Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? 200 birds, 12 months, 1 lapsed birdwatcher

by Lev Parikian

  I let the scene nourish my soul. I’m freezing, but at least my heart’s cockles are warm.

  The lady behind me, eating granola from a Tupperware tub, shifts slightly, issues a clarion call.

  ‘Bittern up!’

  She moves across behind me. She doesn’t need to point. Above the hide a brown bird, larger than I expected, lumbers across the blue sky on rounded wings. I crouch forward and crane my neck to keep it in view. As it circles over the reed bed I know this pleasure will be all too fleeting – ten seconds at most. As if sensing my thoughts, it banks, flops into the bed with a palpable sense of relief, and disappears from view.

  Cross it off the bucket list. No longer will my mental picture of a bittern be composed from photographs and illustrations. I have my own image now; ill-lit, distant and fleeting, but mine.

  The ping of a coiled spring being flicked with a triangle beater. A flash of movement. A glimpse of a small, warm-brown shape flitting across my view. A reed sways under its paltry weight.

  Bearded tit.

  The name is sadly inaccurate. The beard is a droopy, Mexican-in-a-1970s-cartoon moustache, and the bird isn’t a tit. True, it’s small and flits around very much like its great, blue, coal, long-tailed, marsh, willow and crested nearly-cousins. But its habitual milieu is a clue to its proper name. Officially, it’s a bearded reedling.

  I realise, in a rare moment of ornithological self-congratulation, that I’m the only one to have seen it. Everyone else is looking at the bittern, or at least the place where it was last seen. I should say something. That’s what people do, isn’t it? That’s what jack snipe guy did. He shared his knowledge.

  I hesitate. What if these people aren’t interested in bearded tits? They didn’t show any enthusiasm for the grebes or the teal or the geese. And I’ve already experienced the humiliation of a dozen eyes boring into me, not to mention the engulfing embarrassment of the ‘meffroonle’ moment. But still. It’s a bearded tit. Gorgeous little bird, sitting there with its droopy moustache, guitar and sombrero. I should definitely say something.

  I clear my throat. The sound echoes around the hide like the voice of God. Six heads swivel in my direction. Before I speak, something makes me glance across to the swaying reeds.

  It’s gone. The bearded tit has gone. Disappeared into the reeds, never to be seen again. I sidle to the door and make my escape.

  There are four of us, peering earnestly into the depths of a tree about a mile off the North Circular. Yes, we’re all male, and yes, we’re all middle-aged. Stereotypes are generally built on fact.

  The bird’s in there somewhere. It’s been around for a week, showing no inclination to leave, and occasionally disporting itself in full view of the few people interested enough to visit it.

  I’m not twitching, I tell myself. I was coming here anyway. It’s mere coincidence that I stumbled on the ‘recent sightings’ section of the London Birders website. If it’s a twitch, it’s an accidental one. I’m not breaking any of my self-imposed rules.

  No matter how much I rehearse this argument, it rings false.

  If there’s such a thing as a birding hangover, I’m suffering from it. The Minsmere trip yielded thirty-four ticks, but in the aftermath I’m overcome by anticlimax, a feeling that I’ll never again have it so good. I’ve seen those birds now, and despite my good intentions there’s a tiny and hateful part of me that regards a ticked bird, seen again, as a disappointment.

  There’s only one antidote to this lassitude. More birding. Rack them up while spring is young. At some times of year birds are difficult to find, but right now you can’t avoid them. I’m keen to exploit opportunities closer to home, so I’ve come to Brent Reservoir, supposedly one of the best birding locations in central London. It turns out to be quite a trek, but, while not dripping with the natural atmosphere of Minsmere, has a charm all its own. You have to warm to a place where the location of a bird is described with reference to a submerged supermarket trolley or wheelie bin.

  But before I reach the hides, I’ve found myself caught up in this accidental twitch.

  It breeds in the Siberian taiga, this bird. If it’s to be found in this country, it’s usually in autumn, either blown off course by easterly winds or as an extension of normal migration patterns. Quite how it’s arrived in this tree in NW9 in the middle of April, and what it thinks of its new surroundings, will remain a mystery. Its presence here is unusual. If it were a restaurant in provincial France, the Michelin guide would describe it as ‘worth a detour’.

