Birdwatchingwatching

by Alex Horne

  24 February

  My life was ridiculously bird-orientated by now. I’ll end this month with three quotes that typified my days. The first, a line or two from a lunchtime edition of Radio 1’s Newsbeat:

  Top vets from around Europe will decide today whether the EU should allow poultry to be vaccinated against bird flu. The British Government isn’t convinced it will help, but virus expert Professor John Oxford disagrees: ‘The Vietnamese, of all countries the least you’d expect to eradicate the disease, seem to have done it. And they’ve done it not just by culling – for every animal they’ve culled they’ve vaccinated ten.’

  If the people at Radio 1 thought such a bizarre quote worthy of their listenership, you can see how all-pervasive the story was at that time. Nevertheless, Duncton’s RSPB newsletter for February (more bird reading matter sent up to London from Midhurst) concentrated more on things like their Big Garden Birdwatch and ‘How to Give Your Old Binoculars a New Lease of Life’ than the apparently surprising fact that Vietnam was managing to cope with the apocalyptic disease. My favourite story was sent in by a man called Les, and was entitled ‘Trial and Error’:

  A few sparrows were feeding on my lawn when a young sparrowhawk hurtled towards them. The sparrows saw it coming a mile off and scattered while the sparrowhawk, too late to pull off its headlong dive, crashed at high speed into a rhododendron bush. It struggled to free itself from a tangle of twigs then hopped to the top of the bush where it sat for several minutes, straightening its feathers, frequently shaking its head as if to say ‘It looked much easier than that when mum did it.’ Highly amusing to watch but it showed what a steep learning curve this young bird was on; the crash could easily have resulted in an injury which would have meant certain death, many more failed hunts and possible starvation.

  That’s the sort of tender interest all the birdwatchers I’d met so far took in their birds. Duncton in particular seemed fairly indifferent to the listing element of our competition and was concerned instead that I’d actually get to know the birds and remember them when the year was over. Then again, in one typically lengthy and digressive phone message he did reveal that he was also going out of his way to see extra birds this year. This is an exact transcription of his message:

  Hi Als, it’s dad speaking, erm, hope all’s well with you and that Milton – not Milton, New Milton went well – I used to live in a place called Little Milton near Oxford – and that your meetings with Key were OK and that all goes well tonight in Norwich … Sorry, I’m a bit out of breath, just walking along the South Downs Way, desperately searching for additions to my number ninety-four on the list. Erm, but I should be gardening really. So I’ll break the news to Mum when I’m back, that I snuck out for a walk and some birdwatching … And I hope to speak to you soon. We’re off out to supper tonight with David and Rosemary who came to one of your shows on Saturday. And anyway, hope to see you soon – well, hope to speak to you soon – and looking forward to seeing you Wednesday evening … Ah, I’m being shot at here … and [laughs] speak to you soon anyway, bye for now.

  During the course of this three-minute-long message he’d managed to wander unwittingly into a field used more for hunting birds than watching them. I should never have doubted his commitment.

  1 I think I may have been a little carried away with my new hobby at this point.

  2 I superstitiously never delete anyone from my phone and tend to add the details of anyone I’ve ever met, and so the word ‘contacts’ is an accurately broad description.

  3 Great crested grebe is clearly a triumphant title. I’d like to read a comic book about a superhero called the Great Crested Grebe. Other dashing characters could include ‘The Masked Gull’, ‘The Whiskered Tern’ and ‘The Magnificent Frigate Bird’.

  4 Along with various witty bird postcards, several pictures of particularly exotic birds and a Motherwell poster from 1989. We thought it would be pretty funny if Mum supported Motherwell. Her second team was Queen of the South. Those were our sorts of family jokes. When I was ten, I decided to learn the French Horn because my name was Horne. That’s the sort of thing we find quite funny.

  5 An Amiga was a fairly basic but at the time quite reputable games console. If a friend phoned any of us while we were using it, one of Duncton’s favourite jokes was to reply, ‘He’s just playing with his girlfriend,’ having found out that Amiga is the Spanish word for one. This was particularly funny because none of us ever had girlfriends.

