by Alex Horne
Also, our attention kept being grabbed by a couple of stoats cavorting in the foreground. Apparently they’re the bane of the stone curlew’s rare lives (and are therefore closely ‘controlled’ by the wardens) but to us, they were the most interesting things we’d seen all day. Stoats! Like in The Wind In The Willows! Eventually, we did manage to spot the vaguely bird-shaped lump our warden was employed to protect, but it was fast asleep. We were not impressed.
Neither of us had heard of a stone curlew before. I’d assumed it would either look like a stone or be quite curly. Unfortunately, all we could see was its sleepy head and neck, so Tim read me the description from the Collins:
‘Stone curlew. Here it is. It’s in the “Thick Knees” section. In fact it’s the only bird in the “Thick Knees” section. It must have very thick knees.’
I had a look through the warden’s scope. ‘I can’t see its knees,’ I said, ‘it’s sitting down. It’s still asleep.’
‘In Dutch it’s called a griel,’ Tim announced with great pleasure. ‘In Swedish it’s a tjockfot. That’s very useful information. And it’s forty centimetres long. Is that one forty centimetres long?’
‘Yes, it’s exactly forty centimetres long.’
The warden didn’t look amused.
‘Long, heavy, pale yellow legs,’ Tim continued. ‘Are its legs heavy, Alex?’
‘Well, I still can’t see the legs but I guess if those knees are as thick as you suggest they’d have to be pretty weighty.’
‘Flight usually low, with deliberate wing beats. So ignore all birds that seem to be accidentally flying …’
‘Will do …’
‘OK, well I should probably take this back to the centre,’ the warden interrupted us, snatching up his scope.
‘Thanks for your help!’ we both chimed.
Alone in the hide I asked Tim what he thought of the stone curlew.
‘Lazy bastard,’ he pronounced.
It may have been one of only 300 pairs in the UK but to us, the bird was disappointing. We’d paid £2.50 each to see an utterly unmajestic bird having a nap in the distance.
Still, we’d had a nice day out and lots of cakes for lunch. What’s more, the stone curlew was another new (and rare) bird, and for the third time that year I’d got a bit sunburnt. I’d been pleasantly distracted if not overly stimulated. In fact, it was only when I called Duncton for our monthly round up later that evening, and he told me he’d seen loads of stone curlews out in Romania, that I thought again about my massive bird shortfall. I’d gone all that way for one bird that he’d already seen.
To confound matters, when I read out my entire list of species for the year (our conversations in 2006 must have been really quite dull) he pointed out several birds that I’d included but couldn’t actually count. Without meaning to cheat (honest) I’d snuck Polly’s Japanese chickens, the Aylesbury duck and Egyptian goose from Manchester and a snow goose from the London Wetland Centre into my total. ‘The first few are all domestic,’ he explained, ‘and strictly speaking, snow geese aren’t countable. There are a few proper ones over here, but they’re only rare vagrants to the most northerly isles. I’m afraid what you saw was almost certainly a “plastic” one – another captive.’
At the beginning of the year, he would have tried to sound sympathetic when breaking my third bout of bad news that month to me. But I could tell from his tone that Duncton was happy with his lead. He’d only added one extra bird himself, but had spent nearly every day of July enjoying the sun in his garden. I’d travelled to every corner of the British Isles, added just six new birds and was knackered. With just five months to go, I’d seen 145 species, compared to Duncton’s 208. And he’d seen a golden cheerio and I hadn’t.
I turned to Adrian Riley for some inspiration, but he too was struggling. At the same point in his year he was on 328 species and wrote:
‘I was so low on emotional fuel that I found I did not even care about the bird. I phoned Nessie and told her in a broken voice that I had had enough. I simply felt unable to carry on driving myself into the ground. I could not even face the long journey home. I was beaten. I sat with my arms crossed over the steering wheel of The Enterprise and wept with sheer unadulterated exhaustion.’
OK, I suppose I didn’t feel quite that bad. A good night’s sleep would probably sort me out.
1 Easily number one in my Frequently Asked Questions chart for the year. The answer, by the way, is yes. Of course birds are animals. What on earth were you thinking?
2 Well, West Germany, but it was still Germany.
3 Perhaps my favourite Edinburgh shop, it does what it says: makes pies. Tremendous pies. All day and till quite late at night. Why haven’t these taken over London yet? Or the world?
4 If it was, I imagine it’d be a fusion of rock and bossanova, the rhythm made famous by the Casio keyboard we and many other families had in the 1980s.
5 I should explain that I got Mrs Marr’s name and phone number from my Birdwatcher’s Yearbook. When I told Duncton about her he wasn’t surprised by this personal service, it seems there are a fair few characters who help the birdwatching community in this way. ‘When I went up to Shetland,’ he told me, ‘I was told to give Bobby a ring. Bobby was a famous birder up there, and I was nervous about calling him, but he said, “Oh, you’re coming up to Shetland? Well I’ll meet you off the ferry then. We’ll make an expedition of it! Bring a friend!”’
