by Lev Parikian
Look out over the Firth of Forth from the Scottish Seabird Centre at North Berwick and there is Bass Rock rising from the sea, a 100-metre high lump of volcanic rock which seems, at first sight, to be covered in bird shit. Only as you approach it on the surprisingly non-seasick-making boat ride does it become clear that the white mantle draped over the island is in fact made up of thousands of birds, each little white pixel attaining its own identity as you get closer.
The island is home to the world’s largest gannet colony, 150,000 of them at its peak, and while I’ve already seen gannets this year, it was a relatively undramatic spectacle, four birds gamely loping low across the sea off the Isle of Wight back in May. The colony at Bass Rock is significant enough to give the bird its scientific name, Morus bassanus, and there’s something perversely alluring about the sight, sound and smell of thousands of seabirds. Until, that is, you get to within a nostril’s length of the island and are assaulted by the ammoniac tang of tons of guano.
But even before that they’ve made their presence felt. As we approach the island there’s an intensification of activity around us. A lone gannet falls in behind the boat and accompanies it, as if checking we know the way. It flies easily, with shallow beats of its slender, black-tipped wings, a flying cigar with a dagger bill and tapered wedge of a tail. Behind it more birds circle high above the water, scouting for hunting opportunities. And now, as I look to the front of the boat, I realise these are just the outliers. Up ahead the air is dense with them, swooping and gliding, tens, scores, hundreds. Juveniles learning to fish, adults showing them how. They shear upwards, gaining height, knowing that below the surface there’s an abundance of fish just waiting to be harvested. When they’re high enough they enter the dive with a little roll, like a Red Arrow peeling off from formation, and plunge towards the surface at a slight angle. At the last second they tuck their wings in so they enter the water smoothly. It’s up there with the osprey’s as the most dramatic fishing method of all British birds. A heron stalking the shallows ready to impale a trout on its long dagger of a bill; a storm petrel pattering across the surface of the sea, scooping up tiddlers as it goes; a puffin diving deep and coming up with a mouthful of sand eels; a great skua, the bastard, harrying other birds into giving up their catch – all fascinating spectacles, and each in its own way an excellent example of the variety afforded by adaptive evolution. But a gannet plunge-diving into the sea from a height of thirty metres at a hundred kilometres an hour just yards away from you tops the lot, a stirring enough sight to make even this unwilling seafarer brave the waves.
The boat cruises into the armpit of the island and now we see them at close quarters – can study through binoculars the apricot shading on their bulbous heads, and the bare black patch around the beak that lends them their endearing smiling expression. Some sit quietly, bills tucked under wings, saving energy. Two birds get snuggly, an affectionate jousting of bills followed by an intimate nuzzling, consistent with our anthropomorphic idea of the behaviour of a bird that mates for life. Behind them a downy bundle of fluff looks out to sea, like a mortified teenager willing its parents to stop embarrassing it, or preferably just go away for ever while at the same time providing it with four hot meals a day and a free laundry and taxi service.
In the middle of this swathe of gannets sits a lone great black-backed gull, the darkness of its back and awkward hook of its bill rendering it hopelessly out of place among the smiling faces of the gannets, like a teetotaller wearing a dinner jacket at a toga party. The murderous look on its face is nothing unusual – all great black-backed gulls look as if they’re about to peck something to a gory and painful death – but in this context the seething expression has an element of impotence, as if it’s somehow entrapped by the gannets and has forgotten it can just fly away.
The boat moves to the other side of the island, where the variety of birds is greater, and thanks to the informative and entertaining commentary, I notch up two quick ticks: shag and kittiwake. Both can be confused with other species – the shag with the cormorant and the kittiwake with the common gull – but are easily separable from those birds by the simple expedient of having someone tell you which is which.
