Birdwatchingwatching

by Alex Horne

  19 July

  I’d seen ten new species on my own up in Scotland and was well and truly back in the birdwatching groove.

  Back home, a second heatwave hit London. Well, I say heatwave: it had been quite hot for two whole days and I heard a lady in the post office say, ‘It’s this heat! It’s unbearable!’

  At 7 a.m. I was confident that I would be able to bear it. For the tenth time in as many weeks, I drove over to Hampstead Heath soon after dawn to search for Oddie. For the tenth time in as many weeks I searched in vain. Perhaps he’d decided he couldn’t bear the heat. Nonetheless my spirits were lifted by the sight of three young kestrels learning to hunt on Parliament Hill. From the comfort of a bench I watched them rise and fall, fluttering more precariously than their parents, then plopping down impatiently on imaginary mice below. I felt like applauding their efforts, then recalled their captive cousins in Bahrain and saluted instead. This time I checked there was no one else watching first.

  On my way over to the lido, I saw a particularly tame jay and was again pleased both to spot and identify the bird without recourse to binoculars or books. I hung around its tree for a few minutes in the hope that someone might come along and ask me what that exotic-looking bird was, so I could impart my wisdom, Duncton-style, in a knowing yet offhand way. But no one else seemed interested. What was wrong with these people?

  Over at the pools, I’d been casually leaning against another tree for another couple of minutes when a flash of blue caught me by surprise and I lost my balance. This was my first solo view of a kingfisher and it literally knocked me off my feet. I only just managed to regain my composure in time to stop myself stumbling head first into the water.

  So, an enjoyable morning, but no new birds and still no Bill. Dissatisfied, I dropped into what was actually the closest patch of open land to our flat, Wormwood Scrubs. I hadn’t appreciated what a large green space it was until it was featured on Oddie’s Springwatch as an example of a birdable urban environment. Obviously it’s hard to squeeze a big field into London, so in functional fashion Her Majesty’s Prison of the same name is situated at one end, while Linford Christie’s athletics stadium, a whole load of football pitches and a pony centre have each got their own spot on the common itself.

  It was midday and the field simmered in the heat. The scrubs were aptly named. All I could see were huge swathes of, well, scrub. With the prison behind me and the dry tufts of dead grass in front, it felt like a cross between Jaww Prison in Bahrain and the Serengeti, where I imagined Mat was busy getting his fill of new birds. Unfortunately, here in Brent there was nothing much about,10 save for a few shifty looking magpies and a couple of crows. I quickly got hot and bothered and felt like going into a post office to let off steam.

  20 July

  Worn down by yet another day of sun (three in a row!) I looked despairingly at my figures. Despite my successful foray over the border, I was still miles behind Duncton. The groove I’d felt I was in just twenty-four hours earlier seemed more like a rut, so similar to a groove but not nearly as much fun. Sure, I could spot the most common British birds with some confidence now, but I needed more. I had a gig in Winchester that evening, so I decided to get my fix with a sneaky trip to a place I knew wasn’t strictly legal, but where I could definitely get what I needed: Birdworld.

  If you haven’t been to Birdworld, you might imagine it’s a birding utopia, an ornithologist’s paradise, a whole heavenly world of birds. If you have been to Birdworld, you’ll know it’s not nearly as good as that. It’s more a friendly compound for birds, taken there against their will, but which on looking round probably think they haven’t got too bad a deal. ‘Birdworld!’ They must think when they see the colourful signs, ‘Fair enough. No more pesky humans, just birds!’ Unfortunately there were pesky humans, loads of them, mainly kids, most of whom didn’t particularly want to be there on the sweltering day that I visited.11

  After buying a ticket and trying not to spend any more money in the gift shop on the way in (yes, they’re on the way in nowadays), the first enclosure that greets visitors to Birdworld is a spacious cage full of brightly coloured hummingbirds. ‘They’re all right,’ said a kid in a Man Utd shirt, against whom, for some reason, I took an instant dislike. After watching these rare and remarkable birds for two more seconds he turned away and demanded, ‘Right, now where are the monkeys?’

  ‘No,’ said his teacher patiently. ‘I’ve told you already, this isn’t a zoo, there aren’t any monkeys. Only birds.’

