gedi, Israel, last January. These sooty-black birds were drinking from a leaky hose, the only fresh water for miles around. When startled by a car horn or engine, they would fly a short distance, revealing bright orange linings to their wings, before returning to their little oasis in the sand.

  The Great Escape

  MARCH 2001

  Sixty years ago next month, a young man began observing the breeding behaviour of a pair of Redstarts. With the help of friends and colleagues, he continued doing so for four years, amassing a wealth of data. Then, the Second World War came to an end, and he never saw his beloved birds again.

  The man was John Buxton, and his studies took place at a German prisoner-of-war camp called Eichstätt, deep in the forests of Bavaria. Eichstätt was an ideal place to study birds, and as a prisoner for more than five years, he had plenty of time to do so. As author Peter Marren has observed: ‘In some ways, prisoner-of-war camps offer rather good opportunities for birdwatching. It is hard to imagine any other circumstances in which so many intelligent, active people would have so much spare time on their hands, nor so much incentive to find a distracting pastime.’

  Buxton cut an unlikely figure as an ornithologist. In fact he was not a professional scientist at all, but a tutor in English literature at Oxford. But when he was imprisoned in Eichstätt, after his capture during the ill-fated Norwegian campaign, he began to look around for something to alleviate the boredom, and the Redstarts fitted the bill.

  So while his fellow inmates spent their time dressing up as chorus girls or digging escape tunnels, Buxton turned his attention to the study of Redstarts. He immediately enlisted help, organising his colleagues with military efficiency. Regular observations began in April 1941, and soon took up virtually all the prisoners’ free time. In just three months, from April to June 1943, Buxton and his team spent a total of 850 hours watching the birds – an average of more than nine hours a day.

  Buxton was acutely aware of the irony of his situation, as a captive man watching free birds: ‘My redstarts? But one of the chief joys of watching them in prison was that they inhabited another world than I; and why should I call them mine? They lived wholly and enviably to themselves, unconcerned in our fatuous politics …’

  After the war, Buxton returned to academia, and was later active in promoting bird ringing, introducing the mist-net into Britain from Germany. He died in 1989, virtually unknown to the modern generation, but mourned by all those who remembered him. As a legacy he left a delightful monograph in the Collins New Naturalist series, The Redstart, now sadly out of print.

  John Buxton was not the only birdwatcher at Eichstätt. The camp also played host to a young advertising executive named Peter Conder, who had been captured in June 1940, and like Buxton spent five long years in the prison camp. His captors got so used to his birdwatching activities that he became a useful look-out during escape attempts. He made detailed observations on Goldfinches, recording his results on whatever material was available, including German toilet paper.

 
; Conder’s experience was quite literally a life-changing one. After the war, instead of returning to a career in advertising, he became warden of Skokholm Bird Observatory off the Welsh coast. Later, he became director of the RSPB, increasing its membership tenfold during his time in charge. Thus the man who described himself as ‘an academic failure, and a bit of a loner’ became one of the leading conservationists of his day: all thanks to some Goldfinches – and a plentiful supply of toilet paper.

  Keep out!

  APRIL 2001

  So, the countryside is closed. Or to put it more accurately, most places where people normally go to watch birds are currently not open to visitors. Birdwatchers all over Britain are confined to seawatching, reservoirs or a walk round their local park. But the situation is not quite as bad as it may seem. Birdwatchers may be frustrated, farmers devastated, and the tourism industry tearing its hair out. But for the birds, at least, the foot-and-mouth crisis may turn out to be a good thing.

  Britain is a very crowded island. Our 120 million or so birds have to share their space with almost 60 million humans, along with their dogs, cats, bicycles and cars. Whether we mean to or not, we cause disturbance to birdlife. Dog-walkers flush breeding partridges and Skylarks; mountain bikers and off-road vehicles carve up nesting habitats; and birdwatchers themselves sometimes disturb the very birds they come to see.

  Not now, though. With much of the countryside out of bounds to the casual visitor, birds can get on with their lives more or less undisturbed by humans. In London’s Richmond Park, for instance, Skylarks and other ground-nesting birds can look forward to a bumper breeding season, without the unwelcome attention of dog-walkers and their pets. Numbers of predatory crows in the park have also declined dramatically, because the lack of human visitors means less rubbish and waste food for them to scavenge. Elsewhere, in the ‘real’ countryside, the clock has been turned back to a time when the only human presence was the local farmer.

  Of course, birds do not live in an ecological vacuum. Indeed, many species that breed on moorland or farmland depend on the annual cycle of grazing by sheep or cattle, which provides suitable habitat for breeding and feeding. If these animals disappear from large swathes of the countryside it will not only be a disaster for the farmers but could also bring problems for birds like the Lapwing that make their nests on grazing land.

  Incidentally, in their search for a scapegoat for the current crisis some sectors of the media have decided to put the blame on birds. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that birds can spread the disease, but given the sorry state of intensive farming that led to the crisis in the first place, it does seem a bit like shooting the messenger.

  Meanwhile, the countryside is at last beginning to open up to visitors, albeit in a fairly limited way. Some RSPB reserves, such as Titchwell Marsh in north Norfolk or Radipole Lake in the heart of Weymouth, are open and will provide many people with a welcome birding fix over the next few weeks.

  As for the future, what will be the long-term effects of foot-and-mouth disease on Britain’s birdlife? One thing is sure: never before has the countryside been put under so much scrutiny. Once the crisis is over there is likely to be a radical rethink of agricultural policy, hopefully resulting in a return to more traditional, wildlife-friendly ways of managing the land. If and when this happens, we can only hope that the needs of our birds are recognised, along with those of farmers, tourists, birdwatchers and everyone else with a vested interest in the British countryside.

