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

by Lev Parikian

  Seriously, how do people do it? It’s next to impossible. I read reports of a day’s birding, all certainty and no question marks. ‘Whinchat: 4, wheatear: 6, linnet: 35.346, goldfinch: 1,398.’ No mention of ‘unidentified little brown jobs overhead: 76’, or ‘nearly identical cheeps from the middle of a bush – your guess is as good as mine: 137’.

  I stop and take a few seconds to drink it all in. One obliging bird seems to sense my frustration and pops up onto the bush in front of me, showing its bloodied nose and holding still. It has earned my gratitude.

  ‘You, my friend, may be just a goldfinch, but you are most welcome, and I thank you for your generosity.’

  It returns to its bush without reply, my soul brother for a second.

  I stay for a bit, willing the birds to come out and play. But it’s as if they’ve sensed my volatility and are keeping clear. I can’t blame them.

  I’m about to move on when it begins. One sound at first, a preparatory cluck. Once heard, never forgotten, so they say. They’re right, and now I’m treated to an outpouring of fluid, liquid music of astonishing richness and depth, as if the shrubbery has been turned into a Marshall stack and turned up to eleven.

  It’s no more than five yards away, somewhere in the bush in front of me. It’s one of those low scrubby bushes, variety unknown. But the bird is well hidden. I inch forward, desperate to lay eyes on it, but equally desperate not to interrupt the music that seems to suspend me a foot above the ground, worldly burdens momentarily shed.

  I’m two feet from the bush. The song is all around, the bird still nowhere. I lift my eyes, and there, in the bush behind the one I was looking in, five yards away and with a glint in its eye that says ‘What took you so long?’, is my bird. We make eye contact. It knows I’m there, seems to be singing solely for me. It isn’t, of course. It’s singing to find a mate. My wishful thinking can’t change the laws of nature. But at that moment, in that maelstrom of miraculous sound swirling around me, there’s no way on earth you can tell me that this nightingale, this anonymous-looking bundle of life, isn’t directing its love directly towards me, through my ears and into my heart.

  And then, too soon, with a flick of its rufous tail, it’s gone. But it carries me away, out of the reserve and all the way back to the station and home.

  Recommended. Would encounter again.

  The year’s nearly half over and I haven’t seen an owl, a failure denoting a heinous lack of dedication. While London isn’t the first place you’d think of as natural habitat for these alluring birds, there are plenty of places where they can be found. A short-eared owl has been seen regularly at Rainham Marshes, just not when I’ve been there. And Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common and Kensington Gardens all have tawny owls, so I’ve read. I’ve even made a couple of early morning forays to Streatham Common, where they’ve been reported in the past. Zilch. But I’m confident a week of glamping in Dorset over half-term will supply at least one.

  Despite my professed aversion to canvas, I’ve allowed myself to be persuaded by majority vote to submit to a week under it. I protest too much. My memories of camping holidays of my youth mostly involve rain, beans on toast, and campfires brought to flickering life by my father’s typically fastidious attentions. These rustic outings gave way to foreign trips involving hotels and fine dining as we got older, but some tiny part of me must remember that true happiness lies not in luxury and warmth, but in endless games of Owzthat and rummy played in a leaking caravan while waiting for the drizzle to relent. Nowadays, give me a well-appointed shower block and the opportunity to do dad stuff involving charcoal and tongs and bacon, and I’m in.

  The glampsite is idyllic – a large field given over to a well-spaced clutch of yurts, with clear skies, empty roads and a stream running down one side, it’s a welcome release from the grind of urban life. Rosie, the farm’s border collie, greets us at the car and accompanies us loyally to our yurt. Our fellow glampers say hello and nothing else. Everything is as it should be.

  I don’t want my birding to disrupt the family dynamic, so I get up half an hour before going to bed and drive to Portland.

  Birds like an extremity. Those places that stick out of the coast are often the first land they see after a long journey, so it’s natural they should gravitate towards them. Dungeness, Spurn, the Isles Scilly and Fair – all heavily populated by birds and birders. And so it is with Portland Bill, that little skin tag hanging off the base of Dorset. There’s a bird observatory by the lighthouse, one of nineteen dotted around the coasts of Britain and Ireland, each doing valuable work monitoring the movements of migrating birds. It’s from there that I start my first morning’s reconnaissance.

