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Birdwatchingwatching

Page 12

by Alex Horne


  Perhaps lying is too strong a word anyway. ‘Lying’ implies deliberate deceit and duplicity; I might simply have made a mistake. The British Birds Rarities Committee, to give it its full name (it’s also known as the Rare Men) currently has sixteen members, all male, including statisticians, an archivist and a museum consultant who work together to combat bird fraud. They examine the evidence of an unusual sighting with forensic attention to detail, a thoroughness that might seem like neurosis if it weren’t for the numerous scams they’ve exposed. Sometimes charmingly ill-thought out, occasionally worryingly complex, these shady schemes have included people taking photos of birds in zoos, of models of birds they’ve made themselves, or of birds shot and killed overseas then ‘found’ in the British countryside. On each occasion, the con artist has claimed them as genuine British birds and the Rare Men have been forced to prove them wrong.

  But my claim, I told myself, was a far more innocent one. To this day I can’t be sure what I saw. Deep down I can’t help thinking I may have cheated just a tiny bit by including it without confirmation by an actual birdwatcher but I was convinced at the time and anyway, it was a much better story to say I saw a lesser spotted woodpecker.

  Going through my material on the way to the gig I worked out that about ninety per cent of what I say to an audience is untrue. I tell them I’m from Swindon, but only because I first say I’m from Sweden then dash their hopes with the more mundane location. I say I saw a cowboy outside the venue driving a small German car, but only so I can pretend I waved and said ‘Audi’. I even say I hate football to help paint a picture of myself as weak and scrawny in comparison to some manly man in the front row. But then if I did come on and say I’m from Midhurst, nothing happened on the way here and I support Liverpool, it wouldn’t be all that entertaining.

  Having said that, sometimes making stuff up isn’t all that entertaining either. The show in Nottingham was what comedians might call ‘an awful gig’. As the compère, my job was to warm up the crowd, get them settled, tell a few jokes and introduce the acts. Before I’d even got to the stage, however, drunken women were bellowing ‘say something funny’ in an angry way. It’s hard to know what to say to that sort of heckle. I could have pointed out that I had always intended to ‘say something funny’ but appreciated the advice nevertheless, but as the volume of their yells increased I realised it didn’t really matter what I said. The audience was almost totally made up of stags and hens, both groups as raucous as each other. Not for the first time I wondered why the male equivalents of a hen party weren’t called cocks. I spent most of the evening doing my best to find different ways of telling adults to shut up and wishing there was a law stopping people from disturbing comedians (just as there is for birds).

  As I said earlier, I know dying on stage is not the end of the world. But you still feel quite low after it’s happened. On this occasion though, I drove home with a smile on my face, thinking not about the wasted hordes I’d failed to amuse but the woodpecker, whichever type it was, that I’d succeeded in finding. I’d decided not to mention my birdwatching outing on stage (which would itself have been a birdwatching ‘outing’) but that was definitely the most interesting thing that happened to me on the way to the show.

  7 April

  It always amazes me how you can say the same words in the same order on two separate nights and get completely contrasting reactions. After the grim grind of Nottingham, my job was a pleasure once again in Sevenoaks the following evening, where the audience was just the right side of ‘up for a laugh’. I’ve always liked the Kent town, perhaps partly because my grandparents, Duncton’s parents, lived in the nearby village of Kemsing throughout my childhood, and indeed, throughout Duncton’s. I had decided to hedge my bets once more by leaving for the local Kent birdwatching hotspot nice and early before the Sevenoaks gig. If I’m going to have a bad time on stage again, I thought, I’d better make sure I get something out of the trip. The M25, however, had other ideas. It took me four hours to crawl the forty miles anticlockwise round London. I would have been better doing my walk. Alone in the car I shouted things like, ‘This is ridiculous!’, ‘No wonder nothing gets done in this country!’ and ‘Bloody Tony Blair!’ Granny would have been proud.

  I eventually reached the Sevenoaks Wildlife Reserve an hour before it closed its gates, by which time the several remarkable birds chalked up on the notice board outside had headed home, as had the birdwatchers who’d spotted them.