  I feel sorry for it. Illogical, I know. Did I feel sorry for the chicken that died so I could slather its flesh in mustard mayonnaise and eat it in a granary roll for lunch? I did not. This bird, unlike the chicken, has its life and liberty; and no doubt it was in pursuit of happiness that it got diverted. But I can’t help wondering what it makes of the attention bestowed on it by this group of skulkers whose number I have briefly joined. Does it know where it wants to go? Is it hunkering down in the safest spot it can find while it summons the energy to continue its journey?

  Does it, I wonder, anthropomorphising wildly, miss its mum?

  After a while I ask myself how long I’m prepared to stay. I’ve come on a recce, not a twitch. I’m keen to visit the hides overlooking the reservoir, just twenty yards away. But the lure of the twitch is strong.

  A shower sweeps over us. I juggle with binoculars, notebook and rain jacket, and by the time I’m organised, the rain has passed and there’s still no sign of the bird.

  When it does appear, fifteen minutes later, our initial view is fleeting, no more than a flicker of activity from the back of the tree. It pops up, disappears, pops up again, plunges back into the depths. Then, like a diva toying with her admirers, it emerges and bathes in its reception.

  Even more interesting than the behaviour of the bird is the behaviour of its stalkers. There’s a sharpening of focus, an intake of breath from the man standing next to me. He’s muttering to himself, shifting his head to left and right to stay with the bird as it hops from branch to branch. Its camouflage serves it well, and we have to be on our mettle to keep track of it.

  ‘There it is. Midway back, to the left.’

  I shift my binoculars as deftly as I can, but it’s too quick for me.

  ‘Behind the bough now. Out again. To the right.’

  He’s pointing. I can see it, and bring my binoculars up again. It’s gone. No it hasn’t. Wrong branch. I lower them again, locate the bird, readjust the binoculars.

  Got it.

  My companion is all of a twitter. His breathing is shallow, the tension in his face palpable. This might be the highlight of his year.

  ‘Got the dark eye-stripe. Pale supercilium. Yes. Wing-bars. Yes. There it is. Yes.’

  He lowers his binoculars. His hands are shaking. I’m happy for him. He’s been genial enough company, but for the last five minutes the only way to divert his attention would have been to do a convincing impression of an ortolan bunting, or some other rarity that might outrank the yellow-browed warbler we’ve just seen.

  I try to put myself in his shoes. I’m glad to have seen it, grateful for the tick. But what am I missing? It hasn’t made my pulse race, put a tremor in my hands, made me shaky with relief once the sighting’s been snared. It seems that at least part of the attraction was not just to see the bird, but to have seen it, to have ticked it off the list. My birdwatching adventures have been therapeutic and energising. For him this seems to have been an almost religious experience. This bird is fine enough, but I would have derived as much satisfaction from watching the miracle of a blue tit hanging upside down on the feeder at home.

  Maybe we’re not cut from the same cloth. There’s room for different kinds of enthusiasm within the sphere, after all. And yet here I am devoting my year to the collection of ticks. Hypocrisy, anyone? Perhaps. Or perhaps I’ll just call it ambivalence and confusion.

  How far would I have gone to see this bird if I hadn’t already been coming he
re? Not that far. Certainly not the trek across London I now know this trip to be.

  Still, a tick’s a tick.

  We’re joined by a silver-haired gentleman. He, it transpires, was the first person to see it.

  ‘Is it your first?’ silver-hair asks me.

  I mumble my usual disclaimer.

  ‘I’m a beginner, really.’

  He perks up a bit, addresses me like an uncle dispensing life advice.

  ‘Coal tit. That’s how to recognise it. The beginning of the call is just like the coal tit. OK?’

  I nod earnestly. I daren’t admit it, but as I still have difficulty discerning the call of a coal tit, his tip is little help to me. But it’s the thought that counts. I log the information for future use, and we go our separate ways, he to I know not where, me to the hide to search for green sandpipers amongst the upturned bins.

