by Lev Parikian
The similarities between this study and my regular homework, absorbing the details of an orchestral score through familiarity and repeated revision, are striking. But while my brain is used to the language of music, it finds this new vocabulary overwhelming and confusing. Nonetheless I persevere. The more firmly entrenched this information is, the easier it will be to summon in the heat of battle.
But even as I’m immersed in this improving activity, I’m troubled by a small but disproportionately noisy question.
Why?
Why bother learning the difference between a snipe and a woodcock? Or a goldcrest and a firecrest? Or any of the myriad confusion species you might encounter while out birding?
Come to that, why go birding anyway? What kind of sad loser am I?
These questions lead down a dangerous path, encouraging an Eeyorish outlook on life, introspective ponderings spiralling gradually downwards into a grisly vortex of existential anguish.
What, when you come down to it, is the point of anything?
Not to be a downer, but there is none. All human activity serves merely to fill the time between birth and death. In any case, if you’re after a bit of perspective, our planet will be consumed by our dying sun in a couple of billion years. So why bother?
Well, while we’re here, why not pass the time before our inevitable decrepitude by learning the difference between a shag and a cormorant? It’s the equivalent of the courtesy we extend people when we take the trouble to call them by their names instead of addressing them with a vague description of their physical attributes and personality. ‘Henry’ instead of ‘tall, slightly weird dark-haired guy’, ‘Diane’ instead of ‘nice but dull bespectacled lady’.
By referring to shags and cormorants as shags and cormorants, and not ‘blackish beaky waterbirds’, I do them, and nature in general, a service. A barely measurable service, but a service nonetheless. And nature, as we hardly need reminding, needs our services more than ever.
This period of intense absorption brings on a familiar feeling. I realise I’m falling back into the pattern of my youth. My strength as an ornithologically obsessed child was as a theorist. I was able to reel off names of birds I was never likely to see, and would have identified them without a tremor if they’d been obliging enough to stand on the kitchen table in the exact pose they assumed in the guides. Where I fell down was in my ability to apply this knowledge in practice.
The thirty-five-year layoff hasn’t made me any better equipped, and my excursions so far amount to little more than dabbling. I need to get out regularly, and where better than my local patch? I plan, in time, to cast the net wider, but I’m keen not to run before I can walk, so I set aside the books and head to Streatham Common.
In choosing my patch, I’ve been ruled by laziness. London is blessed with many open green spaces, several of them within walking distance of my house. I plump for the nearest one.
Streatham Common and its neighbour Norwood Grove form a good solid patch of green with a mixture of open ground and woods, with the added bonus of a semiformal garden called The Rookery dividing them. It’s a modest patch, but while expectations of special sightings are low, that’s not why I’m there. Regular patchwatching, as advocated by all the bird books, will give me practice ‘in the field’. I’m confident that after a few weeks of keen study and observation I’ll begin to master the dark art of identifying a small brown bird from a brief glimpse of its disappearing hindquarters.
The books are also unanimous in their advice to go birdwatching early in the morning, when activity is at its peak. There is a word in Swedish, gökotta, for the act of getting up early to listen to birdsong, but the knowledge that this word exists, while heartwarming, doesn’t make it any easier. It’s a bitter pill, this early rising, but my enthusiasm propels me to acts of previously unimagined heroism, and I set the alarm for an optimistic 5 a.m., before reality prompts me to change it to 5.15, no 5.30, OK then 5.45.
In the event, and in strict accordance with Finnemore’s Law, which states that the likelihood of waking on time is in inverse proportion to the importance of the thing you have to be up for, I’m lying awake at 4.26, eyes wide open and my brain performing mental gymnastics worthy of Olga Korbut.
What the hell. It’ll be light soon. Gökotta ahoy.
It’s a strange and unfamiliar feeling, being up before everyone else. The musician’s life is geared towards late nights. I almost expect to be arrested. As I walk past a fellow early riser at the bus stop I’m assailed by a frisson of self-consciousness. I feel him glance at me, and am suddenly aware that to appear in public with a pair of binoculars round my neck is to invite the judgement of strangers. Birdwatcher, confused operagoer, or incompetent spy? But the zeal of the recent convert overcomes this shyness. Let people think what they like, I nearly convince myself.
