by Alex Horne
Reactions around the world were brilliantly mixed. In our little flat we didn’t bother trying to make sense of the flawed genius’s actions (we called it ‘the head-butt challenge’) and instead got drunk and celebrated football. Over in France, President Jacques Chirac proclaimed Zidane a national hero, ‘a man of heart and conviction’. Time magazine described the incident as a symbol of Europe ‘grappling with multi-culturalism’. FIFA fined him £3,260 and slapped down a three-match ban which, because he’d already retired, Zidane voluntarily substituted for three days of community service.
So is there a birdwatching equivalent? The master of the game, choosing the closing minutes of their final outing to go mad and bash someone to the ground with their famously bald head? Probably not. Oddie would have to do something pretty remarkable to Kate Humble on the final edition of Springwatch to come close. The only story that seems remotely relevant is that of Eric Hosking, whose career as a bird photographer was marked by an attack from a tawny owl that resulted in the loss of his left eye. This was an isolated moment of violence that has gone down in birdwatching history. But it also marked the beginning rather than the end of Hosking’s career. His photos were soon published in the wake of the strike, as was his autobiography, brilliantly entitled An Eye for a Bird. Also, only a couple of people saw that owl assault Eric, while over a billion witnessed Zinedine’s eccentric head punch.
So, the World Cup fantasy was over for another four years. Well nearly, anyway. The next morning I walked out of our flat and was congratulated by no less than three people on Italy’s victory. Glancing back I saw that our upstairs neighbours had decorated the entire façade of the house with green, white and red sheets, blue scarves emblazoned with the word Italia, and a football shirt with Materazzi’s name on the back. I smiled and thanked the well-wishers. I was glad the dream had come true for someone near me, but even more chuffed that people thought I was Italian. If my face was swarthy enough to be Mediterranean, I was doing something right.
12 July
I had kept an eye on the garden during some of the more tedious matches, but with London now throttled by the grip of summer, the birds were much harder to see. Next door’s fig tree had flopped entirely over our patio, providing welcome shade, but also stealing all of our sunlight and hiding all of our birds. My female blackbird was my only constant feathery companion during most of June and July, but when she gobbled up all my carefully nurtured strawberries in one terrifying binge, I stopped paying her much attention.
During the entire footballing period I saw just one new bird, a herring gull on a beach not too far from a gig in Exeter. But I now had at least five weeks with virtually no distractions and, to kick things off, a couple of shows up in Scotland. Keen to get back out in the field, I dug up my Birdwatcher’s Yearbook once more and planned a couple of trips around Edinburgh and Glasgow. I was way behind Duncton, but I had a car and I knew how to use it (even if I didn’t have the slightest clue how it actually worked).
14 July
The last time I had a couple of gigs in Scotland, I spent almost the entire trip in my hotel room watching snooker. I did go out to Piemaker3 a couple of times, but that was pretty much the extent of my cultural excursions. I’m not proud of myself. I got sucked into a gripping Embassy World Championship final between Shaun Murphy and Matthew Stevens and just couldn’t escape. Something happens to me when I’m away from home with whole days to fill. Suddenly the chance to explore a new place becomes oppressive, any outings seem exhausting, and televised sport wields an unnatural pull.
But this time in Edinburgh, on the advice of both of my bird guides (the yearbook and David), I phoned a lady named Mrs Marr as soon as I woke up. ‘Yes,’ she told me in her sprightly Scottish accent, ‘there are sailings to Bass Rock today. In fact it’s a perfect day out there so we’ll be going to Fidra too.’ So straight after breakfast I left my room without even turning the telly on and bravely stepped out into the world.
Bass Rock isn’t a type of music;4 it’s an island in the Firth of Forth, about a mile off the coast of North Berwick, a town thirty miles east of Edinburgh. David had told me this was a must for my birdwatching year. He’d taken his girlfriend there a few years ago and even she, a non-birder, had been blown away. Thinking back to Mum and Duncton’s trip to Romania, I knew how much that meant.
