by Matt Merritt
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Matt Merritt
Map of Great Bird Gatherings
Title Page
Dedication
‘Magnetite’
Introduction
1 The Mating Game
2 Bowing with the Beautiful
3 Out of Africa
4 Fleeing the Waters
5 A Bridge Between Two Worlds
6 Living in the City
7 Killer in Our Midst
8 The World in a Field
9 Skyfall
10 Of a Single Mind
11 Dark Stars
12 A Blizzard of Wings
13 Parrots, Pests and Garrulous Bohemians
14 Silver Linings
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Birds are all around us, yet few of us appreciate the sheer scale and drama of our avian life. From city-centre raptors to vast flocks straight out of the Arctic, elusive dawn songsters to the exotic invaders of supermarket car parks, a host of remarkable wildlife spectacles is waiting to be discovered.
In A Sky Full of Birds, Matt Merritt shares his passion for birdwatching on a journey to many of the great bird gatherings that occur around the British Isles. During the course of a year, he marvels at the antics of ravens in Anglesey and at birds of prey on the Wirral, listens to Sussex nightingales and witnesses the mating games of Scottish capercallies.
By turns poetic, informative and entertaining, Merritt reveals the wonderful birdlife that can be encountered near and far – if only we know where to look.
About the Author
MATT MERRITT is the Editor of Bird Watching Magazine, and an award-winning poet. His work has been published in the UK, USA and Australia, and he is the Poetry Editor of the literary magazine Under The Radar. His writing is inspired by a lifelong interest in the natural world, in particular birds and ornithology. He blogs at polyolbion.blogspot.com.
Also by Matt Merritt
Making the Most of the Light
Troy Town
hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica
The Elephant Tests
For Natalie, Charlotte, Jacob and all my family, with thanks for their endless patience
MAGNETITE
We are not so much of the earth,
even, as the most microscopic jewel-toothed chiton,
the single-minded sperm whale, the Atlantic salmon.
Even the birds. Especially the birds.
They are tethered by the same element
that silvers the backs of their eyes, the lodestones that stud
their skulls, or spines, while we wander song-lines, desire-lines,
remake maps, charts, the base metal of our words.
Matt Merritt
Introduction
I’m on my way down the M5, heading for Cornwall in the wettest January anyone can remember. I left home at lunchtime in the middle of yet another biblical deluge, but somewhere between Strensham Services and Bristol a stiff southwesterly started to tear great holes in the dirty, grey cloud blanket, the constant curtain of spray kicked up by the juggernauts thinned, then disappeared, until now I’m driving straight into a low winter sun.
With the clearing of the skies come the birds. Through the wet West Midlands I saw nothing more than a handful of magpies, jackdaws and rooks, a few distant and unidentifiable gulls, and a couple of kestrels – once the default raptor of our motorways but now an increasingly irregular sight. The second of them, a bedraggled male hunched on an overhanging light gantry near Worcester, seemed to encapsulate the gloom that surrounds this species’ status in modern Britain, not to mention my own struggle to shake off the inevitable post-Christmas torpor.
Now, however, as I approach Taunton, everything changes. Sheep pastures are spackled with straggly flocks of winter thrushes, woodpigeons and stock doves that arrow purposefully across the six lanes; finches and tits skip from bush to bush as though blown by the backwash of trucks, and buzzards flap ponderously from dead trees and fence posts. When these ubiquitous raptors find a thermal, conjured by the late-afternoon sun, they’re suddenly transformed into the scaled-down eagles they are, climbing gracefully and methodically as they use the last hour of daylight to proclaim their ownership of the sodden fields and pastures.
After two and a half hours behind the wheel, I’m ready for a break, and when a group of twenty or so starlings skims over the road I’m reminded that the Somerset Levels are among the best places in Britain to see their murmurations, the extraordinary pre-roost gatherings in which thousands upon thousands of birds perform a mind-meld of enormous proportions, each one seemingly surrendering its consciousness to a swirling, pulsating whole. Surely it’s worth an hour’s wandering around the lanes in search of them? Certainly it’s more appealing than weak tea and ludicrously expensive cheese toasties at the fast-approaching services. I indicate left and let the 500 yards of the slip road take me into another country.