Our host tells us that had we been here a week earlier there would have been many more birds knocking about the place, but sadly all the puffins and Arctic terns have left, the former heading out to the open waters of the North Sea, where they will winter until returning the following May, and the latter making their annual journey to the Antarctic, a round trip of forty-odd thousand miles.*
Just as I’m thinking how sad I am we won’t see a puffin, our host draws our attention to a small black bird with white on its flanks, bobbing on the water twenty yards away. Its back is turned to us, but the puffin shape is unmistakable, even without sight of the trademark bill. Its status as one of the top five adorable birds in British culture lulls me into a bout of anthropomorphising, and I construct a scenario in which this poor bird is ostracised by its peers for reasons unknown, abandoned, and is now floating around in a welter of perturbation, hoping against hope they’ll realise their mistake and come back to fetch it, perhaps with a cordial, ‘Aw Steve, you didn’t really think we’d leave withoutcha, didja?’ and a playful punch on the shoulder.
Just as I get to the bit where it’s giving out a plaintive cry of, ‘Guys? Where are you? Guys?’, the bird hauls itself off the water and flies away, its little wings whirring, I learn later, at the outrageous speed of 400 beats per minute. Is that a tear I see in its eye as it banks past us and away across the sea?
No it bloody isn’t. Get a grip.
The boat delivers us, surprisingly unvomity, to North Berwick, and we begin the return bike ride to Edinburgh. The route takes us to the mouth of the River Esk at Musselburgh, where I’ve ascertained there’s a nature reserve, and therefore another opportunity to leave my family in the lurch. The portents are good, with a cluster of waterfowl huddled on the bank, more floating loosely on the water and yet more dotted along the mudflats. Resigned to their fate, Tessa and Oliver bid me farewell and I set about my business.
The yield is initially high. Nearest to me are a couple of dozen goosander, streamlined diving ducks with an intent look and a fetching little downward curl at the end of their long bills. They appear all to be females, with red-brown heads and grey bodies. Ah no, wait a minute. It’s August. They’re in eclipse.
Ducks do this. They moult their flight feathers all at once and are rendered flightless for a month or so. To offset the resultant vulnerability to predators, the males adopt the females’ less ostentatious colouring, only reverting to their colourful garb later in the year when their breeding feathers grow back. So this apparently all-female gaggle has been infiltrated by males in disguise.
It’s the same story with the group of a dozen eider, some on the water’s edge, some floating benignly a few yards offshore, their wedge-shaped bill the main distinguishing feature. Beyond them, much further out, I see a pair of birds, duckish but somehow different. I struggle to get a good view with the binoculars, but some buried instinct throws a single word into my head and I cling to it.
Scoter.
These sea ducks often hang out some distance from the shore, I know that much. The other thing I know is that there are several varieties, all of them basically black. That’s the extent of my knowledge. This is all horribly familiar.
Have you done your homework, Parikian?
Nosirsorrysir.
What are the main features separating the common from the velvet scoter, Parikian?
Don’tknowsirsorrysir.
Elsworth-Beast Major?
The velvet scoter has a thicker neck, sir, and less pointed tail feathers, but a good way to distinguish them at a distance is by looking at the white secondaries, prominent when the bird executes its customary wing-flap. The velvet scoter performs this display with head held high, while the common scoter often ducks its head.
Excellent, Elsworth-Beast.
>
Slimy swot.
All hail the Collins app, which supplies this information just in time for me to see one of the birds rear in the water. Throwing phone to floor and raising binoculars to eyes with a hitherto unsuspected nimbleness, I catch the distinctive flash of white under the wings before the bird sits back down.
Velvet scoter. Come to papa.
Having notched up this trio of water birds I’m emboldened and make my way inland to the ash lagoons, where open concrete viewing points look out onto a heavily populated scrape.
No sooner have I started my sweep of the assembled multitude, with my usual internal monologue of don’t knows and maybes, than I’m joined by a tall man who strides across to the first viewing hole and starts scanning the birds in a no-nonsense way that tells me he knows what he’s about.
I continue, slightly subdued. There are lots of birds here I don’t recognise. The ones I do know, the lapwings and oystercatchers, I dismiss. Anyone can do those. The others are the problem. They’re mostly waders, I know that much. But they’re far away, and details are hard to make out. Those little ones scurrying around amongst the lapwings: little stint? Or dunlin? Judging size from a distance is not my strong point.