  I’m not alone. It turns out that unimaginably early for me is the middle of the afternoon for a dedicated birder. The two I speak to, both younger men, have been out for an hour already, and even this is regarded by one as ‘lightweight’. Blanching slightly, I ask them where I should head for, thank them, and take my leave.

  The early-morning fog is localised and beginning to clear in patches, but lends a mystical air to the place, shrouding the base of the old lighthouse so the top half seems to hang magically in the air above it. The sea isn’t yet visible, although its presence is unmistakable in the taste of the air and the background shushing of waves on the rocks below.

  The feeling that I’m on the set of a Hammer horror film is enhanced by a deep graw to my left. There are two of them, perched on adjacent fence posts, noticeably huge for corvids, their heavy bills dimly silhouetted in the mist. Dark birds, associated in many cultures with death. Ravens. Huginn and Muninn, Odin’s eyes and ears, come to freak me out.

  My inner birder does brief battle with my inner superstitious idiot and wins a narrow but painful victory. Rather than flee for my life, I watch the birds for a while, struck again by their size and the deep, other-worldly quality of their gronking and crawing.

  A nice early morning tick to start me off.

  As I explore, it becomes clear why Portland is a haven for birds. As well as its unique situation, the Bill has a wide variety of habitats in a relatively small area. From the fields to the cliffs is a short enough walk, and by the time I reach my vantage point over the sea, I’ve clocked up two more ticks: a fulmar, floating above me on stiff wings like a mini-albatross, and a rock pipit, small and perky, its boldness allowing me ample time to confirm the identification.

  Whenever I’m within a mile of a cliff edge my mother’s voice rings loud and clear in my head. ‘Don’t go near the edge!’ It became a running joke, repeated when any of us went near the shallowest of inclines, even occasionally when we approached the kerb to cross the road. I’m disinclined to go near edges at the best of times, but here there are ways to do so without risk, and I’m afforded a decent view of the sea from a safe vantage point. From here, after a bleary start when it seems there are no birds on the sea at all, I realise I can see little black dots whizzing out from the cliffs, describing a parabola over the sea and back again. These must be guillemots. Or razorbills. Or are they little auks? I watch as their whirring wings propel them through the air. Definitely some kind of auk, the family of marine birds known as ‘the penguins of the northern hemisphere’. A dim memory wafts into my head. They use those stubby wings to propel themselves underwater, and this stubbiness isn’t conducive to easy flight through the much thinner air. No wonder they look so panicky.

  Auks aren’t comfortable on land, using it only to breed. All they need is a tiny bit of rock to perch on. There they lay their single, noticeably pointy-ended egg. Just looking at the birds huddled together on minuscule ledges on the cliff face makes my head spin. Guillemot eggs used to be much sought-after, both for eating and collecting, and the people who gathered them would risk their lives climbing down the slippery rock face, bringing back bags full of eggs and bartering with waiting collectors at the top of the cliff. Unthinkable, in more ways than one.

  As I train my binoculars on these almost comical birds,
I can discern differences between them. I’m looking at two species here. And now I can see a couple of them silhouetted against the dawn sky, I see that their profiles are markedly different. Slim pointy bills: guillemots; short, blunt ones: razorbills. Tick and tick.

  I could watch their frenetic forays all morning, and am also hoping for an appearance from other seabirds, a shearwater maybe, or a skua. But seawatching is a specialist’s game, the distances involved usually too much for binoculars in the hands of a beginner. As well as a telescope, you need the patience of a saint, and the ability to see a blob a mile away in a sea fret and accurately identify it as a Manx shearwater or a juvenile gannet.

  Besides, there’s plenty else to see here, both late migrants and resident breeders. And although I’ve stuck religiously to my ‘no twitching’ rule, I can’t help thinking about a rare and unusual bird that’s been in the area for a few days now, showing itself happily at times but lying determinedly low at others. Wouldn’t it be a happy coincidence if my path were to accidentally cross with that of a great spotted cuckoo?

