by Lev Parikian
My first week as a music student. This new world is big, bewildering. Everyone else is confident; everyone else is good; everyone else is grown-up. Next to them I am a child. It’s all a bit much.
We are in a rehearsal. The conductor is from the ‘hail fellow well met’ school, revelling in his status as guru to the next generation, and keen to establish his credentials as our favourite uncle. He is making a point of addressing us by name. Compared to the mind-boggling feat facing any primary-school head teacher every September, memorising the names of an orchestra of thirty is small beer, but conductors like to do it as a matter of courtesy.
He looks up, surveys the six of us in the percussion section.
‘Which one of you is the Parikian boy?’
And there I was, hoping to lie low and not draw attention to myself. Great. Thanks.
I raise a tentative and mildly resentful hand.
‘Ah yes. I know your father very well.’
I suppose I should have expected it. My father is eminent in the classical music world. He’s a regular on Radio 3, where presenters, keen to show they can pronounce his name, mangle it atrociously, turning Manoug Parikian into something that rhymes with Nanook Tricky-barn.* He is also a professor at this very institution. It’s nice that people want to know him. But this public demonstration of credentials is embarrassing for me, and comes across as self-serving and otherwise pointless.
The rehearsal goes, the way rehearsals do; we play, he corrects, we play again. He knows the music well, but his brisk demeanour and angular conducting style, reminiscent at times of a gull trying to lift itself from the water, do little to endear him to any of us, least of all me.
Afterwards I meet my father, on one of his rare forays into the Great Institution, in the foyer. Enter conductor, walking embodiment of effusion. As he bombards my father with misplaced bonhomie, I smile a quiet internal smile. I recognise the look on my father’s face. It’s one of bland resignation, a quarter smile accompanied by an occasional nod and the merest hint of a laugh. It’s an expression that leads those meeting him for the first time to call him ‘charming’; for those close to him it screams ‘take me from this person before I kill’.
The conductor warms to his subject; my father’s smile grows ever blander. Finally the effusiveness dribbles to a halt, and with a cheery wave the conductor takes his leave, striding into the night. I realise he has spent the last five minutes hoping to be included in whatever social activity we have planned.
My father turns to me.
‘I hate to say it, Lev, but I have no idea who that was.’
If this life lesson warned me off pretence of acquaintanceship, pretence of musical knowledge remained a trap I fell into all too easily, lulled into the illusion that conductors must be omniscient, and trying too hard to impress people with expertise I barely possessed.
But when it comes to birds, there can be no pretending. I could easily claim to have seen this yellow-legged gull, but the idea is anathema. What would be the point?
As I walk towards Regent’s Park I cram the distinguishing features of the bird into my head. It’s basically a herring gull with, predictably enough, yellow legs. But it’s not that simple. Lesser black-backed gulls also have yellow legs, so an idiot could easily get them confused. And if you can’t see the eponymous appendages, the bird is so close to a herring gull as to be almost indistinguishable, especially to the aforementioned idiot.
I’m in luck. Someone has uploaded a photograph of the bird in question, so all I have to do is turn up and gather all the gulls on the boating lake for an impromptu identity parade.
I find it in minutes. It’s bobbing on the water, away from the others, as if ostracised because of its leg colour, which is invisible in the murk of the lake. I will it to take off so I can verify the identification. No sooner wished than done. Up it gets, yellow legs trailing, and in every other respect matching the photograph on my phone. No need to pretend. 169.
Four random ticks, accumulated through a mixture of happenstance and endeavour. I roll up my sleeves and plan the big trip.
In my childhood Lindisfarne meant beards and mandolins and the kind of twangy music I suffered on Top of the Pops while waiting for T-Rex to come on.* I only discovered years later that they were named after a place, and years later again that the place was also called something else.
The name Holy Island, in turn, was off-putting to one whose natural stance towards religion has always been somewhere between worldly cynicism and confused ignorance. Why would I want to visit somewhere whose name implied a duty to devotion as a condition of entry?
Birds, it turns out, are reason enough.