  Only birds. Music to my ears, but apparently the droning of hell to this young hooligan’s: ‘Oh no Miss, you can’t be serious! That’s games! That’s lame! That is well rubbish!’

  If he wasn’t impressed by the hummingbirds, how would he cope with the rest of the world? Luckily, the Birdworld leaders had thought of that. For this wasn’t just a bird zoo, this was more like a bird circus! In one tent a toothy wide boy carelessly flung fish at penguins before a packed and gasping crowd who’d rushed to see this captive bird highlight. In another, a birdman (not really a birdwatcher, not really an ornithologist, but clearly someone who knew his birds) mucked around with a whole load of owls that he’d trained to swoop and twit twoo on cue. In an adjacent block a very young man showed off some parrots he’d instructed to ride bikes and talk. I couldn’t understand how someone so young had found himself in this profession, but it struck me that these were two things I’d some day have to teach my own offspring to do, and so paid close attention. Unfortunately the only word his parrot could say was ‘parrot’.

  ‘What are you?’ the young trainer asked each time the parrot did a wheelie.

  ‘Parrot,’ said the parrot.

  To my shame, this struck me as quite funny. It was, I suppose, incongruous. And, if every animal in a zoo were trained to say what they were, it would save a lot of the money currently spent on signs. No need for a laminated page reading ‘Elephant’ if the elephant barks the word when requested. Another scheme for Dragons’ Den, perhaps.

  After about the fifth ‘Parrot!’ I’d got the message. If his young coach had only asked a few more imaginative questions (‘Name a world snooker champion from Liverpool.’ ‘Parrot.’ ‘Correct! How about a famous Monty Python sketch beginning with “Dead”…’ ‘Parrot.’ ‘Correct!’), he might have kept my attention for more than four minutes. Still, I guess that’ll come to him with experience.

  I had mixed feelings about Birdworld. It was great for kids to be able to see such amazing birds close up, but the kids seemed far more interested in the gift shop. The birds were remarkable, with far more varieties than there are at London Zoo. From the gate of one enormous field I watched two emus, birds I’d previously thought were fictional. In another, two ostriches sprinted about, ‘Reaching,’ according to their sign, ‘speeds of up to fifty-nine miles per hour.’ Surely one of them must have broken sixty by now, I thought,12 and why don’t we harness these birds? Literally. Surely these are the ultimate twenty-first-century transport? They don’t break the law and they don’t leave a carbon footprint. If I was in charge, everyone would have an ostrich …

  Next door, four vultures sat around in their own pen looking disdainfully at the very British bushes. Not quite as manic as the ostriches, they looked decidedly glum, even when a pair of herons swooped down and landed nearby. I was reminded of the bird that had visited the penguins at Regent’s Park and was wondering if herons are a particularly curious species of bird, when a compact family of three generations of humans drew up next to me.13 The grandmother and her daughter debated for some time why the six birds didn’t all look alike. ‘Those ones over there, they must be vultures,’ said the grandmother.

  ‘Well, what about them then?’ said the young mum, pointing at the herons. ‘This is the vulture bit so they must be vultures. How else would they get in here?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? But anyway, I think they’re all ugly looking birds.’

  I was trying not to be judgemental about either
their birding ignorance, or their respective early motherhoods, but this, I felt, was quite an ironic comment. You can’t just go round slagging off vultures! To their faces!

  I trooped back towards my car and my gig, but not before hypocritically succumbing to the temptations of the gift shop. No cuddly bird toys for me, though. No, I bought a shiny blue bird bath for my classy birds back home which I’ve since carefully refilled each week but which the birds have ignored. ‘Poncy,’ I suppose they think. ‘That’s just a posh puddle.’ Perhaps I am a bit of a snob.

  21 July

  I hit 150 birds with a trip down to Midhurst and a bird called a woodcock that wasn’t quite as glamorous sounding as I’d have liked. In fact, Duncton and I got our first woodcocks of the year together when we finally got round to going on the ‘nightjar expedition’ we’d aborted during the World Cup. Nightjars are one of the few species found more often in southern England than anywhere else.