  Independently, though, I managed to find two things that would have made up for any ‘awful gig’ later in the evening. First, from the landing of my first split-level hide of the year, a frisky flock of swallows, dynamic birds, dipping and flitting over the water, gratefully plucking flies from the air like miniature Mr Miyagis. They must have arrived from Africa in the last few days, probably passing my brother Mat on the way. While the light slowly faded I watched them as though in a trance, trying to imagine their journey over here and Mat’s over there. It’s always hard to picture friends or family when they’re abroad, easier to look forward to their return. Now I thought of Mat and the swallows on some sort of interspecies exchange programme and hoped that my brother was having as much fun as these birds clearly were in their new environment.9

  As I climbed back down the steps, I noticed a brass sign on the wall reading, ‘The Jeffery Harrison Hide’. Just as I had with the swallows before, I stopped and stared as if under a spell. ‘The Jeffery Harrison Hide,’ I whispered. ‘I know that name.’

  Later that evening I phoned Duncton and told him I’d spent the evening in Sevenoaks. I often complain that since I began birdwatching, I can’t get him off the phone, although he may easily say the same thing about me.

  ‘Ah,’ he said with as much nostalgia as you can squeeze into a single sound. ‘How was it looking?’

  ‘Yes, nice,’ I said. ‘A bit dark.’

  ‘You know I once met Prince Philip there?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that,’ I said, excited to hear a brand new anecdote, rare after twenty-seven years of being his son.

  ‘Yes, it was the opening of the reserve and Prince Philip arrived by helicopter to host the ceremony. But he had a broken wrist. So did Jeffery actually. Anyway, Peter Scott was there too and we all planted alders together. I remember I was assigned to Lord Beeching. This must have been 1970. Of course I was at university with Prince Charles too. You know I once saw him on stage in a Footlights sketch. He was in a dustbin …’

  ‘Yes I do know that, Duncton. You’ve told me that story a couple of times before …’

  I never knew he’d planted trees at the reserve though. As I was walking along the path to and from the car I would have passed saplings sown by Duncton’s young hand. These were actual family trees. Both they and I had sprung from his seed (I scrumpled up my face a bit at that thought).

  ‘And did you go in the Jeffery Harrison Hide?’ he asked, interrupting my uncomfortable train of thought.

  ‘Yes, yes, I did. Now, I know that name. Why do I know that name?’

  ‘Well, it’s your name,’ said Duncton matter-of-factly. ‘You were named after Jeffery Harrison, you know that.’

  Of course I knew that. My middle name was indeed Jeffery, chosen in honour of Duncton’s own birding tutor, this Jeffery Harrison character. Himself the son of a great naturalist, Jeffery had grown up in a house stuffed full of stuffed birds. That was what great naturalists still did in those days. As well as becoming a GP, Jeffery grew into a big birdwatcher (both in size and ability) and devoted much of his free time to converting a disused gravel pit, once owned by the Redlands Cement Company, into the bird reserve I’d been wandering around and where Duncton had honed his own birding skills.

  I’d conveniently forgotten that for the last twenty years. I was so embarrassed by the name as a schoolboy that I told my classmates my second J stood for John. ‘Yes, Alex James John Horne,’ I would say and the moment would pass without anyone laughing at me. ‘Just a white lie,’
I would tell myself, ‘they needn’t know the truth.’

  But Alexander James Jeffery Horne is who I am. And just to add another twist, up until very recently the whole Sevenoaks sanctuary had actually been called The Jeffery Harrison Bird Reserve. So for a brief moment I was sitting in a hide in a reserve and all three of us had been named after the same man. In Venn diagram terms this was terribly exciting. It was like Queen doing a gig on the QE2 with Her Majesty the Queen in the audience. Except that I actually enjoyed my experience, while I heard Queen Elizabeth II thought Brian May’s guitar playing (and hair) a little too loud when he played on her roof in 2002.

  On my way home that night I caught myself thinking about what I’d call our children. What would I pass on to my offspring? Who would I want to name my kids after? How would Rachel react if I suggested Oddie – even just as a middle name?

