Birdwatchingwatching

by Alex Horne

  ‘What do you want to know, dear?’ asked the lady.

  ‘Well, do you know what that colourful goose is out there?’ I enquired, timidly. I’d seen a colourful goose out on the pond.

  ‘Have you been here before?’ the man demanded, refusing to answer my question just yet.

  ‘No, I’m not from here. I’ve come up from … London,’ I replied, more nervously.

  ‘The one with red eyes, do you mean?’ asked the lady, a little more benignly.

  ‘Yes, that’s the one.’

  ‘It’s an Egyptian orphan.’

  ‘Does he mean Popeye?’ bellowed the man, refusing to look at me.

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman. She wouldn’t stop looking at me. ‘He’s been here for years. I think he’s the last one left. He makes a lot of noise when he’s hungry.’

  By now the three of us had wandered out to the pond and the unfortunate bird.

  ‘Now this one here,’ said the man, suddenly bursting into life and thrusting an arm out towards a different goose, ‘is Chinese. There was a pair but the other one got foxed. About twenty years ago. We’ve been trying to find him a partner, but no luck.’

  ‘Regulations,’ agreed the woman, gloomily.

  ‘And these are Aylesbury ducks!’ announced the man with some pride.

  ‘They’re not!’ countered the lady, ‘they’re a type of muscovy. Aylesburys walk upright and are slimmer than that.’

  ‘But we have got two Aylesburys here – Josie and Gertrude.’

  ‘What have you called them?’ shrieked the lady.

  ‘Josie and Gertrude.’

  ‘After me?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And is there a bird hide here anywhere?’ I interrupted, keen to move on now.

  ‘Yes,’ said the man with a sigh, ‘if you walk right down to the weir – we don’t advertise it mind – but go down those steps, follow the path, down the road, round to the right, go over to the bridge where they’re doing all the work, bear left and that’s the start of White Bottom Farm, but if you follow up the road, on the right side there’s a footpath that says Cheshire Wildlife Trust, follow that and it’ll take you round to the river.’

  ‘Brilliant, and how long might that take?’

  ‘Oh, about three-quarters of an hour,’ said either Josie or Gertrude.

  ‘No! No! No!’ scowled the man. ‘No way. Five minutes. Takes me five minutes.’

  Fifty minutes later, I still hadn’t seen any sign of a hide and I had to start at least thinking about getting back if I wanted to get to my show on time. Suddenly though, a particularly eye-catching bird bobbed down the river towards me, a brightly coloured jester of a duck. If he was a student he would have been one of those amazingly cool ones who dress so trendily they very nearly look like idiots. With orange whiskers and matching tails at the back, white spectacles and a lurid coat, the duck was trying hard, maybe just a bit too hard. I was very pleased to see him, especially because I instinctively knew what it was – my first shelduck. Thanks Dad, I thought.

  Making my way back to the car, I passed the bickering couple again, thanked them for their truly awful directions and told them about the duck. ‘Oh yes, the Mandarin duck,’ they said. ‘Yes, there are lots of them around.’ Oh dear. It wasn’t a shelduck. Still, I’d not seen a Mandarin yet either.6

  I don’t think it would be spoiling anything now to say that even after birdwatching for the entire year, I was still rubbish at birdwatching. If you commit yourself to having a go at most hobbies a few times a week, you’d usually be quite good at them at the end of twelve months. If I decided to take up fencing, I’m sure I could hold my own in a sword fight the following year. If I took up running (as I tell myself I will at the start of every month), I’d probably be able to run quite far without wanting to cry after a year. But birdwatching is different. There’s so much to learn with birdwatching. Even people like Duncton who’ve been studying birds all their lives say they’re not really up to scratch, and that’s not just because most birders are modest. Simon Barnes has written a book called How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, entirely based on the fact that he’s not very good at it. Of course his knowledge and instincts are far superior to mine, far superior to most, but even he feels ignorant compared to the true ornithologists of the world (who in turn, I’m sure, would say they don’t know anything, either).