I’m usually up in Edinburgh during August for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, so it was a refreshing change to wander down to Waverley Station and not have flyers thrust in my face by eager drama students and weary comics. For me, though, the city will always be associated with the festival, whatever the time of year, and as the train and I zoomed along the coastline, I couldn’t help but think of my trip to Bass Rock in terms of an Edinburgh show. How would this day out compare to normal Fringe fare?
North Berwick, to my naive surprise, was brilliant, well worth a visit if you want to escape the mayhem of the city during the festival. A bit like Ibiza, but without the noise, drugs and idiots, the seaside town used to be a fashionable holiday resort in the nineteenth century and still boasts stunning white beaches and glorious views out to the North Sea. As Mrs Marr5 had said, it was a perfect day, and the place looked like a postcard: gleaming sand, perfect rock pools, families having fun. Of course, it was Scotland, so everyone was wearing quite a lot of clothing, so it looked pretty much the same as that beach in Bahrain.
From the shore I could see Bass Rock itself, a big, almost symmetrical, bright white lump of, yes, rock. Worth coming to see? Well, it was a very big rock …
Happy to play the role of a tourist, I popped into one of those modern touchy-feely visitor centres called the Scottish Seabirds Experience. In a bid to reinvigorate the town’s tourist industry, it was opened in May 2000 by Prince Charles (Duncton once saw him in a Footlights show at university. He was in a dustbin. Have I mentioned that?), and boasts contemporary gadgets like interactive displays, Big-Brother-style webcams, and ‘spectacular light and sound shows’. Worryingly, I ignored all these attractions, drawn instead to a row of high-powered telescopes trained on Bass Rock and its neighbours. Ah ha, I thought, now for some serious birding! Then I caught myself thinking that and went a bit red.
After waiting patiently for a couple of minutes, I sidled up to the first available telescope and looked out to sea. All I could see was the sky. When I stepped back, it seemed to be pointing in the general direction of the rock and the water, but every time I bent down to peer into the eyepiece, I seemed to lose all sense of direction. I was tempted to ask for help, but knew that wasn’t what men do. Eventually I managed to aim it at what I thought was the big white rock. It was out of focus. I wiggled a couple of knobs. Nothing. Finally, I decided to read the instructions that were printed helpfully (condescendingly, I’d thought at first) on the wall by the scopes, and zoomed in to see that I wasn’t looking at a big white rock at all, I was looking at hundreds and hundreds of big white birds. So many big white birds that I couldn’t make out the colour of the big rock.
The birds were gannets – 100,000 of them. (That’s what it said on one of the ‘information walls’, although it was a rather suspiciously round number.) This was the world’s second largest gannet colony. I was impressed, but mostly I wanted to get a closer look at them. According to Mrs Marr, the boat would leave in twenty minutes, so I rushed out of the centre and raced down to the pier to take my place in the queue for the sailing. Actually, I was the only person there, so I was the queue.
I was soon joined by several families, none of whom recognised that I was a queue and who stood in haphazard groups on either side of me. I held my tongue. That seemed like the right thing to do. When the small roofless boat arrived, I even waited till a couple of parents with very small children had got on before grabbing a good seat. I could do this parenting thing.
‘When will you be back?’ asked one lady who’d put her husband Charlie on the boat, like a mother might a child.
‘In an hour or so,’ said the gruff Birds-Ey
e-style captain, ‘but that’ll be round the corner. The tide’s coming in so this here will be under water when we’re back.’
‘Ooh,’ squealed the lady in reply, clearly impressed by his nautical knowledge and appearance.
‘I’m married to a woman who can walk on water!’ quipped a fellow passenger. Everyone laughed, including me. This was proper banter! We were off.
As we chugged gently towards the rock, the skipper (who was, by the way, a proper man – gnarled, bearded, dour, with a fine line in gallows humour) gave a dry running commentary about the area:
‘Further east, down at Sea Cliff Beach, there’s a long sloping red rock close to the shore. On the other side of that lies what’s reputedly the smallest manmade harbour in Britain. But it’s a bit pointless me telling you about it because you can’t see it from here …’
That sort of thing.