  I’d barely given it a thought before – except for childishly thinking that names like Sean, Ivor and especially, Dawn, would be quite funny. Without realising it, I was starting to take the idea of fatherhood just a little more seriously. I was making progress.

  8 April

  Already, April had been a big month. I’d been out in the field almost every day and was starting to use phrases like ‘out in the field’. I was beginning to feel like a birdwatcher.

  David, my guide and surrogate father, had emailed me after our trip with some advice as to how I might see which birds, and where, without him. He gave me the Birdguides10 number so I could get regular updates texted to my mobile, and he also suggested I subscribed to a birdwatching magazine. The first suggestions were fine. I looked up some of the bird reserves he’d recommended and worked out which ones I could visit on the way to gigs. Keen to have my very own Batphone, I happily signed up for the birding emails and text messages.11 Birdguides is a well-oiled machine. You can define your own settings and choose which birding areas you want to hear about and which birds you’re interested in, so I chose to receive texts and emails about any interesting birds in London and its surrounding counties, and any ‘mega-rarities’ elsewhere.

  But subscribing to a bird magazine felt more serious, even more of a commitment; there would be no turning back from this direct debit. Only people with a deep devotion to their hobbies subscribe to magazines on the subject.

  When I was a kid I used to buy the footy mags Shoot and Match every week. FourFourTwo didn’t start till later,12 but if it had been around I’d have snapped that up too. As an adolescent I quite often copied my friends by buying Kerrang! and Metal Hammer, two heavy metal magazines whose names sound a little bit silly nowadays.13 I knew which day the new editions hit the shelves, and would rush out to see if they had a free poster (featuring Liverpool, England, Metallica or Iron Maiden; never Man Utd, Everton, Guns‘n’Roses or Def Leppard).

  The shop of choice was, of course, W H Smith, the idiosyncratic British high-street chain famous for its board games, horrible carpets and oh-so-tempting-to-children-who-wouldn’t-normally-think-of-stealing-anything pic ‘n’ mix. Their magazine section was and is bigger than anything normal newsagents could dream of providing.

  Perusing the titles now, over a decade since last buying a magazine (I’m afraid I’m happy not to be laddish enough to buy the likes of Loaded14), I felt seedy. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but as I scanned the garish front pages for anything featuring a bird of prey or the latest Bob Martin Bird Feeder I felt that I looked like a pervert.

  The trouble was, there were so many magazines on display. I was there for what seemed like hours. First the brash women’s titles that read like a conversation shouted across a street: ‘Elle!’ ‘Hello!’ ‘Look!’ ‘Now!’ ‘Closer!’ ‘Your Hair!’ ‘Red!’ ‘Heat!’ ‘OK!’; then the educational puzzles section, featuring ‘Brain Trainer’ and ‘Sudoko Special’; followed by the drudgery of Investors’ Chronicle, Scientific American, The Economist and Spectator, names that filled me with as much excitement as a bowl of All Bran might. Still nothing about birds.

  Moving on to the special interests section, I ignored headlines like ‘Tiger Woods Laid Bare’, ‘Spring Clean Your PC’ and ‘Ferrari Sets Scorching Test Pace’ and was surprised by the sheer quantity of fishing-related publications – Anglers’ Mate, Trout and Salmon, Carp Talk and my favourite, The Crafty Carper – but still couldn’t locate anything about anything with wings. Land Rover Monthly, Yachting Monthly, Athletics Weekly, all helpful names, but not what I was looking for. What Hi-Fi, Sci Fi Now – what about the birds?

  Convinced the security guard thought I was trying to pluck up the courage to reach for one of the ‘gentlemen’s interests’ mags on the top shelf, I asked a red-shirted employee to help me. ‘I’m looking for a magazine about birdwatching,’ I mumbled. ‘It’s not for me! It’s for my dad, he’s one of them …’

  Nodding sympathetically, the girl, who looked about twelve years old, led me to the home and lifestyles section, where, at last, I found the bird mags, nestled coyly behind Gardeners’ World, Heritage Railway and the Hornby Magazine. Finding it impossible to decide between Bird Watching, Birdwatch and Birding World, I grabbed all three, paid without looking the cashier in the eye and hurried home.