I should explain. Since the age of seven or eight, I’ve been a member of that much-maligned and even more misunderstood tribe – birdwatchers. Not a twitcher, you understand, the term trotted out disparagingly by the national press on the rare occasions that the world of ornithology intrudes upon their pages. Not for me midnight dashes up the motorway to catch a ferry to some bleakly beautiful Scottish island in the hope of seeing a tiny transatlantic stray that an autumn storm has thrown helplessly into our hemisphere, or teeth-chattering vigils on east coast headlands waiting to see what the winds will bring out of Siberia. No, a birdwatcher, plain and simple.
This is going to sound like stating the obvious, but a birdwatcher watches birds. They might, if they are one of those aforementioned twitchers, also tick species off a list (or more likely several lists); hence their alternative name of listers. They’ll probably compare their hauls with like-minded individuals across the country, across the globe even. They can, if they happen to work for a conservation organisation such as the RSPB, British Trust for Ornithology or The Wildlife Trusts, or if they’re one of the thousands of volunteers who make these and many smaller ornithological societies and clubs tick, turn their observations into hard science that, in the past at least, has helped shape environmental policies for governments of all stripes. Increasingly, they might squint down the barrel of a digital camera the same way the pioneering naturalists of the nineteenth century sighted their own ornithological finds down the barrel of a gun. Birds that, a hundred years ago, would have found themselves gathering dust in the glass cases of county museums, live on, bright-eyed and with every feather detail picked out in thousands of megapixels, on countless blogs and websites. But a birdwatcher watches birds. For many of us – most of us, probably – that’s enough.
My own enthusiasm was fired from pretty meagre kindling – a primary school project, of which my only real memory is creating a collage picture of a then-rare osprey (little suspecting that thirty years later they’d be nesting only a few miles from that school), my mother’s fondness for feeding garden birds, and occasional sightings of something unfamiliar during annual summer holidays at my nan’s house in South Wales. These included a strange black and white creature, seemingly carrying a carrot in its bill, which scudded low over the beach at Rest Bay one overcast August day, which a nearby pub sign revealed to be an oystercatcher, starting my enduring fascination with wading birds.
And there were books, of course. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, as this new obsession replaced my previous fascination with dinosaurs. No bird had quite the same capacity to induce awe and terror as a Tyrannosaurus rex, of course, but I supp
ose my eight-year-old self made the not unreasonable assumption that any of them, even colourful rarities like the golden oriole, were far more likely to turn up in the suburban East Midlands than the ‘terrible lizard’ itself.
The local library provided The Observer’s Book of Birds, while birthdays delivered the RSPB’s own similar effort, along with a much heavier tome that would never, these days, get away with calling itself a field guide. Quite apart from its doorstop size, the species accounts were brief and vague, and the drawings of a distinctly impressionistic bent. There’s nothing wrong with reducing a rare passerine to a few bold pencil strokes, and these days I’d probably enjoy the same artwork in an exhibition, but to a young birdwatcher the illustrations only induced bafflement.
Finally, there was the Reader’s Digest Field Guide to the Birds of Britain, which would also struggle to be considered portable with its slightly odd, letterbox shape, but which mixed wonderful artwork with precise descriptions and concise but fascinating little digressions into the folklore and cultural significance of the different species. It, or at least a later version of it, is sitting there in my birding rucksack even now.
