by Alex Horne
The lengthy text, from Mum, read:
On v. noisy stretch of river tonight. 2 types of frog + fire-bellied toads all croaking. 134 different birds seen (not by me tho), 50+ new ones so far for dad! My brain needs a rest! Someone here got texts as goals happened so kept up to date in the cup – but she was West Ham … Well done Liverpool! hope all OK with you both, AML Mum x x x.
Note the superior texting technique to Duncton’s: use of symbols, not in capitals, abbreviations and not a single mistake. Good use of exclamation marks too, the first (‘50+ new ones so far for dad!’) definitely being an exclamation mark of danger rather than humour. I had been so close to catching up. I thought this was the month I’d slip past him, winking as I went. Now, in one Romanian fowl swoop, he’d charged off into the distance without even a word cast back to his struggling son.
I was consoled by the fact that Liverpool had indeed beaten West Ham in the FA Cup final – thanks to some Steven Gerrard heroics that evoked memories of Istanbul the year before – but even that was a bit of a worry for me. So exciting was the game, so thrilling the finale and so good the result that I was already looking forward to the World Cup next month. Good things come in threes, I thought, and if Gerrard could lead Liverpool to European and domestic cup glory, surely the World Cup would be next? But how was I supposed to go out birding if England were going to win the World Cup for the first time in my life? All logic, I admit, had gone out of the window, but my loyalty to the Big Year was threatened. I’m not going to win now anyway, I thought, what’s the point?
My progress was infuriatingly stilted: two steps forward – but only when assisted by my carer, David – then no steps anywhere at all. Duncton’s meanwhile, was fifty-plus steps forward, so far that he could no longer even see his son faltering behind him. As I used to on family walks, when Duncton strode purposefully ahead and my legs just weren’t long enough to keep up, I sulked.
16 May
I’d been neglecting my garden birds for some time now so, with just a hint of petulance, I decided that while Duncton was flouncing up and down the Danube, I’d get down to some grassroots birdwatching in Kensal Green. At a particularly sticky stage of the Cup final, when Liverpool were 2–1 down and I was planning how to laugh off their loss to my friends, I’d seen my first goldfinch on the Defender II, but was so caught up in the game that I hadn’t really given it credit. With another football season finally at its futile end, and three weeks to go before the World Cup, I would now devote myself to my loyal local birds.
In my second edition of Birdwatching magazine, I’d read an article on mealworms. The article suggested you should treat your birds by giving them a regular supply of these creepy crawlies, ideally creating a mealworm farm in your back garden so they could have a regular supply. I’m not particularly squeamish, but I am quite badly organised, and so I didn’t dare grow my own mealworms. I’d forget all about them and then come home to find they’d eaten my wife. So I followed an RSPB advert on the same page and ordered myself a batch.
I’d been working the night before, so had got up late, thrown on a dressing gown and was eating my breakfast. It was about 11 a.m. Rachel had indulged in a more conventional takeaway the previous evening with some friends, so I was eating their leftover curry. If you’ve never tried it don’t judge me yet – cold curry in the morning is a treat everyone should enjoy at least once a month.
Because I’m out most evenings, I tend to watch my requisite hour of telly in the morning. This morning, however, there was nothing on. I couldn’t cope with Jeremy Kyle or tolerate Trisha, so I flicked through the sports channels and settled on a game of netball. Now netball may be a women’s sport, but it’s not beach volleyball. It’s a proper sport, like basketball, played by proper sportswomen in proper sports clothing, so I wasn’t being pervy. I just wanted some entertainment as I ate my curry, and about halfway through my garlic naan I was really getting into the game.12 I think men can get obsessed with any sort of competition – Badminton, Big Brother, Birdwatching – if they spend enough time sitting in front of it.13
Even so, when a delivery man knocked on the door and was greeted by the sight of me in my dressing gown, clutching a bowl of curry, with women’s netball blaring out in the background, I was just a touch ashamed. His nonchalant expression suggested that this wasn’t such an unusual sight, but I was still uncomfortable. ‘I work nights,’ I tried to explain, vaguely suggesting I do something worthy like medicine or road building.