Once on the common, my hope that I’ll be alone with the birds is confounded immediately. I was forgetting about dog walkers. There’s a clutch of them as I arrive, owners and dogs of different shapes and sizes, not resembling each other nearly as much as we’ve been led to believe. I greet them with a hearty, ‘Morning!’ They look at me as if I’ve farted poison gas. I can almost see them clocking my binoculars and thinking, ‘Incompetent spy.’ But worst of all, I’ve broken the first rule of the Living in London Club.
Never say hello. Ever.
They hurry past. If they had children they’d be herding them away from me. A Labrador shoots me a look of hatred as it scurries off.
It’s not the ideal start. I hear mocking laughter from the copse down the hill. It takes a few seconds for the sound to register in my befuddled early morning head. I’ve heard it before. Recently, in fact. I’ve heard it on the CDs. But I can’t put my brain on it.
It bothers me as I walk down the hill, following the path around Norwood Grove. It takes me down to the bottom corner, then back up towards the copse, skirting the edge of the grove. I hear the sound again, back up the hill from where I’ve just come. I lift my binoculars, but it’s a token gesture. Whatever the bird is, it’s taunting me from afar.
As I explore this unfamiliar territory I feel like a stranger in a foreign land, overwhelmed by the new, everything tantalisingly beyond my grasp. When I do see a bird I recognise, I dismiss it as easy. ‘Oh, it’s just a robin. Everyone knows a robin.’ And when a bird flies off without giving me enough clues to its identity, I berate myself for not instantly recognising it from its flight pattern, or rump colour, or jizz.
Now there’s a word.
It’s common in birding circles, conceived in a more innocent age. For those unaware of the word’s secondary, earthier, meaning, I offer one simple exhortation.
Do not google it.
The word ‘jizz’ is commonly thought to come from the World War II RAF abbreviation of ‘General Impression of Shape and Size’.* GISS becomes gizz becomes jizz. Whatever the explanation, birders continue to use it, either ignorant of or impervious to its darker connotations. Jizz is an important concept in bird recognition. Birds often disappear before you’ve had a chance to note the colour of their primary coverts or supercilia or whatnot, so a working knowledge of the ‘feel’ of a bird is indispensable. We use it to recognise people from their gait or body shape. Sports commentators know about jizz. Paula Radcliffe’s bobbing head became instantly recognisable to athletics watchers in the 2000s. Likewise the run-up of Sarfraz Nawaz, the Pakistani fast-medium bowler – memorably described by John Arlott as ‘like Groucho Marx chasing a pretty waitress’ – or Ian Botham, ‘like a shire horse cresting the breeze’.
Although I reckon I could recognise Ian Botham a mile away from his jizz alone, my skills are less reliable with birds, especially when they’re in flight. The little beggar that just bounced over my head often goes unidentified.
But the pastel-shaded beggar I glimpse through foliage one morning in the small copse in The Rookery rings instant bells. It’s attached to the tree as if with Velcro, has a jaunty set to its bod
y, and, crucially, is facing downwards. It descends a couple of feet, pecks at the bark for a second, then flits into the undergrowth, where I can’t follow.
But I’ve seen enough. The soft pinks and blues, combined with the acrobatics, give me the information I need to murmur ‘nuthatch’ under my breath. Because, as I learned many years ago and have somehow retained for just such a moment, the nuthatch is the only British bird that climbs trees downwards.
I have a similar experience with the stock dove by the pond, its ‘kind’ eye and lack of white on its body distinguishing it from the much commoner feral pigeon, with its variations of plumage and ‘lunatic staring’ eye. With both these birds there’s a feeling of intimacy, a sense that there’s a thread of communication between the bird and me, something to which nobody else is privy. I see them both in a little nook away from other people, and the proximity of the encounters renders them memorable, the exact moment of contact imprinted on my mind.