6 I have no idea if that’s the right word. Like Duncton, and unlike Trader, Johnny and Polly, I am no sailor. If you think something like port, starboard, keel, helm, ballast, boom, foremast, tiller or ketch is more suitable, please do cross mine out and put yours in.
7 The hundredth largest settlement in Scotland, apparently. That’s a satisfying claim to fame.
8 A bad colour for bibs, I think. Babies’ bibs seem to be white too. This makes no sense to me. If that’s the bit that’s going to get messy, make it brown, green even. Anything would be better than white.
9 To be honest, it was a little way off and if I couldn’t tell what bird it was I definitely couldn’t tell what insect it was eating. But I guess they were flies. Most small flying things are, aren’t they?
10 Another birdwatching phrase I was now unconsciously using.
11 I later found out that I too had visited Birdworld as a kid – in 1984, the year my very first ‘writing book’ was published (well, written). Once more, however, I seem to have wiped this birding memory from my mind.
12 Although, on further consideration, I remembered the pointless fact that the terminal velocity of a falling cat is sixty miles per hour (after which their fur acts as a parachute). Could this be relevant?
13 Three generations of women, in fact, the eldest of whom looked no older than thirty. The youngest was in a pram.
14 However, as Peter Marren explains in his book, The New Naturalists: ‘In a way war encouraged birdwatching. It is often said that war consists of five per cent wild excitement and fear, and ninety-five per cent boredom. Stationary soldiers and, still more, prisoners of war need a hobby.’ As do stand-up comedians and the recently retired.
15 Other examples of birds that sound like you could eat them in the morning include corncrakes and capercaillies, whimbrels, kittiwakes and a nice bowl of honey buzzards.
CHAPTER 8
Beyond the Fringe
‘If one is going to put oneself in this sort of situation, one had better expect the proverbial to hit the fan at some stage. The best policy is to face it head on – not try to avoid it, as this is impossible.’
– Adrian M Riley
Alex:
145 species
Duncton:
207 species
7 August
YOU’LL BE RELIEVED to know that Riley soon picked himself up, dusted himself down and took himself off to the Scilly Isles for some serious birdwatching. That’s how he faced his ‘proverbial’ head on. I had different priorities. So a week into the month I packed a bag,
said goodbye to Rachel and drove north to somewhere I hadn’t thought I’d visit during the year, the Edinburgh Festival. The Goodies were performing for the first time in twenty-five years and I’d bought myself a ticket. I was going to face my Oddie. He was my ‘proverbial’.
I’d gone up to Scotland the month before by train. This time I was driving, so with my Birdwatcher’s Yearbook, I planned a route that seemed sure to yield at least a couple more birds. And so, despite leaving at 9.20 a.m., I arrived in Edinburgh at 7.20 p.m. I spent ten hours travelling 400 miles on A-roads, eating four Ginsters sausage rolls and listening to entire shows by Ken Bruce, Jeremy Vine and Steve Wright on Radio 2. All this because of birdwatching.
Spending that much time on your own, you could do some pretty profound thinking. You could ponder your career, your family, politics. You could consider the state of the world, the wars, poverty. Or you could contemplate memories past and dreams for the future. But for ten hours, I thought almost exclusively about Bill Oddie. What will I say when I see him? How will I greet him? Should I tell him I’ve been following him for the best part of six months?
By the time I arrived, I’d answered all these questions and more. I was focused.
My three bird stops were the only breaks to this concentration, and I was really treating them as fodder for my conversation with Bill. The first stop was The Lodge at Sandy, where Duncton had stayed as a child1 and where, I later discovered, we had stopped as a family in 1987 on our way to a holiday in Yorkshire.
I’m not sure what’s better for you, a Ginsters sausage roll or a meal in a Happy Eater restaurant. It’s probably a close run thing.
Until I found this scrapbook I had no memory of this stop, and on my unwitting second visit I didn’t recognise anything about the stately RSPB building or its pristine woods. I remember the holiday itself, in a lovely house with, as I described, ‘a big garden and a stream’, but I have no recollection of the RSPB HQ.2 I guess that means that by 1987 I had entirely lost interest in birdwatching.
In 2006, however, I explored the nature reserve with unbridled enthusiasm, still full of adrenaline at the thought of finally meeting Oddie and not tired by the mere fifty miles I’d covered so far. I was even a little impatient, and probably didn’t make the most of the grounds, but I did sit for a good half-hour in one of the immaculate hides, watching no less than six great spotted woodpeckers dine, dinner-party style, on a breathtaking bird feeder. ‘That is state-of-the-art stuff,’ I murmured to myself. I was perhaps more impressed by the bird table than the birds, but then I noticed something to my right, creeping up a tree.