  6 One of two twin black cats, Horace died soon after Hamish, the black labrador whose coat gave me appendicitis. Horace’s brother Boris would celebrate his nineteenth birthday in May, but was a very lazy sort of a cat and rarely a threat to birds. All our pets were male, obviously. Like everyone else we knew, we also had several goldfish – Jaws I, Jaws II, Jaws III etc., and some unnamed stick insects that were dead for quite a while before anyone noticed.

  7 Now, I don’t know whether this is an example of nominative determinism – a phrase coined by the New Scientist to describe the phenomenon of one’s name determining one’s career – or aptonymy, the more coincidental occurrence of one’s name being particularly fitting for one’s personality, but I came across several such examples in the birding world. See how many you can spot during my year. In fact, see how many names with any bird associations at all you can spot – I’ll put my answers at the back of the book.

  8 In case you’re wondering, it was the classic Bob Martin Fat Snax: Garden Guests Edition.

  9 They’re officially called pied wagtails, the pie, as in magpie, referring to their black and white colouring, not an actual pie.

  CHAPTER 3

  Big Brother

  ‘March is the first anticlimax of the year. At least it usually is. The frenetic activities of January and February are over, and all the winter birds are safely gathered in.’

  – Adrian M Riley

  Alex:

  51 species

  Duncton:

  95 species

  2 March

  BY THE THIRD month of his Big Year, Adrian Riley had already seen 217 species of birds, considerably more than Duncton’s and my combined totals at the same point in ours. ‘Less than creditable,’ was how he described this already extraordinary number. ‘Still not even level with Lee’s score for January.’

  I suppose I was in the same boat. Not necessarily exactly the same boat, but a similar boat at least – maybe a scale model of his boat. After all, I still hadn’t seen as many birds as Duncton had in his first month. But although I knew I had some catching up to do, I was still prepared to give myself some credit for the fifty-one species I’d seen so far.

  I didn’t know quite what to think about his notion that March might ‘usually’ be the ‘first anticlimax of the year’. In footballing terms, the quarter-final of a major tournament is generally pretty anticlimactic for England. But in this, my first birdwatching year, I wasn’t even nearly at such an advanced stage. An anticlimax now would be like England failing in their very first qualifier.

  And while all Adrian’s winter birds were ‘safely gathered in’, nearly all of mine were still recklessly tearing round the countryside. Spring was approaching, the year was gathering pace; I couldn’t afford an anticlimactic month. So it was perhaps quite an eccentric decision to start March with trips to see birds I knew I couldn’t count on my list.

  Norfolk is arguably the best county in Britain for birdwatching. The Isles of Scilly may be the most popular place for particularly rare visitors1 and over 350 species have been spotted on the Scottish island of Fair Isle, but these places are expensive and troublesome to get to, playgrounds reserved for the most dedicated of birders. Norfolk is the spiritual home for ‘normal’ birders. (An oxymoron? I wasn’t sure yet.)

  Cley Next The Sea is a village perched on the shoulder blade of the Norfolk coast. I don’t know if the name is ungrammatical, or simply points out what happens if you drive through the village, but Cley (as most people sensibly call it) is w
here serious twitching began. It may have a population of less than 400 people, but during the 1970s that number included a certain Nancy Gull who with her husband Jack ran a commune-like café at which the burgeoning birdwatching community could eat cheaply and grow. In his book Birders: Tales of a Tribe, Mark Cocker describes how the café’s phone was the heart of the young birdwatching scene:

  I don’t ever remember hearing the phone ring at Nancy’s and it being a call for the residents of the house. It was always other birders on the line and whenever birders were in the café they themselves answered it. We usually took it in turns. That way everyone got to eat while maintaining the news service. But it was essential to do so. It was part of the unspoken protocol of Nancy’s and, indeed, of being a birder.