  I head north from the cliffs, aiming to do a large loop which will return me to the car with a clutch of exciting ticks in the bag.

  Three hours later I collapse behind the steering wheel, undone by the early start, miles of trudging, and the stubborn determination of Portland’s bird life to avoid me.

  Tiredness and hunger impel me to curse all birds, and especially great spotted cuckoos. It’s almost as if the guillemots, razorbills, rock pipits and ravens had never existed.

  It’s our last day at the glampsite. All is idyllic. We play football with Rosie, the border collie. She trounces us. Barbecuing takes place. A robin, whose song has accompanied me to the car every morning at 4 a.m., is still giving it large as daylight morphs to gloaming. A yellowhammer joins it in duet from a telephone wire behind the yurt. The song, according to every single bird book, is supposed to sound as if the yellowhammer is singing ‘A little bit of bread and no cheese’. Handy mnemonic it might be, but this particular bird clearly hasn’t heard of it. It sounds to me as if it’s trying to emulate the French horns at figure 15 of Gershwin’s An American in Paris.

  Each to their own, I suppose.

  Accompanied by these calming sounds, I light the fire and, cradling a glass of red wine, and then another, ponder the week, the month, the year. What started as rekindled interest has blossomed into obsession. I carry my list in my head wherever I go. Where ten years ago I might have assessed a new place on the quality of its architecture, bookshops or restaurants, now this valuation is based on its proximity to birding havens. I’ve walked more in these five months than I did all last year, and have got used to lunching on a small sandwich and a packet of crisps, or even, when I misjudge the availability of such things, nothing at all. I’ve lost weight, gained energy, and rediscovered a world hidden in plain sight for three decades.

  The disruption to family life I nervously anticipated hasn’t materialised. Tessa and Oliver allow me my strange ways, smiling indulgently as I return from a birding trip and recount the day’s events, and dutifully admiring the photo I show them of yet another distant bird that must seem to them no different from all the others. In a strange way my new-found interest complements theirs. Tessa, embarking on a garden design course, is always on the lookout for new gardens to visit. If I can wangle it so there’s a bird reserve nearby, so much the better. And if we can cycle there, so Oliver can have his training session at the same time, he’s more than happy to be dragged round one or other of his parents’ favoured habitats as a quid pro quo. He’s also proved a dab hand with the camera, getting to grips with its many features far more quickly than me. Any middle-aged person wanting to learn about technology only has to hand their apparatus to an eleven-year-old boy and wait for ten minutes.

  While May has yielded a comparatively small number of ticks, that’s not my only yardstick of success. It’s about seeing the world through new eyes, reassessing values, making use of one’s time. The list is the driving force, but the new birds are valuable because of their intrinsic beauty and fascination, not just because they’ve swelled my total to 124.

  But still. 124. Yay.

  I saw my cranes after all. Missing them at Lakenheath gave me an itch I needed to scratch, so I granted myself a day and a half at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, home of the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, and drop-in centre for some of the birds from the Great Crane Project – a reintroduction scheme on the Somerset Levels. It was the wrong time of year to go there. I knew that. For the full panoply I needed to be there in winter, when the reserve throngs with thousands of wildfowl. But the sight of two cranes taking off, circling, then coming in to land again, counts among the more moving spectacles of my birding year. They’re at the same time gawky and delicate, long necks straining forwards as they heave themselves off the ground with an elegance that belies the hard work and sheer power required for the task. And at rest, standing tall, they have a majesty enhanced by their rear feathers, which stick out like a bustle, lending them an air of Victoriana.

  Also at Slimbridge were common terns, refined cousins to gulls, elegant, delicate and deliciously skittish. A pair appeared over my shoulder as I cycled along the canal on the second morning. I engaged in an exhilarating but inadvisable race, me and my folding bicycle against their deceptively languid wingstrokes. I held them until they decided to fire up the afterburners and I pulled out of the competition rather than condemn myself to a watery demise.

  This week in Dorset has been terny too. First, Sandwich terns, seen up close on their nests next to the hide at Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, shaggy crests on the backs of their heads lending them a punky look, and matched by a decibel level which would put a crooked smile on John Lydon’s face. But their elegance in the air, suspended above the water as if held on a thread from above before plunging to spear an unsuspecting fish, brought to mind the hover of a kestrel.