‘Sign here,’ he said, handing me his futuristic electronic notepad. I scrawled my name and scurried back inside my den, clutching the package and feeling quite sordid.
It was then that I noticed the package was making noises – a rustling sound, a crawling hum and, I noticed, an unnatural movement just beneath the surface. The mealworms were alive.
I checked the advert again. Yes, there it was, ‘live mealworms’ – just slightly more expensive than ‘dried mealworms’. Why was I such a snob when it came to buying stuff for the garden? Midway through my already stomach-churning breakfast, I was holding a bag stuffed full of stretching, tetchy worms.
I sprang into action. I could deal with this. I made sure I was recording the netball (I now had to know who had won before I could carry on with my life), stuffed the remains of the curry back in the fridge and peered at the bag. So, I thought, I’ve got a lot of live worms. I need to store them somewhere. I don’t want Rachel to be cross. What should I do?
I was stumped.
I phoned up the RSPB for help.
‘Oh,’ they said, ‘just put them in a container with holes for air and a lid so they can’t get out.’
‘Great,’ I said, ‘thanks.’
A container with holes and a lid. Easy. I glanced around the kitchen. There must be something here. Aha! The teapot!
For twenty seconds I contemplated pouring the larvae into our one and only teapot, a cherished wedding present and much used kitchen item. It was only really the nagging thought that they might be able to crawl out of the spout that stopped me.
What else? I know, perfect … the piggy bank!
This was, to me, a much more sensible option. The piggy bank had holes, obviously, so you could put the money in. This could be ideal. Unfortunately, this was a piggy bank with a history. I’d bought it for Rachel as a surprise gift one afternoon. She was as surprised and pleased as you can be about a gaudy china pig.
One evening between then and now I was hosting a comedy quiz show with Key and Mark (the stag). Not having a budget that stretched to buzzers, I grabbed the only thing I could see that would make a noise on the way out of the house, and later that evening handed one of our contestants Rachel’s piggy bank to shake if they wanted to answer a question. Rachel was in the audience. I hadn’t asked to borrow her pig. Halfway through round two the contestant got particularly excited and gave the pig a thorough rattling. The pig exploded. Everyone laughed. Except for Rachel and I. I’d done a bad thing.
The pig was now superglued back together and wrapped in a bandage to remind me of my mistake. I was duly warned. Filling Rachel’s romantic pig present with mealworms would not be a good idea.
I was stumped again.
I texted Mum for help. Despite being on a river in Romania, she texted back in a matter of seconds:
Try a Tupperware container or an ice cream tub. Pierce it with a fork. Good luck! x
That’s what mums are for – sound advice and perfect texting (‘Tupperware’ isn’t even in predictive text). But we didn’t have any Tupperware containers and the only ice cream tub we had was full of ice cream. I think people only keep empty ice cream tubs when they have children. We didn’t have children. We had worms. I scooped the remaining ice cream into a bowl, stuck it in the fridge next to my curry (mentally marking it ‘lunch’) and washed out the tub. I was nearly there.
*
‘Most bird people would probably tell you that there are roughly eight sub-clans in the tribe – scientist,14 ornithol
ogist, bird-watcher, birdwatcher, birder, twitcher, dude and robin stroker,’ writes Mark Cocker in Birders: Tales of a Tribe. That’s a complicated tribe. The first two ‘overlap pretty much completely’; bird-watcher, Cocker explains, is only included ‘in a bid to banish (it) for ever … If you need to stick a hyphen between the two words you’ve obviously never been involved in the enterprise in your life.’
Twitcher, of course, we’ve covered. But dude was news to me. ‘His central feature,’ writes Cocker, ‘is ignorance … “dude” also carries a vague moral implication, suggesting a person who purports to know things they patently don’t. A dude is the most unwelcome character in any rigid hierarchy …’ This got me a little worried. Was I a dude?