Passionate as I was about birds, it’s fair to say I was never of a very scientific turn of mind. Prior to going to secondary school, I’d heard all the scare stories from older kids about having to dissect rats and God knows what else in biology lessons, and being somewhat squeamish I dreaded it. Once I got there, however, biology sprang two genuine surprises. The first was a pleasant one, namely that dissection wasn’t on the curriculum at all, and that I thoroughly enjoyed the subject. The second, a far more disappointing turn-up for the books, was that I didn’t actually understand a great deal of it. So, my birdwatching remained strictly un-academic, and if you’d asked me at the time I’d have struggled to tell you anything about why I enjoyed it. The truth, of course, is that it’s taken me until now to even begin to understand that.
Once caught, the birdwatching bug is never quite thrown off. Even during those periods of your life when you think it’s taken a back seat, you still find yourself gazing into the middle distance as you talk to someone in the street, while struggling to make out if that really was a grey wagtail scurrying across the car park, rather than the more familiar pied.
So it was with me. By the time I went to university other interests (primarily that great British hobby ‘going to the pub’, plus music and cricket) had come along, but they never wholly took over. And then, in my mid-twenties, living in Cardiff, working as a newspaper subeditor and suffering with a chronic back condition, I found myself walking miles each day at the recommendation of my doctor. As lovely as Llandaff and Pontcanna Fields are, they can get a bit samey when seen every day for a month, and so I started taking a pair of binoculars along to see what birds I could find. And that was it. I was a birdwatcher once again, and this time there was no going back.
That’s why I find myself standing at the roadside at East Lyng on a Friday afternoon in January. My journey to Cornwall is in connection with my job as editor of Bird Watching magazine. As you might imagine, managing to combine that childhood love of birds with the unfortunate adult need to earn a living is something of a dream job, and if, like any area of journalism, it contains its fair share of mundanity, it also contains more than its portion of unalloyed joy, not least in providing a cast-iron excuse for hanging around for large parts of every month while aiming my Swarovskis in the direction of feathered fly-pasts.
This particular stretch of road, as it happens, is one I know well. Any student of English history feels a sudden pang of recognition when, in East Lyng, they pass the signpost to Athelney. There, in January of 878, King Alfred of Wessex took refuge from the Danes among the marshes and thickets of the Levels, after the invading army fell upon his court at Chippenham and dispersed his household forces. The exploits that would earn him the epithet ‘The Great’ were still a few months away, and when he wasn’t overcooking some unfortunate housewife’s breadcakes you’d imagine he probably didn’t have a great deal to do beyond watching the birds that thronged what was then a wetland wilderness. Although he probably ate a fair few of them too, and not just the wildfowl that still turn up on our own menus. Godwit, for example, from the Anglo-Saxon for ‘good thing’, is merely one modern bird name that reveals the species’ past as a culinary delicacy, and a remarkable number of our native species remained on the menu to within living memory. In the terrible post-war winter of 1947, for example, even the likes of house sparrows were still being trapped to provide a mouthful or two of sustenance.
But I’m digressing. As I leave the village to the east, there are barriers across the road just beyond the last house, and signs warning of floods, but the way’s still passable on foot for at least half a mile. The straight stretch of the A361 towards Burrow Mump (little more than a pimple in the grand scheme of things, but a veritable mountain in these parts) has been turned into a causeway, with the fields on both sides submerged. Close to the Alfred monument itself, on the low hill that is the original Isle of Athelney, water pours down the gentle slope and pools beyond the hedge.
Now it’s fair to say that were I living in this locality I’d probably find the floods less than fascinating. If they’re in your front garden – worse, in your front room – they cease to be a novelty, a magnificent force of nature, or a once-in-a-lifetime sight, and become a nuisance, a health hazard and a heartbreaking reminder of climate change, government incompetence or the refusal to listen to the wisdom of tradition (take your pick).