After about twenty informative minutes, we were closer to the rock than the shore and could appreciate just how many birds 100,000 gannets were. The noise was terrific, constant shrill screeching and screaming; it was like being the only adult on a plane full of babies, but without any of the responsibilities that situation would entail.
We could smell them too. Cries of, ‘Oh, that stinks!’ went up as forty noses were immersed in the all-pervasive gannet perfume. The sky was thick with gannetness – their sounds, their scent, them: enormous beaky white wings, some diving around us, others gliding on the sea breeze. Everywhere you looked there were gannets. Long white necks, glowing yellow heads, swarming around like massive freakish bees. I’d really never seen anything like it. And then I remembered that Duncton had: ‘And all those seabirds were wheeling around. That’s the best way to approach. I’ll never forget that.’ This was my Fair Isle moment.
We circled the island, admiring the remarkable clouds of gannets, gannets and more gannets, from every angle. During an hour-long Edinburgh show, the audience’s attention will begin to flag after about forty minutes. Everyone on this boat was transfixed for a full hour and a half. It was the perfect Edinburgh performance. Unless you don’t like gannets. There was one man who’d made it clear he was going to be an awkward customer by spending about five minutes getting on board, grumbling that the boat was moving too much (‘Can’t you stop all these waves for a bit?’). ‘This is rubbish,’ he muttered over the noise of the engine and loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘Gannets are rubbish. Not as good as swans.’
But it wasn’t all gannets either. In amongst the stinking quilt of white feathers, the captain pointed out guillemots standing to attention on the rock, like penguins but a bit more serious. I also notched up the tough-sounding razorbills and my first shag of the year. Then, at that tricky forty-minute mark, the first puffin flew past.
‘Puffin!’ shouted the skipper. Everyone missed it.
‘There’s another!’ he cried.
This time I saw a flash of something whiz past the stern6 and shouted, ‘Yes, puffin! Definitely!’ Soon we’d all seen plenty of the little tinkers, perched on the rock, their famous clown-like faces looking out at us with just a hint of melancholy. I never knew they could fly with such bullet-like speed. Short and stocky, they punch through the air like gaily painted torpedoes.
Back at the harbour, the captain announced that since the weather was so good, he’d be taking a trip out to the island of Fidra too.
‘What’s on Fidra?’ asked one man.
‘More gannets!’ said the captain.
The gannet-hater scuttled off the boat far quicker than he’d got on. ‘And more razorbills, guillemots, herring gulls. We should be able to see kittiwakes too,’ our skipper continued. Kittiwakes! Another new species! I stayed on board, as did about half of what was now a pretty tight crew.
But this trip wasn’t so successful. Perhaps it had come too soon after the highs of Bass Rock; like watching a newish, experimental comedian after a Billy Connolly video, it just wasn’t quite right. Yes, we saw lots more puffins resting on ledges and yes, they were now my new favourite bird, but it was the island itself that made me feel uneasy. Unlike Bass Rock, we were allowed to get off the boat and wander round Fidra, and while it was uninhabited by humans, it was home to countless gulls who’d just had countless chicks. So, as our merry band of mums, dads, children and I marched around, we soon realised that we were endangering the lives of tiny baby birds who lay virtually hidden under the tufts of grass and whom we would only just see, cowering in the shadows of our boots, as we went to take our next step. Quite justifiably, their parents were spitting and shrieking at us from the air. Our captain had given us sticks to hold above our heads to protect us from aerial attacks.
It was all quite odd and a little uncomfortable. When he instructed us to use these sticks to defend ourselves against angry birds I could see the faces of some of the kids light up, while others crumpled with fear.
I didn’t think we should be there. This was the birds’ island and the young ones in particular were so unused to humans they didn’t know they could or should run away. We shouldn’t have been there, but proper birdwatchers should. I could see why Fair Isle was run almost exclusively by genuine ornithologists rather than tourists like us who just wanted to get a few close up pics of furry chicks. Then again, I did see kittiwakes, and a schmaltzy pair of fulmars, so I got what I came for.