  Nowadays the village is still dominated by birds, although its unofficial status as the birding capital of the UK has slipped. During the 1980s that single phone was replaced by Birdline, set up by the birders Richard Millington, Steve Gantlett, Roy Robinson and Adrian Riley’s rival, Lee G R Evans, and which people could call from anywhere in the country to hear what birds were where. Although Richard Millington runs Birdline from the village, as well as publishing Birding World magazine, it is no longer quite such a crucial place for birders to visit.

  When Duncton goes to visit his mother and sister in Norwich, he usually finds an excuse to nip up the coast and check out the birds that he’d rarely get to see in Sussex. When I paid a visit to my grandmother and aunt at the beginning of March, however, this world was still unknown to me and I had to be content with the sight of a few garden birds I’d already seen on their respective bird tables. I didn’t know that just a few miles away lay a coastline teeming with birds and birders.

  What I also didn’t know was that my aunt’s family actually have their own birds, three Japanese chickens to be precise, one male, two female. They were born the Christmas before and are called Noel, Holly and Snowdrop. The downside of having chickens, my aunt told me, is that they make quite a lot of chicken mess and chicken mess is difficult to clear up. Luckily, my aunt and uncle also have two dogs which enjoy the taste of chicken mess. With faeces consumption being one of the easiest ways to catch dastardly bird flu, this was a worry, but their garden was kept relatively clean.

  I knew that, being pets, the chickens wouldn’t count on my year list but I was excited to see these exotic, eastern birds up close. They may ‘only’ have been chickens, but they were from Japan! And my aunt was keeping them as pets! That was quite a hard concept to get my head around, not helped by her comment that she’d got a pair of females ‘So they wouldn’t get too knackered by all the raping the male does.’ That’s an odd sentence at the best of times.

  Each holding a cup of tea, Polly and I watched the birds parade around the garden, partly, I suppose, in the hope that we might witness some of this raping. Unfortunately (probably not the right adverb to use here) we saw only some chasing and a bit of pecking, but this was entertaining enough. Puffed up and jet black, they looked like they were trying to pretend they were some other, much more important species. This wasn’t birdwatching in the traditional sense, but I came away with just a little more knowledge about the world of birds, as well as two perfect Japanese eggs.

  5 March

  This slightly fraudulent form of education continued with a trip to London Zoo with my friend Lloyd (a pro-bird campaigner on the stag back in January). I was hoping to pick up a few tricks of the trade and swat up on the birds I’d meet in Israel later in the year.

  I’ve never really known what to think about zoos. On the rare occasions that I do ‘have an opinion’ about something, it’s usually after I’ve listened to the views of other, cleverer people. Whatever Stephen Fry says, for example, I usually believe. So for a good many years I held the view that zoos were one of the worst examples of human brutality, after I read Fry’s essay on the subject in Paperweight:

  What then will our grandchildren wonder at in our world? What practices that we indulge in will turn their stomachs and make them amazed that we could ever have called ourselves civilised? I have a strong feeling that zoos will figure high on the list. Is it possible, they will ask, that we actually stole polar bears away from the arctic and set them in concrete-floored cages in southern climes to be gawped at? No! My grandfather would never have countenanced that, he would have demonstrated, or lobbied Parliament or written to the newspapers; he, kindly old grandpa, would have been ashamed to live in a country which imprisoned animals for show. Wouldn’t he?

  Fry’s right! I thought. Even at that young age I feared that my grandchildren would be disappointed in me and so I adopted a strictly anti-zoo stance. ‘Zoos are like prisons,’ I would tell anyone who had the misfortune to stray within range. ‘But the animals are innocent! Sure, put them away if they start stealing cars or embezzling funds (I thought this quite funny and didn’t then know about the rapist chickens), but until then, release the blameless creatures!’ I think I even contemplated setting them free myself, sneaking into zoos at night with some metal cutters and releasing tigers back into the wild (well, the suburbs).