Over the next fortnight I visit my patch several times. I become familiar with its birds and where they hang out. A pair of jays occupy the top of the wood, clacking noisily as they fly away from me. A song thrush – living by the adage ‘If it’s worth singing, it’s worth singing twice’ – serenades me down the east side of Norwood Grove. Greenfinches, with their zuzzing snore of a call, herald spring from the copse in the middle. There’s always a blackbird on the path as I arrive. More often than not, as I walk that path, a wren buzzes across in front of me, wriggles through the railings, and loses itself in the bushes.
There’s something irresistible about the wren, its tail cocked at a ludicrously perky angle, its entire demeanour redolent of bundled energy and small-birdy flittiness. It’s a low-level bird, say the books. Look down, not up. And they’re right. I’m getting better at spotting it, its direct flight fizzing the air. And when it perches on the railings and treats me to a five-second recital, complete with machine-gun trill, I smile for the rest of the morning. Admittedly it’s 11.53 at the time, but a seven-minute smile isn’t to be sneezed at, and to be world-weary about a wren is to declare yourself a curmudgeon of the first order.
I spend most of those seven minutes walking through the wooded area to the north of the patch. The walk takes me to my habitual resting point before the stroll home, one of a long line of benches in The Rookery. It’s a pleasant place to spend a few minutes, looking down the hill over twin lawns which lead to the formal gardens. The lawns are dominated by two conifers just in front of the benches. Furthest away is a large cedar, an arresting and noble tree, elegant branches sweeping down close to the ground. I sit and enjoy the early spring sun on my face while updating my notebook, my clumsy scrawls mostly indecipherable. My memory tells me I saw a mute swan and a parakeet the day before. The notebook insists they were a mule swat and a parapet.
I’ve walked a fair distance, and I’m trying to summon the energy to go home. The air is thick with birdsong. To my left, my new friend the dunnock, scrabbling indeterminately. From the thickets to my right, a great tit. In the distance, the mocking laughter, remembered now, and never to be forgotten, as a green woodpecker.
And now, from the depths of the tree in front of me, a new sound.
‘Tsee-ba-da-tsee-ba-da-tsee-ba-da-scabba-diddle-oo.’
It clocks in, I’m guessing, at roughly 7 kHz.
Just as my mind plods to the conclusion that this is the song of the goldcrest, Britain’s smallest bird, a goldcrest, Britain’s smallest bird, hops to the edge of the tree and cocks its head in my direction. As slowly as possible I reach for my binoculars and lift them to my eyes. They’re not that good, but they help bring the bird closer. It stares with its tiny button eyes into the blank infinity sign of the binoculars, and with a quizzical look that seems to say, ‘Don’t I remember you from somewhere?’ hops into the heart of the tree and out of my life.
It’s the first goldcrest I’ve seen for thirty-nine years. I walk home with the carefree energy of a twelve-year-old.
We leave the stork* behind and continue towards Karlsruhe. Our daily schedule of thirty-five miles isn’t overambitious, but the short stops add up, and I’ve already caused too many delays with a series of ‘ooh look’ moments. The route takes us through mixed landscapes, some beautiful, all in some way interesting, and birds are never far away. Birdwatching isn’t entirely compatible with smooth and continuous progress on a bicycle, and I’m aware these interruptions are eroding my family’s patience. Oliver, eleven and cycling-mad, whizzes up and down the towpath as I scour the evergreens for a woodpecker, but his appetite for this form of cycling is limited. Tessa, not eleven and cycling-sane, takes the reasonable view that to stop too often is to risk not only seizing up with cold, but also arriving at our destination under the cover of darkness. So when I see a flash of activity as we skirt an industrial plant with ten miles still to go and time getting on, I hesitate. Family peace is more important than this, surely?
Maybe.
For this, if I’m right, is an historic bird, at the heart of my mendacious past and directly responsible for my current obsession. I need to see it if I possibly can.
But the rusty flash that caught my eye might have been its only appearance, and a return to the spot might mean a fruitless few minutes scanning the aggregate heaps in the face of increasing familial impatience.
It won’t take long.