The east coast is a magnet during migration seasons for birds travelling south in search of milder weather, and Lindisfarne, sticking out just enough to be a first port of call, is known as a hotspot, just as it was for invading Vikings at the end of the eighth century. It’s a good time to visit, although had I been organised and savvy enough, I would also have come earlier in the year and gone to the Farne Islands so I could be physically assaulted by Arctic terns defending their nesting grounds.*
Nonetheless, I’m optimistic I’ll get a good portion of the remaining birds. In truth, I’m pinning my hopes on it. With two months left, all I can see are small beacons of opportunity. There will be days out, for sure, and another few days earmarked for Norfolk just before Christmas, but a lot of the heavy lifting needs to be done here and now.
My fears that the trip would be hard to smuggle past a family ideologically neutral on the subject of birding proved unfounded. Northumberland, with its hiking, biking and Vikings, turns out to be a pleasing prospect for us all.
And so we find ourselves in the shadow of Bamburgh Castle on the Thursday evening of half-term, exhausted by the drive but refreshed by the heady mix of sea air and the fleeting freedom of the mini-break.
I’ve drawn up a list of target birds for the visit. Of course I have. This whole thing has merely been an excuse for fiddling around with spreadsheets. The list comprises twenty names, about fifteen of them realistic. I’m hoping for twelve, would settle for nine, and any less would have me crying into my flat white.
Before we visit the island, I’m keen to explore what the mainland has to offer, so the next morning I’m up before dawn, walking down the middle of the Bamburgh–Budle road in the dark, listening to Test Match Special and mentally reciting a list of bird names.
Eccentric? Me?
I hear the birds before I see them. These sounds, the piping of waders, squawking of gulls, whistles and snorts of wigeon and teal, with a background of the alarm calls of robins and chackings of corvids, make up an unconventional, autumnal dawn chorus of the coast. I let the sound envelop me, no single feature predominant. It’s a relief to shun the tyranny of identification, to listen without thinking, ‘That’s a curlew, there’s a redshank, oystercatcher in the distance’ – to let the sounds blend into a unity that can only be Budle Bay at dawn on this specific October morning. Tomorrow it will be similar but the balance subtly different. And there’s music to be found in it. I’ve read that it’s possible to identify certain places by their soundprint, their unique blend of background noise. Budle Bay’s soundprint, enhanced by the dawn-nibbled darkness, and free of mechanical noises, has an eerie melancholy all its own. As I lose myself in it, I notice a slight shift, new voices. I pick out flickerings of activity, and six, no, seven, no, eight shapes. They lift off, hugging the ground as dawn begins to break. Then they wheel round and fly past in formation, and suddenly my head is full of Sibelius.
There was a time when I would have dismissed Sibelius in favour of his contemporary Mahler. Where Mahler’s canvas is huge, encapsulating the drama and despair of the human condition with sweeping gestures, a broad colour palette and outrageous mood swings, Sibelius distils symphonies to their essentials. His late symphonies have the musical density of a black hole; Mahler’s are more like galaxies. And it takes just as long to travel through
them.
I make the comparison not just because their approaches were so contrasting. They were friends, and their conversation about ‘The Symphony’ has passed into musical folklore. Sibelius’s view included the phrases ‘severity of form’ and ‘profound logic’; Mahler’s rejoinder was abrupt.
‘No. The symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.’
The vast scale of his compositions, both in duration and forces, bears testament to his dedication to this ideal.*
Sibelius may not have put the world into his symphonies, but he did include, in his most famous example of the genre, one important element of it.
Swans.
Boy, did he love swans. He loved cranes, too (‘Their cries echo throughout my being’), but it’s swans who feature more overtly, from the mystical Swan of Tuonela to the birds which, in his Fifth Symphony, do pretty much what these ones are doing right now in front of me.
These aren’t the familiar park birds, the inappropriately named mute swan.† These are whooper swans. They’re the same size as their cousins, but their slender necks and more delicate facial features – their bills have a pattern of pale yellow and black, and lack the distinctive ‘knob’ of the mute swan – set them apart.