  You’re probably aware of a television programme on Channel 4 called Faking It. Even Duncton’s heard of it, and he only really watches programmes featuring David Attenborough or Tottenham. If you haven’t, it’s like a shortened version of my Big Year. As the pithy pitch on the show’s website explains, ‘Our faker is plucked from their natural habitat and given four weeks to master a skill well enough to fool a group of expert judges.’ So in just a month a chess player must become a football manager, a management consultant has to master dog training, a choir girl is asked to morph into a rock chick. It’s good TV.

  But I don’t think Channel 4 could ever do a Faking It on birdwatching. There’s too much to learn. Even after my first ten weeks of birding, there was absolutely no way I could have persuaded some genuine bird experts that I knew what I was doing. There are too many nuances, too many calls, too many brown, speckled birds. A Faking It on birdwatching would be like doing a Faking It on Being a Mouse. It would be that pointless. You’d have four weeks of training on How to Walk Like a Mouse, How to Squeak Correctly and Which Cheeses to Eat. Then the day of the test would arrive and you’d have to line up next to three actual mice and the judges would take one look at the line-up, point at you and say, ‘Well he’s not a mouse, clearly, he’s far too big.’ After ten weeks I was nowhere near to being a mouse.

  18 March

  But knowing I had the whole world at my disposal, and the Israel trip on the horizon, I did think I still had a chance of winning the competition and pulling off what would be a remarkable upset. So back in London I knuckled down and tried to make sure I at least knew the basics. I may not ever become a mouse, but at least I might learn to do a better impression of a mouse than most people.

  I therefore joined the RSPB. I’d never joined a society before, so this was a fairly big decision, but when I read on their website that I’d get a free fourteen-inch feeder on joining, I was sold.

  19 March

  Every gig was now an opportunity to grab more birds, but one show down in Exeter provided a chance to grab a birdwatcher too. The parents of Tom, the merlin man, had moved to Dawlish in Devon the year before. Like Duncton, they’d retired at a sensible, youngish age, and had chosen to escape to the seaside for at least some of the rest of their lives. Dawlish wasn’t far from Exeter, so they suggested I drop in.

  Unfortunately, I was doing one of my Edinburgh shows that night, and had Key with me. Key liked Janet and Jamie, Janet and Jamie were really quite fond of Key, but Key was staunchly anti-birdwatching. I wanted to go birdwatching, I’d heard Jamie liked to go birdwatching, but Key was doing me a favour by doing the gig for very little money, on the condition that I wouldn’t make him go birdwatching. This was tricky.

  ‘Well, we’re here early, and it’s a nice day, why don’t we all go for a walk!’ I suggested ingeniously when we arrived.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Jamie and Janet.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Key suspiciously. I discreetly tucked my binoculars down the front of my coat.

  The four of us piled into Janet’s car and headed down to the beach, me and Key like kids in the back with our surrogate parents in the front, occasionally spinning round to stop us squabbling. As we drove through Dawlish town centre, Jamie pointed out a black swan minding its own business on the pond.

  ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘The black swan.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, making a mental note of this bonus species. Key shook his head and tutted.

  At the seafront we bought ice creams, sticking closely to our assumed roles, and wandered along Dawlish Warren, a seashore boasting gravelly beaches, sand dunes, grassland and
scrub, and therefore perfect for avian activity. I managed to engineer a situation where Jamie and I were alone, with Key and Janet chatting away further ahead.

  ‘A lot of birds out there,’ I said, gesturing to the sea.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jamie.

  ‘Tom tells me you’re into birdwatching,’ I continued hopefully.

  ‘I do like to feed them in the garden. I find them relaxing.’

  He’s an amateur! I thought. What am I doing here?

  ‘Hang on,’ – Jamie was still talking – ‘what are they out there? … Oh look, oystercatchers! They’re always nice.’

  I looked up to where he was pointing and squinted. Nothing. I reached into my coat and brought out my binoculars. ‘Oh yes, great! Well spotted!’ Terrific. Red legs, red beaks, these were good new birds, and Jamie was clearly a fine, if laid-back, birdwatcher.

  Unfortunately, just then Key looked round and caught me with my binocs out.