‘Carry on!’ I call. ‘I’ll catch you up.’
There’s a slight rolling of eyes. I wheel round and head back to the spot, trying to remember exactly which bit of the chain-link fence it was behind, which gravel heap to scour. Gloriously, it’s still there, perched on the fence in the lee of a scrubby bush, not much bigger than a robin, its rusty tail doing fifty to the dozen and the rest of its body looking as if it’s been dipped into a coal scuttle.
Black redstart.
It’s a restless soul. As I slide the pocket binoculars out of the saddlebag, its head darts to left and right and it’s off, disappearing into the bleak industrial landscape it likes to call home.
This is the bird that made me pause in my reading of The Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, the one with a shaky tick next to it. I make a mental note to reinforce that tick when I get home, and cycle like the wind to rejoin my long-suffering family.
We have three more uneventful days of cycling, then three days in Mainz with friends. Old friends, good friends, friends who know how to make you welcome. For a while I forget about birds. Almost.
But by the time we say our goodbyes, load up the car, and set off down the wrong side of their quiet suburban street, I’m itching to rejoin the fray. My enthusiasm is at a peak, stoked to boiling point by the stork and the black redstart, all the more so because neither of them counted. I have plans to exploit a quiet period at the beginning of April. There’s work to be done, for sure – preparation for an intense period of rehearsals and concerts in the next couple of months – but there are gaps in the diary for forays further afield.
My list stands at a derisory forty species. Pathetic. I need to kick on. Those scaup, whimbrel and guillemot aren’t going to come looking for me. I have to go looking for them.
March ticks (13)
West Norwood & Streatham Common
Green Woodpecker Picus viridis, Chaffinch Fringilla coelebs, Fieldfare Turdus pilaris, Redwing Turdus iliacus, Great Spotted Woodpecker Dendrocopos major, Jay Garrulus glandarius, Long-tailed Tit Aegithalos caudatus, Nuthatch Sitta europaea, Mistle Thrush Turdus viscivorus, Song Thrush Turdus philomelos, Stock Dove Columba oenas, Goldcrest Regulus regulus, Grey Heron Ardea cinerea
Year total: 40
Notes
* Human hearing is at its most sensitive between 0.4 and 3 kHz, approximately equivalent to the top half of the piano. A cuckoo’s ‘cuck’ usually comes in at about 0.57 kHz, with the ‘oo’ at around 0.52 kHz, well within our hearing and singing range. By contrast, the bittern’s ‘blowing across the top of a milk bottle’ boom comes in at around 0.17 kHz. While one of the
lowest sounds made by any bird, it’s comfortably within the range of a cello and slightly higher than the lowest note on a viola.
* All birds are measured in terms of their weight compared to coins.
* A theory tragically undermined by the fact that the term first appeared in 1922, but never mind.
* Approximate weight: 474 pound coins or 4,639 £10 notes.
APRIL 2016
We have the Nazis to thank for the return of the avocet.
In 1940, with invasion imminent, preparations were made to defend East Anglia from German forces. Anti-tank blocks and scaffolding were constructed and areas behind coastal dunes flooded.
Some of the concrete blocks at Minsmere, just north of Aldeburgh, are still there, close enough together to tempt you into jumping from one to another. But it was the flooding that had lasting significance for wildlife. By the end of the war extensive reed beds were established, and grazing marshes, coastal lagoons, heath and woodland contributed to the burgeoning biodiversity on the site.
In 1947 avocets – piebald waders with delicately upturned bills – bred at Minsmere, after an absence from the UK of over a century. Also in that year the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds took over management of the site, and visitors and birds alike have been constants there ever since.
In 1977 I wanted to go there so much it ached. The summer holidays dragged by with nothing to do except mooch, fester and pester. My father was away on tour, my brother staying with friends. It fell to my mother, as well as running her own antiquarian book business, to bear the brunt of this torture. She reached the pragmatic conclusion that a trip to Suffolk for two days of birdwatching, tedious for her, would at least shut me up. Suffolk friends were called, the trip arranged, and, doubtless, no gratitude from me either expected or received.