  You should always treat yourself on your birthday, so I go to RSPB Rainham Marshes.

  It’s been a good day, Minsmere’s abundance replicated closer to home, the arrival of summer visitors guaranteeing a continued supply of new sightings.

  A clutch of itinerant yellow wagtails, flitting around on a patch of mud this close to the hide; linnets, bouncy and excitable, spring in their bones and bursting out of their mouths; a reed warbler, singing its scratchy song from deep cover, but flitting up to adorn the top of a reed like a figurehead on a ship’s prow; a whitethroat, rewarding my homework with a song I knew from the moment it started, before popping up onto a protruding branch to congratulate me, as if it knows it’s my hundredth bird. I’m halfway there. I raise my bat towards the pavilion and take guard for the second hundred.

  I’m delighted and amused to see a skylark, its silver chain of music soaring upwards, higher and higher and higher, into the boundless sky, just as Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote it.

  Definitely a skylark, not a nightingale.

  The only downside has been the absence of the short-eared owl. I’ve come here three times this month, and each time it’s eluded me, but that’s a disappointment I can live with. Owls, it seems, aren’t my thing. There are five varieties in the UK, and I’ve had neither hoot nor feather of any of them.

  Not so with the lapwings. They’re abundant at Rainham. The visitor centre is in sight, and I can hear a plate of beans on toast calling me from the cafe, but the lure of the lapwings is greater. Just one more minute.

  A man approaches. Like me, he’s about fifty. Like me, he’s wearing binoculars round his neck. There the similarities end.

  My demeanour is exaggeratedly buoyant, enhanced by exercise and the richness of avian life. His is downbeat, possibly exacerbated by the massive telescope/tripod apparatus that sits on his back and threatens to devour him like some monstrous sci-fi alien. As I hear the crisp tread of his feet on the gravel I tear my gaze from the glorious spectacle before me and acknowledge his existence with a brisk nod, a tight smile and what I hope is a birder’s ‘morning’.

  We stand in silence for a few seconds.

  One of the attractions of birds, I’ve realised, is all too easily overlooked.

  They can fly.

  Honestly, think about it for a second. They can actually bloody fly. It’s a miraculous thing.

  They may not be able to invent the wheel, design cathedrals, make lavender bags, temper chocolate, merge mailing lists, bake an olive and rosemary focaccia, write haiku, work out when it’s bin day, dance a cha-cha-cha, remember all the words to Tom Lehrer’s ‘Elements Song’, do a passable impersonation of Michael Caine or open a bottle of wine using the heel of their shoe, but they can fly – so, frankly, they win.

  We can fly, but we need a lot of help, and the experience is undermined by the whole AAGGHHH WE’RE IN THE AIR IN A METAL TUBE WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE IN THE AIR IN A METAL TUBE GET ME OFF BEFORE IT GOES SPLAT thing.

  But maybe that’s just me.* Although we don’t know exactly how flight evolved, there are two main theories. The arboreal theory contends that flight is basically Gliding+, a fully integrated gliding experience enhanced by FLAP technology. It’s an enticing thought, undermined by the fact that none of the current non-avian gliding vertebrates uses flapping to help them – they’re gliding purists, if you like. So there’s no connection between this and the flapping method, and no evidence that the development of flight was a result of adaptations using it.

  Pitched against this is the cursorial theory, which has it from the ground up, as it were. The idea here is that a running dinosaur would leap in the air to evade predators, and the development of small proto-wings to help that process led to ever-increasing hops and leaps, and then to, ‘Woo hoo, I’m flying, look at me, Mum!’ (WHIFLAMM). This theory is undermined by the objection that strong-legged dinosaurs wouldn’t need help from wings, so why did even a partial one evolve? This objection is in turn undermined by the example of the chukar partridge, which indulges in wing-assisted incline running, or WAIR,* using a mixture of flapping and running. This means that partridge chicks can whizz up steep hills with the greatest of ease. From there it’s easy to imagine an adaptation which takes this process a few flaps further to WHIFLAMM. When I nearly ran over those partridges at Minsmere, it might not have looked as if their wings were helping them, but they probably made the difference between safety and partridge pâté.