  I was touched when I realised he’d planned a whole evening round the trip. In true manly fashion we drank beer, barbecued meat then set off in search of birds. No one else was at nearby Ambersham Common at 9.30 p.m., just the two woodcocks we scribbled down in our respective notebooks. Then Duncton set down his rucksack. ‘It’s time,’ he said.

  Nightjars join ostriches, penguins, parrots and puffins in the group entitled ‘Fun Birds’. They’re quirky for a number of reasons. First, they’re nocturnal. Second, they have tiny feet on which they can barely walk. Third they’re one of only two species of birds that hibernate during the winter. Tremendous. Fourth, their name sounds like a swift drink in a pub. And fifth, their nickname is even better: goatsuckers. People have been calling them this for centuries after mistakenly believing that they feed by sucking milk from goats. How can you make that sort of mistake? An adventurous nightjar must have had a tiny swig from a teat way back in the past, and then whoever witnessed it must have told everyone what they’d seen.

  Apart from this, my favourite thing about nightjars is that you attract them by holding up two white handkerchiefs and waving them in the air like a morris-dancing air traffic controller. According to birdwatching lore, the goatsuckers think you’re a moth, their actual favourite food, and fly towards you. Only when they work out either that you’re not a moth or, if you are, then you’re an enormous bloody moth, do they fly off again.

  Amazingly, after Duncton had flapped his handkerchiefs for just a couple of minutes, a weird alien-like chirruping rose up around us. I had drunk quite a bit more beer than Duncton, but was mightily impressed – moved even. The spooky noises edged closer in the deepening murk of the night until eventually five large, flappy birds loomed out around us. Nightjars!

  Best of all was Duncton’s wonder. Even though he’d performed this ritual and seen these birds a hundred times before, he still grinned throughout the whole show. And I felt sure that letting me into this strange club was adding to his enjoyment.

  22 July

  I didn’t sleep very well that night. My normally facile dreams were interrupted by strobing images of Duncton beating an enormous pair of moth wings in a bid to attract a goat. When I awoke my head hurt. I couldn’t really remember what had happened the night before. This wasn’t what I had got into birdwatching for.

  My morning only got worse.

  The last big bird flu headline had come in May, when two fatal cases of the H5N1 virus were reported in Indonesia. Since then, the panic had largely died down. The spectre of the whooper swan in Scotland still raised the odd scare, but other stories had taken over the front pages. And most of those other stories came from the Middle East. And involved Lebanon. And Israel.

  On 12 July, a conflict broke out between the two countries that became known in Lebanon as the July War and in Israel as the Second Lebanon War. Whatever you want to call it, ten days after the violence erupted, both sides had suffered hundreds of casualties as the world watched in horror.

  I’d been following the international news with more interest than usual. The wedding we’d been invited to in Israel, my one chance to catch Duncton up, was now just a month away. As the violence escalated it became obvious that Israel wasn’t a safe place to go. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were displaced from their homes. The wedding, sensibly, was called off.

  Well, not called off exactly. It was moved. To Barnet.

  As well as being grim global news, this was a huge blow to my birdwatching year. Despite Lee G R Evans’s pessimism about the heat, I was looking forward to the ‘returning warblers in the wadis and larks at K40 and flamingos at K20 Reservoir’ that he’d promised. Now, thanks to this conflict, I wouldn’t get to see them.

  I don’t want to make light of a bloody and tragic war, but there was something grimly amusing about this complicated political and religious struggle having the power to reach as far as England and influence a birdwatching contest between a father and son. War. What is it good for? Well, I haven’t got the political nous to say for sure, but certainly not for my Big Year.14

  29 July

  I spent the following week trying to work out what to do next. Rachel and I now had a two-week gap in our diary that was meant to be filled with this trip to war-torn Israel. I looked into holidays around the Barnet area, but couldn’t find anything to suit Rachel’s desire for relaxation and stimulation and my need for exotic birds.

  With all wedding plans relocated to the UK, Rachel was off to the hen weekend down in Wales. I needed to get out of the house and stop worrying, and so I phoned David. He was spending the weekend with his family, but recommended I take a trip east for some birding. That’s what he did when he needed to clear his head.