When I was younger, I wanted to be a dude. Brad on Neighbours was a dude and he got to marry Beth. But I’d never actually thought of myself as one before. Now, though, dude apparently meant something different, something less cool, less relaxed, something more morally flawed. Thankfully I was fairly confident I hadn’t purported to know things I patently didn’t. I had claimed a dodgy woodpecker, yes, but that was different. That wasn’t feigning knowledge; that was hoping for the best. But I did have to be careful. I could easily see myself becoming a dude. At the Wetland Centre with Tim I was very nearly a dude. I no longer wanted to be a dude.
Cocker lists ‘robin stroker’ last. ‘They are the most lukewarm in their enthusiasm,’ he says. ‘Like my parents, they heap food on the bird table. They watch from the living-room window. They join the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.’ I couldn’t really deny any of this. I did heap food onto my bird tables, I did watch from the living-room window, I had joined the RSPB. And, most damning of all, I was about to try to stroke a robin.
I was Mark Cocker’s parents, he was my dad. I didn’t think this was good news.
I knew I had a long way to go before being a birdwatcher or a birder, but after nearly six months it was frustrating to be stuck at the bottom, with the perilous dude level still to negotiate. Still, I’d started, so I’d have to finish.15 At least I was in one of the clans. I was on the ladder. And besides, as Cocker concludes: ‘Robin strokers are the vast bulk of decent folk without whom bird conservation would have no real teeth. We should all learn to love and stroke them fondly.’ Absolutely. We should all do a bit of robinstrokingstroking when possible.
18 May
Mealworms aren’t really worms. They’re larvae that will in time metamorphose into mealworm beetles. They’re the caterpillars’ ugly sisters. But the birds love them. Illustrating the article I read in praise of the humble mealworm, the sort of article few magazines ever dare publish, was a photo of someone feeding the worms to a robin. But instead of placing the worms on a bird table or scattering them across her lawn, this lady had both the worms and the bird in the palm of her hand. She had the bird eating out of her hand. I wanted to do that. I wanted to hold a robin in my hand. I wanted to feel the feathers, the weight, the tiny life (I imagined it would have the texture of a tennis ball, the mass of a squash ball, and the little heartbeat of a mouse).
So on the day the worms arrived I poured a few of them into the Defender and only had to wait a matter of minutes before a blue tit and the robin (yes, the same portly chap as before) were gleefully tucking in. I watched with a bowl of curry then a bowl of ice cream from the kitchen.
The next day, I placed a few more of the mealworms on a plate on a table in the garden, closer both to the house and human activity, so the robin would learn to trust me. Again, before long, three birds (the robin again and two starlings), were standing on the plate, mercilessly attacking the poor larvae, plucking them from the china, snapping them in half and gobbling them down. I’d never seen them so happy (the birds, not the poor worms).
Now, on the third day, it was time for me to be that plate. At about 11 a.m. – well before their lunch but ideal for a midmorning snack – I took my position on one of the chairs, shut my eyes, wrinkled my nose and reached into the ice cream tub for a highly unusual scoop. They didn’t actually feel that bad. Reasonably firm, like boiled rice, the creatures wriggled as if in slow motion on my hand, occasionally twisting one end (presumably a head but both ends looked identical) up as if to look me in the eye. I, meanwhile, did feel quite bad. All of a sudden I was uncomfortable with the idea of condemning these worms to certain death. To leave them out in the garden to do their best was one thing, but to actually hold them out for their beaky murderers felt cruel. Still, this was what the RSPB had recommended, so this was what I would do.
An hour later, I’d had no customers. Three worms had actually writhed their way to freedom, dropping off my thumb on to the patio below, and were making a bid for the flowerbed, so I felt a little better. My arm, however, was aching, so I was now resting it along the table. I was also trying to read a book to pass the time, but was finding concentration and page turning tricky.16 One blue tit had alighted briefly on the seed shack but was so put off by my presence that he hadn’t even stayed for a bite to eat there.
I had experience of robin stroking. This is my first mention of birds in print, written at the end of 1983.