  ‘No birds,’ he cried, ‘you promised!’

  So that was it. The four of us carried on walking, with me occasionally looking helplessly out to sea.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be back,’ whispered Jamie reassuringly.

  ‘I doubt it,’ I grumbled.

  We turned back for the car about a hundred yards short of the only hide. As a kid this would have been a great result. Now, I was gutted.

  26 March

  My RSPB welcome pack arrived, including the complimentary seed dispenser, so I went straight out to buy some luxury Bob Martin Bird Food from Sainsbury’s. I hadn’t known that Sainsbury’s sold bird food, but I was gradually realising I’d been mysteriously blinkered to all things birdy for many years now.

  31 March

  Deciding not to revisit the axe-addled Welsh Harp Reservoir just yet, I paid a visit to a comparatively tiny nature reserve just yards from King’s Cross Station called Camley Street Natural Park on the last day of the month. In complete contrast to The Welsh Harp, this miniature oasis was perfectly kept, a tiny haven for all things natural, wedged between the gasworks and the new Eurostar station. Unfortunately, it really was very small and after an hour I’d circled the pond three times, examined all fifteen trees and become personally acquainted with all ten birds on the site, so headed off again. But it did hearten me to think that a place like this could exist in the most urban of landscapes. As a resource for inner-city kids that wasn’t a zoo, this was an unexpected treat.

  As worthy as that sounds though, it didn’t do any good to my numbers. I saw that I needed help; I needed someone to tell me where I could see rare birds. I needed a guide. So, with Mat leaving for Africa and Duncton my adversary, I went back on the web that evening and for the second time that month, joined something I’d never joined before. This time, a forum! The forum connected to the London Birders website in fact. If you’re not familiar with internet forums, they’re not all that similar to the forums of Ancient Rome. They’re more like notice boards in a community centre. People post messages about their interests, other people reply. Sometimes they get graffitied. With the bird phone at Cley now a little outdated, birdwatchers use the London Birders forum to alert people to the arrival of particularly rare birds in the area, ask questions about troublesome birds and, in my case, beg for help.

  The message I left on the site read ‘Hey guys’ – the correct way of addressing members of a forum, I hoped – ‘I’m a novice birdwatcher, and also a comedian,’ – and then I thought I should do a little joke to justify the claim – ‘would anyone like to take me under their wing!!!’ Not a great joke, obviously, but I wanted them to see I was fun, so added three exclamation marks at the end of the sentence.7 Taking a deep breath and hitting send I then went one step further and logged on to Lee G R Evans’ website8 (which is, by the way, well worth a look. Not only can you read his story in his own words, but you can also book him to run a mobile disco for you9), found his contact details and sent him a message too. With less exclamation marks this time, I explained my situation, the challenge with Duncton and the fact that I was going to Israel later in the year. Since he was an expert on birds all around the world and an experienced birdwatching tour guide around the Western Palaearctic10 and North America, I was hoping Lee might be my Israel instructor.

  Having sent two emails to people I’d never met, I went to bed.

  Earlier that day, while on my final lap round the Camley Street Natural Park pond, Duncton had sent a text to his children saying:

  IM UP IN LONDON HE (sic) ANY OF YOU ARE AROUND FOR COFFEE.

  I walked straight over to Great Portland Street where he was sitting in a café, and was soon joined by Mat for one last chat about football and family before he migrated south for the summer. Just before we all parted company, Mat noticed a heron high above Regent Street, the same heron, I liked to think, that had dropped into the zoo at the beginning of the month. For about thirty seconds we fell silent, standing in the middle of London, gazing up as the graceful creature coasted past, still poker-faced. I don’t know what it meant to the others, but I took it as a very positive sign, and after Mat and I had hugged Duncton goodbye, the three of us went our separate ways with spring in the air and our steps.

  1 In the autumn these islands are such a target for serious twitchers that during one particular month – the Scilly Season – the whole area turns into a bizarre birding holiday camp. An annual Birders versus Islanders football match takes place in front of a fairly sizeable crowd, expert birders present slide shows, hold quizzes and sell bird products, and the whole shebang culminates in a Birders’ Disco where, according to Mark Cocker, twitchers have been known to dance with binoculars still dangling from their necks if a particularly rare bird (like the blue rock thrush of 1999) has been sighted.