  11 April

  There can’t be many situations in which birdwatching skills can save lives. Unlike hobbies such as mountaineering, skydiving or lion-taming, being good at birdwatching is not usually a matter of life or death. An inability to correctly identify a redshank from a hundred yards will rarely prove fatal. But thanks to a spot of basic bird identification, the whole country was saved from an unspeakable pandemic, for now at least anyway.

  The scientists examining the bird-flu infected swan in Cellardyke last week had presumed it was a mute swan. After all, most swans in Britain are mute swans. And since they thought it was a mute swan, they leapt to the conclusion that it was a native British bird and that we were therefore all going to die.

  Regrettably, the bird in question didn’t have a head and was heavily decomposed. The main way of definitively identifying a mute swan is by its orange beak and the odd black lump between its eyes. Apart from these distinctive facial features, a mute swan is pretty much identical to a migratory whooper swan in terms of size and plumage, especially when it’s in an advanced state of decay.

  Several days after the initial panic caused by the most famous dead swan ever, scientists revealed that after looking at its DNA, they could now say that it was in fact a whooper,15 not a mute. This was good news for everyone (except the swan, for whom it was irrelevant in every way). Whooper swans are migratory birds that flock to Scotland from Iceland and northern Europe every year. This meant that it was much more likely the bird represented an isolated case of bird flu, rather than an outbreak here in the UK. Instead of a native bird being infected by a new arrival, the swan had probably been infected elsewhere, died during its migration over the North Sea (had its head bitten off by some evil fish) and was then washed up at Cellardyke.

  Arguably, it shouldn’t have taken the scientists so long to ID the bird. The bodies of the two species do of course look very similar – that’s why I’m finding this whole birdwatching thing so tricky – but you might have hoped scientists would get these things right, or at least remain silent until they were certain. In this instance, several newspapers immediately ran alarming headlines about the swan, as well as outlining government contingency plans to deal with the thousands of deaths that would occur when this pandemic hit. Unsurprisingly, some people got scared. They started to fear birds. Bird reserves and wetland centres in turn started to worry about people staying away. For them, the interests of the birds come first. For others, avoiding this plague was more of a priority.

  Reports of this misidentification and its significance were far less shouty than the original stories. Good news, and especially good news that involves quite a subtle piece of ornithological analysis, doesn’t sell so many papers. But a few journalists did take time to explain the events, question the apparent mistake
and even decry the plight of the poor whooper. In the Guardian, Matthew Weaver wrote that whoopers are, ‘believed to be the origin of the phrase “swan song”, after the call they make as they die. It is unclear whether they make the same noise if they are dying from bird flu.’ That’s quite poetic. He also added that, ‘Last year the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies got in trouble with the law when he tried to eat a dead whooper swan. He wouldn’t try that now.’ That’s not so poetic.

  12 April

  Later that week, as I was sitting on the sofa trying to generate any sort of interest in an article about wing markings, David sent me a text asking if I was going to get the Alpine swift that had dropped in to Hampstead Heath. While my Birdguides account was being processed, David had taken it upon himself to make sure I wasn’t going to miss anything good. And an Alpine swift, he insisted, was good.

  The birdwatching magazines had left me a little cold. I liked the pictures, but they bore little resemblance to my own blurry views of birds. This was a rare chance to rectify that imbalance.

  After my disappointing skiing trip it seemed fateful that this Alpine bird would come to me, and the next morning I was up at 6.15 a.m., the earliest time that year and, with the exception of the beginning of holidays, pretty much ever. It was so early I didn’t even feel tired, just excited by this unusual nocturnal activity. By 7 a.m. I’d driven over to the heath, eaten my peanut butter on toast and was standing on Parliament Hill looking out across London. The sun was up, the city looked resplendent and I was extremely cold. In my early morning mania I’d made some basic clothing errors and my arms were bare.

  According to the London Birders website, the bird had last been spotted the previous evening at this end of the heath. I was surprised, and a little affronted, not to have found it straight away. In my naivety I had assumed I’d turn up and immediately bump into the exotic visitor. In fact, all I could see were two blue tits and a dunnock, not even nearly an Alpine swift.

 

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