It’s 101 years, six months and a week since Jean Sibelius saw sixteen whooper swans and made an entry in his diary.
‘One of the great experiences of my life! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming ribbon. Their call the same woodwind type as that of the crane, but without tremolo.’
In the symphony he represented them as a simple rocking motif that now inhabits my head as these eight birds – a half-Sibelius – rise from the early-morning mud and disappear over the horizon, suffused in the pink glow of the rising sun.
It’s three minutes after sunrise. I could go back to bed right now and call the day a success.
Even after the swans have left, the mudflats are a hubbub of birds, like a winter market, constant activity everywhere. Curlews, their gurgling calls haunting in the early-morning gloom; oystercatchers, teal and wigeon scrabbling around in the shallows; a flock of gulls, four species bundled together in a sprawling clump, bickering amongst themselves; redshank piping noisily, just wanting everyone to know they’re around and doing fine.
But no pink-footed geese.
It’s a momentary disappointment. From everything I’ve read, they should be here. When autumn comes they arrive in their thousands from breeding grounds norther and colder, commuting inland from coastal roosts to feed on leftover crops in muddy fields, and Budle Bay is one of their favoured sites. But not, apparently, this morning.
I scan the mudflats again, looking for anything resembling a goose. The closest I find are some shelduck, but these are not the geese I’m looking for. They can’t have gone already. I was here before dawn. Another desperate scan. Nothing.
The first sign is a distant disembodied squabbling. Before I can locate it, I see a flicker in the distance. Five seconds ago it was a dark surface, muddy sand on the broad estuary. Now I can see a clump of dots, wriggling and rising to form ragged arrowheads against the sky.
They fly over my head, their steady approach allowing me to attempt a head count. Doing it bird by bird is impractical, so the thing to do is count in manageable bunches. If you know roughly what ten geese look like, you go through the group counting bunches of ten. For larger groups you use the same process, but with units of a hundred or even a thousand. Using this method I arrive at a total of 240. Then, recounting as they get closer, I make it 360. Split the difference. Call it 300.
Three hundred geese make enough noise to qualify as at least half a racket, but their calls seem to me less hectoring than the cries of the more familiar greylag. They pass overhead, an asymmetrical, straggling, join-the-dots puzzle on the move, the steady crescendo of their calls peaking at a strong mezzo forte before they disappear over the hills behind me. What a sight. The frisson I feel might be the cold reaching the back of my neck, but I doubt it.
On the way back I follow the contours of the coast, Budle Water at low tide giving me the run of the enormous expanse of sand. Within ten minutes, prodding their long bills into the runnels of water that irrigate the sands, five birds stop me in my tracks. Five sought-after and desirable birds, within easy reach of my optical equipment, conveniently located for immediate viewing, and fully furnished with streaked plumage on the back and wings, long, slightly upturned bills, and light barring on the tail.
Bar-tailed godwits. At last. Thirty-eight years after I chased a flock of them off the Forth estuary, here are my bar-bloody-tailed god-sodding-wits. I mutter an apology to their breed on behalf of my younger self, give them the widest possible berth to ensure I don’t flush them, and make my way onwards, buoyed by this connection with the past and the partial repayment of my debt to the species.
If a young person setting out in life chose, for reasons best known to themselves, to ask my advice, high on the list of crucial nuggets – sandwiched between ‘Don’t accidentally elect fascists’ and ‘Avoid desiccated coconut except as an insulating material’ – would be: ‘Walk along broad, deserted beaches as often as possible.’
It’s a spectacular stretch of coast, rendered more memorable by a clutch of three female red-breasted mergansers cruising on a broad stream a few hundred yards further on. I’m four ticks to the good and it’s not even breakfast.
A thin layer of sand eddies away from me on the expanse of beach ahead, like snow on the Arctic tundra. The sea on the left is distant and unthreatening, a thin silver wedge separating broad sheets of sand and sky. Two sets of footprints, duo of man and dog, lay a trail to low dunes on the right. I scan them for a hunting short-eared owl, or even a merlin. But I’m not holding my breath.