Within seconds, he’s asked the question I dread.
‘Got anything?’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me. I’m pretty new to this.’
He’s not unsympathetic.
‘Ah well.’ He eyes my binoculars. ‘To get really confident identifying waders you need a year to get used to all the different plumages. And a scope.’
Dissolve to sepia. St Petersburg, 1998. I’ve been working hard. Or at least I think I have. But I just can’t get it. Conducting is difficult and I can’t do it. I feel a significantly worse and more confused conductor than I was when I joined the class four months ago. My intention was to come here, learn all about it, go home, take the world by storm. A simple four-step process, the product of a fantasist’s mind. I’m stuck on step two, my desperation to be immediately brilliant ensuring I have no chance to be.
Ilya Musin has seen it all before. Many times. I like to think he’s sympathetic, but I’m not so sure. His English is hesitant and sparse, but he’s learned some key words, which he enunciates clearly, as if speaking to a foreigner. Which indeed he is.
‘To do this you need... experience.’
This is reassuring but frustrating. I want ten years of experience in ten minutes. I smile and nod. But here comes the kicker.
‘And talent.’
No clue as to whether he thinks I’m endowed in that department.
He reverts to Russian, explaining in detail all my technical failings and how they relate to the passage I’ve just massacred. Most of it is lost on me, but some words have become familiar from repeated use. Nyedostatochno vyrazeetelnost. Sleeshkom bystro. Ochen slaby.
When he’s finished I haul my talentless, expression-free, too fast, very weak, and now utterly depressed butt off the podium. Later, I will remind myself that these are the good lessons. He’s taken the trouble to point me in the right direction. More than that, he’s done it without cruelty, ensuring, through the translator, that I’ve understood what I need to do, and dismissing me with a faint smile and a pat on the arm. In the least valuable lessons all you get is a platitudinous ‘very good’ and a wave of the hand to usher on the next pupil, as if it’s all so irredeemably awful that he can’t bear to spend any more time on you.
It’s been a useful lesson. But right now all I see is the mountain of failings barring my way to progress.
Here, in Musselburgh in 2016, it’s the same. Never mind the puffin, shag, kittiwake, goosander, velvet scoter and eider I’ve added to my list today. What about the ones that got away? They’ve left a shortfall I’ll have to make up at some stage, although I have no idea how or when.
Regardless of the list-building, I brood about the difficulties of learning. Twenty years on, I’m still easily frustrated by my inability to acquire new and difficult skills. And then I get annoyed by how easily I get frustrated, and my inadequacies chase their own tail downwards into a vortex of doomy self-recrimination.
I wonder if my father ever felt this frustration. He never expressed it, or at least not within my hearing. What I saw and heard was a rigorous intellectual approach to the art of the violin. Frustrations, for there must have been some, were dealt with maturely and patiently. Not for him the stamped foot, slammed door, brooding introspection.
The sound of the violin was as much a part of the soundtrack of my childhood as the lilting coo of the woodpigeon, its absence a sure sign that my father was away. I remember just one occasion when it occurred to me, listening to him, just how difficult playing the violin was. We were on holiday in Italy. It could only have been by a prodigious act of willpower that he tore himself away from the view, food, wine, and prevailing holiday atmosphere. But he had a concert immediately after our return, and hadn’t picked up his violin for several days. He was, no doubt, no stranger to the adage, attributed to virtuosi from Liszt to Louis Armstrong: ‘If I don’t practise one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.’
It was an incongruous sound that rang round the hills that afternoon, not exactly in keeping with the prevailing tranquillity. And it was the first and only time that I didn’t want to listen to him playing. The concert was, naturally, superb.
These difficulties – inevitable and necessary hurdles on the path to enlightenment* – are common to the learning of any skilled pursuit. I console myself with the thought that twenty years on I’m able to look back at my travails in Musin’s conducting class and put them into perspective. He was known to reassure struggling pupils with the words, ‘Don’t worry – it’ll sort itself out in forty years.’ And I’m sure my father’s response to this comparatively minor glitch in my pursuit of what, after all, is a mere hobby, would be equally philosophical.