  Where have all the birds gone?

  MAY 2001

  A few years ago, an American ornithologist wrote a book with the provocative title Where Have All the Birds Gone? He showed that North America’s songbird population had undergone a drastic decline since the Second World War, mainly as a result of habitat loss and modern farming methods.

  I am tempted to write a book of the same name today. For over the past few years, along with many others, I have begun to notice declines in many once familiar birds. Last week I was in north Norfolk, hoping for a range of spring migrants and newly arrived summer visitors. True, the weather was hardly ideal – persistent north-easterlies for the whole three days – but I was still surprised at the lack of birds. At Cley, the only migrant waders were a small party of Ruffs and the odd Whimbrel, while Titchwell was hardly any better. Songbird migrants were thin on the ground, too: with just a few Whinchats, although one of these was in the same binocular view as a day-flying Barn Owl.

  Which brings me to the good news: some birds are clearly increasing in numbers. Barn Owls, Sparrowhawks and Marsh Harriers are all regular sights on a trip to Norfolk nowadays, whereas when I first visited the county in the 1970s they were scarce. Avocets are thriving, too: a welcome boost for the RSPB.

  A few days later, on May Day Bank Holiday, I visited Dungeness. There, too, there were good numbers of some birds, including plenty of Sedge Warblers and Whitethroats, and a heavy passage of Swallows and Swifts. But it has been years since I regularly saw birds like Bullfinches, Willow Tits and Lesser Whitethroats, which in my youth were fairly common. The latest London Bird Report reveals the seriousness of the decline, with the Willow Tit, once a regular breeding bird in the capital, down to just seven individuals, none of which bred.

  Whatever the cause of these declines (and they are probably due to a combination of factors), one thing is clear: by and large, birds which live on reserves, such as Avocets and Marsh Harriers, are doing fine, while birds with wider but sparser distributions, including farmland and woodland species, are declining – in some cases perhaps even heading towards extinction.

  That may sound a bit over the top. But recent studies have suggested that when bird populations decline they do not do so in a neat and orderly fashion. Once numbers drop below a certain level, whatever conservation measures are put in place, the species may be doomed.

  Take the Passenger Pigeon. Once the commonest bird in the world, it was so abundant that flocks containing tens of millions of birds literally darkened the North American skies as they passed. The birds were shot indiscriminately for food, and a rapid decline began. For some reason, the pigeons appeared to lose the will to breed, and numbers dropped like a stone. Fifty years later, in 1914, the last surviving Passenger Pigeon, Martha, died in captivity in Cincinnati Zoo.

  Nothing so dramatic has ever occurred on this side of the Atlantic. But when we start to notice the decline of familiar birds such as the Song Thrush, Starling and House Sparrow, it’s time to get worried. So next time you hear that songbird populations are in decline, don’t console yourself with the thought that they will recover. This time, there’s just a chance that they might not.

  Two for joy

  APRIL 2OO3

  I’ve always had a soft spot for Magpies, not least because they featured in the very first article I ever wrote for the Guardian, a dozen or so years ago. These splendid birds are, for most people, part of the landscape – especially if, like me, you live in a leafy suburb, packed with trees and gardens.

  And packed, of course, with garden birds. For there’s the rub. In the bird world, Magpies are currently vying with Sparrowhawks as public enemy number one, because of their tendency to prey on the eggs and chicks of some of our best-loved songbirds.

  Since the end of the Second World War, Magpies have undergone a population boom and recolonised many areas from which they used to be absent. This is due partly to the drop in numbers of gamekeepers, who would shoot Magpies on sight and ask questions afterwards. During roughly the same period, several species of songbird have suffered dramatic declines – some, like the Song Thrush and House Sparrow, to the point at which we are seriously worried about their future. Many people have, understandably, put two and two together and made five. To them, Magpies are the evil villains responsible for our songbirds’ demise.

  But things are not quite as simple as they might seem at first sight. In fact, Magpies are not the culprits. Yes, they do take eggs and chicks – though even at the heig
ht of the breeding season these still only make up about a third of their diet.

  Let’s look at it another way. If Magpies are responsible for the decline, why did songbirds not die out centuries ago? Why are so many garden birds doing rather well? And most importantly of all, what do the species that have declined most rapidly have in common? Not that they are predated by Magpies – but that they feed for much of the year on seeds.

  The seed-eaters – birds like the Tree Sparrow, Linnet and Corn Bunting – have declined more than any other group. When I was a child the bird books classified these as ‘farmland species’ – though few do so now. That’s because on many arable farms you would be lucky to find a spare seed in winter, let alone come across the stubble fields filled with birds that I remember from my youth.

  So who is to blame for the decline in songbirds? Top of the list are farmers – at least those who embraced modern, high-intensity farming methods and took the subsidies that went along with them. They are closely followed by consumers of cheap supermarket food – who went along with an agricultural policy that left no room for the birds. Does that sound familiar? Well, that category certainly includes me – and probably you too.

  Max & Guy

  MAY 2003

  In the autumn of 1926, a young man named Max Nicholson went up to Oxford. His subject was history, but his passion was birds, and he soon joined the newly formed Oxford Ornithological Society. In contrast to the hedonistic behaviour of the ‘Brideshead Set’, with their endless round of parties and costume balls, the ornithologists were an earnest bunch. Instead of propping up the college bar and getting ‘hog-whimperingly drunk’, they were often out from dawn to dusk making careful observations of bird behaviour.