  And then the little terns, their fragile breeding colony protected by a roped-off area on the shingle beach at Ferrybridge near Weymouth. Tiny for a seabird, their delicate appearance is deceptive. They’re robust enough to fly to Africa and back every year.

  How easily we say that. ‘They fly here from Africa,’ as if it were a routine trip to Waitrose. To give myself some sense of the enormity of the feat, I try to visualise it from the bird’s point of view. Guided by forces beyond our comprehension, and endowed with astonishing stamina and doggedness in the face of constant sapping of energy by the elements, these birds make the journey because it is, believe it or not, the most efficient thing for them to do, their chances of survival enhanced by chasing perpetual summer across the globe.

  As dusk beckons, and to the accompaniment of a steady trickle of gulls heading south to their nightly roost, we go for a stroll round the site. A family of ‘mule swats’ drifts towards us on the stream, parents keeping their two cygnets firmly in view and offering an admonitory hiss if we stray too close. A third cygnet takes the easy option, nestled on the mother’s back between her large angel wings. I wonder if the cygnets take it in turns to go for a ride, or whether this favour is the result of special pleading.

  It’s approaching prime owl time, and I leave Oliver with the swans as I take a brief and aimless saunter, hoping to catch a glimpse of a barn or tawny owl against the darkening sky. But no. Not tonight.

  I head back to the yurt, aware of my dereliction of duty in the barbecuing department. Oliver stays, pongling around with a stick. Dusk is slow, and the light has that crepuscular quality that makes shapes indistinct.

  I’m putting sausages on plates when Oliver returns. His is the saunter of one who knows they’re about to go one up. He’s casualness personified as he delivers the killer news.

  ‘Just seen a barn owl, Dad. It flew over my head and went into the next field.’

  I’m delighted for him. Just.

  May ticks (16)

  Isle of Wight, RSPB Cliffe Pools, Beddington Farmlands, RSPB
Lakenheath Fen, Weeting Heath, WWT Slimbridge, Frampton-on-Severn, Portland, Brownsea Island, Chesil Beach

  Yellowhammer Emberiza citrinella, Gannet Morus bassanus, Nightingale Luscinia megarhynchos, Garden Warbler Sylvia borin, Common Tern Sterna hirundo, Garganey Anas querquedula, Stone-curlew Burhinus oedicnemus, Crane Grus grus, Bullfinch Pyrrhula pyrrhula, Fulmar Fulmarus glacialis, Raven Corvus corax, Rock Pipit Anthus petrosus, Guillemot Uria aalge, Razorbill Alca torda, Sandwich Tern Sterna sandvicensis, Little Tern Sternula albifrons

  Year total: 124

  JUNE 2016

  It starts with the lightest smattering, a few unthreatening drops no bigger than commas, and then a mist so fine as to be almost unnoticeable. Refreshing enough on a warm summer’s day, especially halfway round a long walk on undulating terrain, but also a portent of things to come. From our vantage point over Ashdown Forest we can see the future, the heavy mass of clouds still distant but moving in our direction. About five miles away a village is shrouded in grey, as if shaded by 4B pencil. I suggest to Andrew that we consider returning to the car. He agrees. Oliver’s relief is palpable.

  I place myself in Oliver’s shoes. He’s not here under duress, but nor was the trip his idea. I sold it to him on the possibility of raptors, the certainty of photo ops, and the Winnie-the-Pooh connection. Cynical move, that last one. Eleven is a bit old for that finest of bears,* but the familial devotion is deep, and mere mention of him is enough to bait the hook. Sure enough, Oliver gave the resigned assent of a boy who knows he has no choice. He’s played cricket in the morning while Andrew and I birded, and Tessa has dropped him off and gone to visit a garden. Everyone’s happy, more or less. We’ve visited the Enchanted Place, narrowly evaded a heffalump trap, and are now on an expotition to the North Pole while scanning Eeyore’s Sad and Gloomy Place for Dartford warblers. Oliver has found a stonechat to photograph. Stonechats are great for that, perching considerately on a gorse bush with the patience of a film star on the red carpet.