‘Just keep going. That’s all you can do.’
The summer course has gone well. We’ve dispatched Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with a swift chop to the pressure point just below the neck, the rest of the repertoire a mere bagatelle compared to that behemoth. Players have declared themselves happy, and there’s no reason to disbelieve them. My habit of shoehorning bird references into rehearsals seems not to have upset them unduly. Indeed, a stalwart cellist turns out to be a bird ringer of thirty years’ experience, and we have an invigorating conversation on the subject of twitching. He is unequivocal.
‘I might cross the road for a rarity, but certainly not the country.’
He’s more excited about having avoided injury while ringing a great spotted woodpecker a few days earlier, those birds notorious for digging their claws into their handlers’ flesh. I find this uplifting, confirmation of my suspicion that the most visible birders, the ones I see proclaiming their successes and bantering about rarities on Twitter, aren’t representative of the thousands of enthusiasts who make their way quietly in the world, their priorities aligned to a different calibration.
But the fact remains that I’ve set myself this challenge and am committed to it. The evening before we leave for home, I survey the wreckage of my birding year, fiddling with the spreadsheet and making gloomy prognostications about my chances. The most pessimistic appraisal sees me stranded in the mid-180s. The most optimistic nudges me over the line at 202. More realistically, I expect to end somewhere in the high 190s. Damn those Scottish birds.
It’s time to go home. We’ll be dropping in on Tessa’s brother in Chester for a couple of days on the way back. Fourteen spoonbills have decided to spend their summer holidays at Burton Mere. There’s a good garden within a couple of miles, and we could easily cycle there along the canal towpath. It’s a glimmer of hope, but not enough to lighten my mood. The project seems doomed to honourable failure.
I sleep the fitful sleep of the preoccupied, and dream of eagles and ptarmigan, flying away from me with howls of mocking laughter.
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August ticks (13)
RSPB Loch Garten, Glenmore, Isle of Skye, Edinburgh, Mussel burgh, Bass Rock, Gullane, RSPB Burton Mere Wetlands
Osprey Pandion haliaetus, Crested Tit Lophophanes cristatus, Goshawk Accipiter gentilis, Hooded Crow Corvus cornix, Grey Wagtail Motacilla cinerea, Dipper Cinclus cinclus, Shag Phalacrocorax aristotelis, Kittiwake Rissa tridactyla, Puffin Fratercula arctica, Velvet Scoter Melanitta fusca, Eider Somateria mollissima, Goosander Mergus merganser, Spoonbill Platalea leucorodia
Year total: 154
Notes
* Its old Scottish name, bastard eagle, might contain a clue to its status in their eyes.
† DDT and other pesticides make the shell of birds’ eggs thinner, leading to embryo death. Raptors, at the top of the food chain, consumed more pesticides through their prey, so were worse affected.
* The Green Loch. Do keep up.
* Google it. It’s not a story for a family show.
* Say it quickly and it doesn’t sound like the insane distance it really is.
* I’m still looking. It’s probably down the back of the sofa.
SEPTEMBER 2016
I’m not wet, in the same way that cats aren’t covered in fur. There are bits of me untouched by water, but I lost contact with them some time ago. The rain started in the middle of the night, hammering down on the roof of the shepherd’s hut we’ve rented for the weekend,* and waking me in good time for my early-morning start. The forecast has it continuing till the early afternoon, and for once the forecast is bang on the money. Tomorrow the sun will shine, but tomorrow is bike ride and garden day. My designated birding slot, impartially assigned by the gods of family togetherness, is Saturday morning. I feel like a real birder. I’m alone on the reserve for most of my walk, only encountering other people as I return to the visitor centre after three hours of soggy tramping. The RSPB guy smiles. He understands, sees nothing extraordinary about it. Who wouldn’t want to spend their Saturday morning up to their armpits in sludge, enjoying the full gamut of a varied landscape in five-yard visibility?