By midday, three things had happened. First, the robin landed on a branch about a yard from me and watched me beadily for several minutes. I watched him right back. Occasionally our eyes darted down to the worms, who may well have been watching us too. All three corners of this food triangle were nervous. We couldn’t all win. The worms might escape and the robin and I would lose out. The worms might be eaten and the robin and I would be happy. Or the worms might be a Bahrain-style trap and I might crush the robin in my hand. Not wanting to take that risk, the robin flew next door for some time out and much safer sesame seed. Stalemate.
Second, a vast throng of starlings swooped onto the fig tree above me. There must have been about thirty of the noisy, agitated things. With summer coming the figs were swelling, something I hadn’t noticed, but which the starlings clearly had. They crash landed on the branches with such a clatter that I jumped, startled, and a couple more worms fell from my hand. While I held out my wriggly offering they then tore into the fruit with savage energy and I prayed they wouldn’t do the same to my hand.
Third, one of the occupants of the flat above ours appeared at the window and watched me warily, much like the robin. As I’ve mentioned, the house next door belonged to an Anglo-Italian family, who were always friendly, kind and welcoming – even if their bird feeder was annoyingly superior. The flat above us was being rented by an Italian family. Again, they were lovely, quiet and trouble-free (except when there was a big Italian football match), but having only recently arrived from Italy, they were unfamiliar with the whole concept of birdwatching. Having been puzzled by my CD tree decoration the year before, this painstaking attempt at feeding must have looked quite bizarre.
Birdwatching isn’t massive in Italy. There are hundreds of fantastic species to find, but it’s not a national pastime as it is here. Being something of an Italophile – he takes Italian lessons and holidays on Lake Garda – Duncton subscribes to Ali, the Italian birdwatching magazine. (The Italian for birdwatching, by the way, is ‘il birdwatching’. They don’t have their own word for the activity, so foreign is it to their culture.)
Interestingly, British and Irish robins are far more trusting of humans than their European counterparts. The traditional British Christmas image of a red-breasted robin perched on the fork handle of a nearby farmer is one of the more realistic festive pictures you’ll find. But anywhere other than these islands, robins are far too wary to go near a human hand. That American robin in Peckham may have been seen by countless birders, but none would have dared get too near, for fear of scaring him back across the Atlantic. Italian robins don’t sit on Italian gardeners’ shoulders.
When I caught the eye of the Italian father of the house, watching me, watching a robin, watching me, watching the worms, watching the robin, watching me, watching the Italian father of the house, it was a peculiar mome
nt. I nodded seriously as if this was a normal but important everyday activity. He nodded back, admirably masking shock or dismay.
I continued with my experiment for another hour without success. Even if he’d stayed watching, my neighbour wouldn’t have seen me with a bird in the hand. He must have thought I just fancied sitting outside for the morning with a handful of worms. He may have thought I was airing them, or even showing them off. I couldn’t face trying to explain myself.
19 May
By now I’d set the London Birders Forum as the home page on my laptop. It had been the official Liverpool FC site. Now each time I logged on to the internet I’d find out which birds were playing where, rather than footballers. I was determined to shake off my dip in form, whatever it took.
I’d read reports on the site the week before, not of a special bird but a special birding occasion – the inaugural ‘London Birders Drinks’. Harnessing the power of the internet and acknowledging the social side of birding, a few of the more prominent posters had suggested a night in a pub, catching up with old friends, putting names to faces that they saw every week out in the field, and finding out who was using what pseudonym on the forum itself.
Now that I was officially friends with David and had met Andrew at The Welsh Harp, I thought I should go along. But on the tube down from Kensal Green to Baker Street where the drinks were scheduled to be consumed, I was nervous. Despite my job, I hate walking into a room and having to say things to a group of people. I’m bad at introducing myself, embarrassed by everything, socially awkward and naturally shy. Will David be there? I thought. If not, who will I speak to? What will I speak about? Will I fit in? Will they suss me out as a fake or a dude? These doubts continued to build as I neared the pub, but I knew my only hope of staying close to Duncton’s total was with the help of other, more experienced birders. So with two hours to fill before a gig in Soho, I poked my head into The Globe Pub on the dot of 6 p.m., far more anxious than I ever am before going on stage.