But I’m passing through, and selfishly find myself enjoying the sheer strange grandeur of what’s before me. The immense lake to the north is criss-crossed by hedges and fences and studded with occasional trees, giving it an appearance that, you suspect, gets rather close to what Alfred himself might have seen. Back then, the Levels would have been an almost trackless, convoluted tangle of streams and dark meres, with willow thickets and alder carr clinging to the islets rising from the murk – not the semi-tamed arable land we see today. The landscape is simultaneously expansive, with the whole sky suddenly pouring itself into a pool between two hedges, and restrictive, oppressive even. You can well understand why even Guthrum and his fierce heathen warriors would have hesitated at the thought of following Alfred into this wilderness. Ravens, perhaps, might have found enough to sustain them in the form of unfortunate people and animals fallen foul of the waters, but those marching under the raven banner would have found things a good deal less hospitable.
But the long-ago struggles of a fugitive king are soon exiled to the far reaches of my mind. And it is the birds that do the banishing. No sooner have I started walking east along the road than I stop at a sign of movement to the right. There’s a patch of land, maybe half of a small field, still above water, in the shadow of the raised causeway between East Lyng and Athelney; and as I focus the binoculars on it, I can see that it’s alive with fieldfares and redwings – thrushes that pour across the North Sea to these islands from Scandinavia every winter. Such gatherings are common enough across the UK, but I’ve never seen them flocking quite so densely. Whatever the problems caused by the floodwaters, they seem to be turning the conditions to their advantage, feeding quickly and constantly, pulling worms and other goodies from the soft ground. Every now and then the last couple of ranks in the fieldfare flock leapfrog to the front, and so the gathering moves slowly eastwards with me, utterly heedless of my presence and intent only on making the best use of what little light is left to them.
To the north, little flurries of jackdaws and rooks lift from the fields beyond the trees, and two carrion crows harangue a buzzard as it sits in silent and unmoving vigil on a dead branch. Impressive as the raptor is in terms of size, it has to take a back seat to the marsh harrier that appears from the east, gliding low with long wings held in a shallow V, tethered tight to its own reflection. Its presence provokes consternation but not alarm among the mallards, teal and moorhens dabbling in the shallower areas – the
y move purposefully but unhurriedly towards the nearest cover, like office workers who, on hearing a genuine fire alarm for the first time, carry out the drill they’ve rehearsed a dozen times.
The sounds are as impressive as the sights. There’s the whistling of wigeon from somewhere out of sight, and lapwings skirl and swirl, low over the waters, before coming to rest on the long island formed by a field boundary. They bicker for the best positions, only occasionally forgetting their private rivalries to gang up on an intruding black-headed gull.
From above comes a distinctive, two-note piping, a sound that speaks to any birder of wild, wide-open places. Craning my neck to look skyward, it takes me a good thirty seconds to find its source, even though I know what it will be. A loose group of around two hundred golden plovers flash and spangle in the last of the sun, performing their strange alchemy with every turn. At first they’re dark, indistinct dots, before, banking left, they brighten into little white-hot ingots, finally turning again and falling as a rain of gold pieces.
All of this has me, for a moment, quite forgetting where I am. This sort of sight, with huge numbers of birds clinging to every square foot of dry land, every one of them intent only on its own survival, and seemingly completely oblivious to human presence, feels more like one of the world’s great wetlands – Australia’s Kakadu, maybe, or Brazil’s Pantanal – than the fenlands of south-west England. I’ve been lucky enough, as part of my job, to visit such places, but this feels every bit as extraordinary.
No, more so, perhaps. For a good ten minutes I am quite literally entranced, unable to break my gaze away from this astonishing spectacle. Sporadic glimpses of lapwings’ crests above the long grass just add to the exotic feel. Seen at a distance, they’re chunky, pied creatures which only finally make a lasting impression when they take to the air, tumbling and falling while making a noise not unlike someone trying to tune in an old-fashioned radio. But seen close up, with the iridescent purples and greens of their backs glorious in the sunlight, and their jaunty crests visible, they’re a sudden glimpse of far-off savannahs. ‘So crowned cranes stalk Kenyan grass’ writes the English poet Alison Brackenbury of them in the poem ‘Lapwings’, from her recent collection Then, and she’s right. Perhaps somewhere deep down their appeal to us is that they rekindle buried memories of our own origins in a warmer, wider continent.