I come to rocks, dark and low, blocking my path. Even from afar I can tell they’re slippery, exuding the malevolent gloss of evil, like Darth Vader’s helmet. They’re prime concussion territory for anyone, let alone a flappy-footed clumsybundle like me. I’ve been wary of shiny surfaces ever since the unfortunate* incident of the ice hockey game on the frozen field when I was nineteen. Easy to say now† that oversized wellingtons weren’t the ideal choice of footwear for the endeavour. Always at the forefront of fashion, I took my tumble within three minutes of the start. The game was abandoned to get me off the ice and into hospital, so our side won by one unconscious idiot to nil. I came round in the back of a pickup truck, exhaust fumes in my nostrils, half an hour lost to my memory for ever, and with the percussion section of the London Symphony Orchestra playing the famous 11/4 bar from The Rite of Spring on a loop in my head. Miraculously, I suffered no lasting ill effects, unless you count an irrepressible desire to stand in front of musicians and wave my arms in the hope that music will appear.
I give the rocks a wide berth, scrambling over the dunes and onto the road, from where there is a spectacular view of Bamburgh Castle and the Farne Islands beyond.
The question springs into my head unbidden, as so often when exploring the more peaceful corners of the country. Why exactly do I live in London?
Because I’d most likely be unemployed anywhere else. You can’t heave a brick in central London without hitting an amateur orchestra, a situation unrivalled anywhere else in the world, and since those fine institutions provide the bulk of my employment, to move away would be perverse.
I knew there was a reason.
I breathe in lungfuls of clean air. I’ll be needing reserves of it when I get back.
No matter how many times I consult the tide tables, there remains the nagging doubt that halfway across the causeway linking the mainland to Lindisfarne the sea will pounce and leave us embarrassedly awaiting the emergency services. According to the timetable, we can cross between 5 a.m. and noon, and will then be trapped on the island – like characters in an Agatha Christie play – until drinkies time. Mid-morning seems safe enough, and so it proves, although driving across a narrow s
trip of tarmac in the knowledge that it will shortly be covered in water is a slightly uncanny experience.
Birdwise, the early signs aren’t good. We park, unstrap the bikes and cycle around the village, then on towards the castle and harbour. There’s a ghostly quality to the place, human activity bordering on zero, avian barely better. I’m hoping for red-throated divers, Slavonian grebes, goldeneye, short-eared owl, merlin. I get a couple of herring gulls and a cormorant.
Excessive reading can give unrealistic expectations. A summary of any location’s sightings will necessarily include the highlights, and the unwary will be gulled into thinking that these birds, seen over a period of years or even decades, will be crowding round them the moment they arrive. The reality is inevitably more prosaic.
Even allowing for this, I’m disappointed by the island’s first offerings.
There’s been a slew of rarities there in recent weeks. Isabelline shrike, Pallas’s warbler, White’s thrush, red-breasted flycatcher – names to conjure with. But the pinnacle was a mega rarity, a Siberian accentor, the very first record of which in the history of everything British had occurred a couple of weeks earlier on Shetland.
My awareness of this profusion is tempered by the balancing knowledge that no sooner had these birds arrived than they either scarpered or died. But I’m not discouraged. Something is clearly afoot. Anything could turn up.
Anything, in this case, turns out to be starlings. There are small groups of them everywhere. A couple of dozen tear about the village, streetwise youths up to no good. By the limekilns below the castle, six more forage on the path ahead of us, scattering as we pass and regrouping behind us. As we walk along the east coast of the island, buffeted by a bracing North Sea wind, starlings pop up everywhere, like the bowler-hatted men in The Thomas Crown Affair. One perches on a grazing sheep. Just as I’m beginning to suspect that some bewitchment has turned all the island’s birds into starlings, I spot a flicker of movement on the rocks ahead of us. It’s so fleeting there’s no time for an identification beyond the habitual ‘some sort of small brown bird’, but I somehow know it’s different, worth pursuing. It could, from that glimpse, be anything from a house sparrow to a Siberian accentor. My instinct is it’s somewhere in between.