After three hours on the water, I noticed with some pleasure that my face was a little sunburnt. I’d got sunburnt in North Berwick! It might have been a touch painful but I felt a whole lot healthier than I had after my snooker marathon on my previous visit.
16 July
Instead of driving straight from Edinburgh to Glasgow, I stopped at a place called New Lanark where, according to my yearbook, I could get ‘unrivalled views of breeding peregrine’. Since Duncton had shown me tremendous views of exactly these birds the month before, I wondered how much better the experience could be. Do they mean you can actually see the peregrines breeding? Do I want to see such behaviour? I want to experience birdwatching fully but I didn’t know it involved that … The book also promised dippers, pied flycatchers, skylarks and barn owls, none of which I’d seen before, so all things considered, I was excited. I had another whole day ahead of me and was determined to bag them all.
I never really got to grips with New Lanark. It’s near Lanark, which is a normal Scottish town,7 but New Lanark was some sort of bizarre homemade tourist village. The signs indicated that it was an old mill town, but I couldn’t tell if anyone lived (or milled) there any more. The houses seemed empty, but there were signs of life everywhere. The lights were on but no one was home, and after three days on my own I found it just a little bit eerie. I’m sure I could have discovered more about its history if I’d wanted to, but I was here to see birds, not learn about culture, and the site with these ‘unrivalled views’ was a mile outside the ghost town at the Falls of Clyde, a fine-sounding water feature, high up in the hills.
So I marched off, up a well-kept footpath that climbed the bank alongside the river below. Thanks to my regular walks around The Welsh Harp, Kensal Green Cemetery and countless other nature reserves, I was now reasonably fit (although I still didn’t think I could run very far without wanting to cry) and I strode with giant, dad-like steps, overtaking the other dawdling visitors, until I reached the peak from which water tumbled down into the pool below and presumably once powered these rumoured mills.
Once again, I was the only birdwatcher there. Well, the only person with binoculars anyway. Some of the dads leading their families along the path looked like they could easily out-bird me, but I seemed to be the only person on a strictly birdwatching mission. At the time I felt quite proud of this fact. Looking back, I can see that someone like Duncton would have got much more out of the day by combining his birding with a look around the village. But I was determined to be single-minded.
This meant that for the first hour I saw nothing except families, dogs and water, all things I like, but none of which would help me beat D
uncton. There were no birds of prey at all, let alone any saucy sights to rival those at Chichester Cathedral, and there was no sign of the other species my book had promised. I felt ripped off.
But then, just as I was about to turn back to the mysterious city of old, I caught sight of a tiny bouncing bird, about a hundred yards below me, bobbing up and down at the edge of the plunge pool. It really was very little. I don’t know how I managed to see it. But somehow it had appeared on my radar and, training my binoculars upon it, I confirmed what I’d initially thought – it was a dipper!
There was no doubt about it. It was small but chunky with a white bib8 and, best of all, it was dipping. Every few seconds it would bravely poke its minute head into the bubbling brook of freezing Scottish water then bound back onto its step. Completely charmed, I watched it for ages. It might have been drinking, fishing or washing its hair – I didn’t care which: it was dipping! And I was watching. Families arrived and peered down to see what I was staring at. It was like that childish game in which you pretend to be looking up at something in order to try to make other people look too, so you can then think, ‘Ha! I fooled you and now you’re looking up at nothing!’ (That’s pretty much how birdwatching seemed to me for twenty years.) Except that now I could see something. I could see a dipper! And without binoculars no one else could see my diminutive friend, so I felt smug.
I skipped back down to my hire car. But even then my birdwatching senses were firing. Passing through some dense trees I connected with a pied flycatcher! At first I wasn’t sure it was a pied flycatcher, it was small and compact and seemed to be catching flies,9 but it was flitting round too much. Then, for a few seconds, it alighted on a pine tree just yards from where I was standing and I could see that it was indeed pied – neatly dressed in black and white. I forgot all about the other birds, the breeding peregrines, the owls and the skylarks. I’d found two brand new birds, all on my own. I felt good. I punched the air. Then I felt embarrassed, but still good.