  2 One answer to this deliberately rhetorical question would be ‘On nature programmes on TV with Attenborough.’ I don’t yet have a comeback to that excellent point.

  3 Thanks to its location either side of the canal, there are areas of London Zoo that even us flightless humans can experience without having to pay. From the towpath you get an excellent view of the Snowdon aviary on one side and some warthogs on the other. Indeed, from Regent’s Park itself you can often see the heads of the giraffes peeking back at you over their fences. If you’re a particular fan of giraffe faces and not all that worried about the rest of them you never need pay to visit.

  4 www.Londonbirders.com

  5 ‘To dip’ is birding parlance for ‘to miss out on a bird that was, at some stage, within reach’. The opposite is ‘to connect with’. Dipping is generally followed by a sighing and swearing. Connecting is generally followed by cheering and swearing.

  6 I had no idea, by the way, why it was called a Mandarin duck or what it was doing in Manchester. And I couldn’t face asking these two ‘characters’.

  7 I’ve never been a fan of single exclamation marks as they can warn both of humour and danger. This, I feel, is confusing. It’s only really relevant in McDonald’s when someone spills something and they bring out a yellow sign with a picture of someone falling over and an exclamation mark – because that is potentially both hazardous and quite funny.

  8 www.uk400clubonline.co.uk

  9 Although, since finishing my year, Lee G R Evans seems to be now concentrating solely on birds. Only recently have people other than Oddie been able to make a living entirely out of birdwatching. For someone like Evans, this must be a dream come true.

  10 A zoogeographical region comprising Europe, North Africa and the temperate part of the Arabian peninsula.

  CHAPTER 4

  Wingman

  ‘By the end of March my total had increased to 243 species, and I was beginning to feel on top of my game … In my days as a football coach, I would always tell my players to concentrate fully on their own performance and forget about that of their rival teams. The most important competition is that which you have with yourself. It was time for me to practise what I had been preaching.’

  – Adrian M
Riley

  Alex:

  63 species

  Duncton:

  104 species

  1 April

  ONCE OR TWICE a year a bird will turn up in Britain that is so rare even the national press get excited. Usually the unfortunate vagrant will have got lost on the way somewhere fairly exotic and ended up in an incongruously mundane British location. At the end of March, an American robin in south London ticked all those boxes and, for a brief while at least, shunted bird flu scare stories out of the papers.

  ‘Peckham welcomes American Cousin’ announced The Times proudly, with the hack’s subtitle: ‘Don’t tell Del-Boy. A new bird has flown into his manor and it’s got some of the neighbours twitching.’ ‘You don’t have to spend long with a bunch of birdwatchers to realise what it’s all about,’ said Harry Fawcett on Channel 4 news. ‘Waiting! And this morning, we’re waiting in a street in Peckham in the drizzly cold.’1

  Frustratingly, while birdwatchers from all over the country were flocking down to this drizzly cold street in SE15 to see the poor little lost bird, I’d had to travel to Swindon, Ipswich and Caernarfon for gigs, locations so far apart I didn’t even have time to stop for a quick stroll around a bird reserve on the way, let alone a jaunt down to Peckham beforehand. I knew Duncton wouldn’t be making the pilgrimage to southeast London either, but this was exactly the sort of bird needed if I was to get anywhere near his total.

  To my wife’s well-hidden disappointment, Saturday morning was the first time since news of its arrival broke that I could actually try to see it, so after spending twelve hours in the car the previous day driving to and from the furthest corner of Wales, it took me another two hours to crawl the six miles down to Denham Road where, according to the London Birders forum, the robin had last been seen.

  But that last sighting was now two days old. Since then, there’d been silence. So when I arrived at what was a completely deserted street, my heart sank. Where were the birders I’d seen on the news? Where, more to the point, was the robin? I felt like I’d been given the wrong date for a party. I felt like an April Fool.