  As time went by and my idealism faded, I conveniently forgot these views. Nowadays it’s a bit like vegetarianism: I still like animals and don’t particularly think they should be locked away (or eaten) but then again I do like looking at them (and eating them). As a kid (before being corrupted by Fry) I loved trips to Windsor Safari Park and barbecues. My childhood wouldn’t have been complete without them. Obviously any zoo should be as humane (or the equivalent word for animals) as possible, but how else can kids in this country see rhinos, snakes and brightly coloured, fun birds?2

  London Zoo, I told myself, must treat its animals well. It’s London Zoo! And although I was no longer a kid, it was time for me to once again explore the alien animals. I needed to have a close look at birds I wouldn’t otherwise see.

  On previous visits I’d have first sought out the rhinos and snakes, but now we aimed straight for the aviaries, ignoring anything with tusks, fur or scales. Just the week before a new wing (it’s hard not to make some puns in a book about birds) had opened right at the heart of the zoo, entirely devoted to African birds and while I only found a couple of the birds I thought I might later come across in Israel (the fantastically named Arabian babblers and brown boobies, as well as a pristine flock of eastern white pelicans), I was happy to admire what really were brightly coloured, fun birds.

  The African enclosure was very different to the birdcage prisons I’d once railed against. The different species were free to mingle in a gauze marquee-type structure about the same size as a big top (a circus tent, not a large pullover). Even better, this free range accommodation was open to human visitors like me. Entering through a sort of one-way cat-flap, we could wander round the Africanesque landscape, just feet from the most spectacular birds I had ever seen, more dazzling even than the toucans of Costa Rica.

  The appropriately named superb starling was among the most impressive. As far removed from our own common starling (which is a beautiful bird in its own right) as their adjectival first name suggests, they were an electric blue, so bright, in fact, that I thought at first they must be fake. Clashing nicely with these cobalt creatures was the brilliant red ibis, tall, gangly and again, ludicrously bright. I should mention that it was pouring with rain at this point, so while their feathers dazzled, their expressions did tell a slightly different story. The red-tailed Abyssinian ground hornbills looked particularly irate, outraged, it seemed, by this unwanted holiday destination. ‘This isn’t what it looked like in the brochure,’ they seemed to say. I tried not to worry too much about them and instead appreciated the magnificent names and plumes of the village weaver, hammerkop, hyacinth macaw, king vulture, purple-tailed imperial pigeon and tawny frogmouth (the bird with the biggest mouth in the world). If I could only have counted these colourful captives on my list, I’d have taken an unexpected lead over Duncton.

  Eventually emerging from this ti
ny corner of Africa, we raced round the rest of the zoo, admiring the majestic birds of prey, spotting sleepy owls dozing in their nooks, and smiling at the antics of the rockhopper penguins (‘Now that’s the Hollywood side of birds,’ marvelled Lloyd). Their pool, by the way, was as open as the African exhibit, but without the gauze roof. Like ostriches, emus and kiwis, penguins can’t fly, so there’s no need to hem them in from above. What this does mean, of course, is that other birds that can fly find their way into the penguins’ water park. One of the many perks of flight, of course, is that you have greater access to places like this and don’t need to worry about ticket barriers.3 While we watched the ever-popular penguins dive and swim, a solitary heron swooped down onto the bank and, like us, stood and stared. His expression wasn’t easy to read – herons have pretty good poker faces – but he seemed interested in his distant relatives. I couldn’t quite tell if he was more interested in their agility under the water or their lack of it on firmer ground, but he was engrossed for a good few minutes and I enjoyed this brief spot of birdbirdwatchingwatching.

  7 March

  Before leaving the zoo, I returned for a second stroll around the African enclosure. The rain had eased and I sat for a while beneath a bare Saharan tree covered in sunbirds.

  A couple of days later I met up with my older brother Mat for our first ever joint birdwatching trip. He was about to head off to Africa himself for a year with his girlfriend Morri, the first six months of which would be spent working on a nature reserve, researching animals just like the ones I’d seen in their actual African home.