  Whatever the truth, it crosses my mind that there must have been a moment when some creature nailed it, realised this was the way forward, and embraced the future with the fervour of Frasier Crane assessing a 1988 Château Lafite.

  After that there was no looking back, the combined intelligence of evolving life forms exploiting the myriad possibilities afforded by a life in the air.

  Flight in all its forms, from the whir of a hummingbird to the soaring of an albatross, never fails to boggle the mind. And when there’s an exhibition of virtuosity right in front of you, it would be rude not to give it a minute or two. So I’m watching a group of lapwings give their courting display. In this case, it’s not their mum they’re showing off to, but the ‘woo hoo, I’m flying, look at me’ bit holds.

  The lapwing’s decline since my childhood has been marked, but it’s still the most widespread British wader. I have memories of flocks of them billowing up in the wake of tractors ploughing the fields around our village. As those fields are now a golf course, I suppose the lapwings are no longer there. But visit an estuary or mudflat and you’re likely to see some.

  If the gadwall is underrated, then spare a thought for the lapwing. Superficially black and white, it’s easy to take for granted. But the green and purple iridescence on its back and neck show beautifully in sunlight and at close quarters, and its crest, no more than a flick of the pen, lends it a quizzical air.

  Attractive enough when standing on the tidal flats, in display the male lapwing is mesmerising. It’s an aerobatic trick show of effortless virtuosity, combining tumbles and swoops and sudden upward dashes with a song that brings to mind the soundtrack to the 1980s video game Galaxian.

  For many years I assumed the bird’s name came from the lapping of its wings. The discovery that it is in fact a corruption of the old English for ‘crested bird’ was a kind of betrayal, and made me question all the easy assumptions I’ve made over the years. Be that as it may, the lapping of the lapwing’s wings lends plausibility to my supposition, the limbs in question broad and rounded at the ends, like wide-handled table-tennis bats. Yet from this apparent languor it produces astonishing control, improvising airborne flourishes and curlicues before gliding in to land with casual understatement, a Clooney-esque, ‘Hello ladies,’ to cap the display.

  If I were a female lapwing, I totally would.

  I’ve been watching four of them, rivals in love, each determined to advertise its suitability as a mate to its adoring lady-lapwing public. It’s a captivating sight.

  My new companion seems immune to the joys of lapwings. His voice is flat.

  ‘Anything about?’

  It’s the conventio
nal birder’s opening gambit, and already I’m on the back foot. What is ‘anything’? I can’t list everything I’ve seen. What he means is ‘anything unusual’. Because I’ve stopped on the path, he assumes I’ve found ‘something’. But all I’m doing is watching lapwings. So what do I say?

  I shrug, vaguely apologetic.

  ‘Oh, no… I was just… watching the lapwings. Amazing display.’

  I might as well have given him a pair of grey socks for Christmas. After a short and unimpressed silence, he tries again.

  ‘No sign of the water pipit? Or the gropper?’

  A month ago I would have been flummoxed by ‘gropper’, but I’ve learned a bit about birding nicknames, so I’m on sound footing. It’s short for ‘grasshopper warbler’. Advocates of the use of such abbreviations (‘sprawk’ for ‘sparrowhawk’, ‘mipit’ for ‘meadow pipit’, ‘PG Tips’ for ‘Pallas’s grasshopper warbler’ etc.) claim it saves time, and there’s truth in that – but there’s also an element of the unnecessary shibboleth in there too. ‘We belong,’ users of these nicknames are saying, ‘to a club. Learn the lingo or don’t join.’ As an apprentice, I don’t feel either that I’ve earned the right to use the lingo, nor that I particularly want to.

  The grasshopper warbler is shy, but advertises its presence with a high reeling sound that indeed recalls the chirp of a grasshopper. This one’s been around for a few days, but is elusive.

  I shrug. ‘Afraid not.’

  Disappointed beyond endurance, he moves on. The lapwings send him off with an intensification of their display. I wonder if he and I inhabit the same planet. It’s the flip side to the feeling I had at Brent with yellow-browed warbler guy.