  So I called Tim, my other main birdwatching companion, who said he was free and up for anything. He hesitated when I said I’d be round to pick him up at 7 a.m. the next morning, but kept his word, and by 9 a.m. we’d arrived at a place called Lakenheath Fen nature reserve in Suffolk, aiming to regroup with another amateur birdwatching adventure.

  It was still very hot. I know I shouldn’t go on about the fact that it was actually hot in summer in Britain but it really was very warm. So warm that Tim had decided to wear an entirely white outfit: white shoes, white shorts and a white T-shirt with a picture of a stick bird printed on the front. When I picked him up – I was now wearing good birdwatching gear: I’d replaced my yellow shoes with brown walking boots, was wearing dark trousers and an unlikely khaki shirt. I probably looked like a prat – he realised he’d picked the wrong clothes for the occasion. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him. ‘It’s very hot.’

  According to David, Lakenheath Fen was one of the few places in Britain where golden orioles breed each year. These were still Duncton’s birds of the year, so I was determined to see them for myself. I’d come to terms with the fact that I probably wasn’t going to find my own childhood favourite, the golden eagle, but if I could spot a golden oriole (it sounds the same if you say it quickly) that would be almost as good. So for a good couple of hours we ambled round the woods and fields surrounding the sweetly named Little Ouse river, an odd but chirpy couple strolling in the sun and looking out for orioles (Tim insisted we refer to them as Golden Grahams. He had a point. They do sound more like a breakfast cereal than a bird15).

  Once again I revelled in Tim’s inquisitiveness. I’d brought a fair amount of bird literature, which I hoped would help us find these elusive birds, and every sentence we read aloud prompted more incredulity. ‘OK, apparently the golden oriole is “a summer visitor …”’, he read from the bird guide, ‘“… shy, restless, mobile, keeps concealed high up in foliage … blends into the sun-dappled leaves and escapes detection … Nests suspended in branch fork Walt Disney-style, high in canopy,” says our playful author. “Often emits” – and this is what I’m looking for – “a screaming hoarse VEEAAHK!”’ (He really went for that sound.) ‘So if we hear that we’ll know we’re getting warm.’

  I’d also printed out a few pages from the internet about other birders’ succe
ssful oriole-finding missions. In one blog someone mentioned that Lakenheath Fen was the place to go because as well as golden orioles, this was where he’d seen his ‘favourite ever woodcock’. Tim couldn’t get over this tremendous statement. ‘Who’s got a favourite ever woodcock?’ he asked, flabbergasted. Disturbingly, I could relate to the sentiment. I’ve got my favourite kingfisher, I thought to myself.

  By lunchtime we’d incorrectly identified a marsh harrier (we were told by a ‘proper’ birder that it was a buzzard), discovered what we were sure was a brand new goose (it looked a bit like an Egyptian goose so we thought it was probably Moroccan or Tunisian) and had triumphantly spotted another great crested grebe, still Tim’s favourite bird from the Wetland Centre trip back in February. We also found two frogs (that we thought might be toads because they were warty), ten cows (definitely cows) and a donkey-sized, long-haired Alsatian whose owner tried to reassure us with the words: ‘Don’t worry, he likes faces!’ No idea what this meant, and no sign of any orioles. According to my notes there were only six of the birds in the entire reserve. This was the needle-hunting aspect of the hobby I found frustrating but which, I guess, makes successes like Duncton’s so sweet.

  Lunch was the highlight of the day. We found a lovely café in a town neither of us had ever heard of and scoffed down a lot of cakes.

  Refreshed, we drove three miles to Weeting Heath, where David had insisted we would see a bird called a stone curlew. I’d been disappointed by this sort of promise before, so was healthily sceptical, but the warden told us one had been seen that morning. Taking a long look at our attire and our single pair of cheap binoculars he offered to show us the bird himself and led us down to the relevant hide, where he set up his own telescope and pointed it at the field. Neither of us could make out anything through the lens. The warden said things like, ‘Can you see that yellow flower? Look just below that …’ This didn’t work. It was like trying to spot the image in a Magic Eye poster with someone whispering, ‘Well, squint, look through it, gaze at the fifth dot from the middle …’ in your ear.