It was a treecreeper, my first for the year and instantly one of my favourite species, mostly because their name is both accurate and appropriate. This was a shuffly sort of a bird, well camouflaged against the bark of the oak, nervously going about its business and doing its best not to get involved with the more flamboyant woodpeckers. It reminded me a lot of me.3
Nipping into the visitors’ centre, I found out that they were using a couple of Duncraft Super Cling-a-Wing Bird Feeders hung on Single and Double Shepherd Staffs, a Meripac Bird Banqueting Hall, three Squirrel Baffles and several Rabbit Shack Flatpack Rosedale Bird Tables with Hexagonal Ceramic Effect Rooves. Pleased to have a new species under my belt, I got back in the car, ate a sausage roll and drove another ninety miles up to the Lound Gravel Pits in Nottinghamshire, where my guide said I might find the dramatic-sounding Manx shearwater, killdeer or great skua. Not many people would break up a journey with a refreshing trip to a gravel pit, so again I felt pleased with myself.
This was, however, no Welcome Break.4 This was a frustrating break. As soon as I’d paid my £4 entrance fee (which immediately aroused my suspicions) I realised most of the birds I had heard from outside the gates wouldn’t count. These were more captive birds. When signing up for this Big Year, I had no idea that there were so many birds imprisoned in this country. I saw birds like a fulvous tree duck, a cinnamon teal and an Indian spotbill, but couldn’t include them in my total. It wasn’t quite a zoo and it certainly wasn’t Birdworld. It was a nature-reserve-enclosure hybrid, and I was in the wrong half, with my binoculars. So while kids were being picked up by their dads and shown a stork on one side of the fence, I was peering out through the wire with my birdwatching equipment. Yet again, I felt foolish.
Only later, when I looked up the pits on the internet, did I discover that if I’d been a little more patient I may have seen some legitimate birds. Rareties do drop in there – earlier that year something called a gull-billed tern had got everyone excited – but you needed to put in the hours. I hadn’t. I’d just finished my second sausage roll, packed up my binocs and left.
Piqued, but focusing once more on Oddie, I ploughed on for 200 miles, stopping at a narrow strip of marsh called Bemersyde Moss in the Scottish Borders. This time, to my relief, there was no one else there. There was just a single hide, untouched by axe and unsullied by the words SEX HUT. I brought out sausage roll number three and munched happily away, gradually blending into the landscape. Dusk was settling and the cows, sheep, fields and skies were appropriately moody. I hoped I’d see one of the site’s breeding black-necked grebes, a relative of Tim’s great crested, thanks to which the Moss has gained limited fame.
Unfortunately, I’d used up my bit of luck back in Sandy. The notes neatly written in the hide’s log book informed me that the last black-necked grebe had packed its bags and emigrated the week before. But I didn’t really care. I’d found peace here in the Moss. The setting alone was better than a mocha from Caffè Ritazza, more exciting than GameZone and more relaxing than one of those massage chairs, where you put in a couple of quid, sit down, and get poked about for ten minutes. I made the final approach to Edinburgh and Oddie with a smile on my face (and the fourth sausage roll in my stomach).
Hi Bill, my name’s Alex and I’m a birdwatcher.
8 August
That smile stayed on my face throughout the next day. The sun was shining, the festival was in full swing. Eager drama students and weary comics thrust flyers in my face every step I took down the Royal Mile, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t have to perform a show every night for a month. But Oddie did. And I’d be there to claim my prize.
Or so I thought. I arrived at The Goodies’ venue a full hour before their show started but already a queue bigger than any I’d seen at a nature reserve meandered down George Street. As the minutes ticked by, staff at the venue skipped down the line dishing out bright yellow stickers that read ‘Do the Funky Gibbon’, ‘Goody Goody Yum Yum’ and ‘Anything, Anytime, Anywhere’, the last of which I slapped on my chest with pride. Anything, anytime, anywhere, I thought, that’s right. But more specifically, Oddie, now, here!
The audience was made up almost entirely of people older than Duncton, so when we were finally allowed to enter the auditorium I managed to overtake a couple of my rivals and grab a seat in the very front row. I’m not proud of myself, but after my six-month search I was determined to get a good view.
The lights dimmed. I was more nervous than I ever am before one of my shows, more excited than at anyone else’s. Then out they came. The Goodies! Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and … and … and that was it. Where was Bill? While the rest of the audience laughed, I sat up straight, mouth agape with confusion and distress.
‘As I’m sure you all know,’ said Graeme, ‘Bill’s not actually on the tour with us …’
What? You’re sure we all know? I didn’t know! I’ve driven 400 miles on A-roads to see Bill!
‘But don’t worry, we have got video inserts of Bill throughout the show and I’ve got my Bill ventriloquist’s dummy!’
Don’t worry? I hadn’t pinned down the rules of my Oddiewatch, but I knew that a virtual reality Bill, on screen or a puppet on the end of Graeme’s fist, wouldn’t count.
The show went down brilliantly. I was gutted. I spent the rest of the evening getting drunk in a way I would never have dared to do if I had to perfor
m myself the next day.
I later found out that Bill hadn’t committed to the tour due to his birding obligations.
9 August
I was staying with some friends who were doing shows at the festival, but who happened to have their one day off the next day, and we didn’t get in till 5 a.m. that morning. Four hours later, Tom (the merlin man) banged on my door. Apparently we’d agreed to spend the day birdwatching. Key was also invited but once again declined. At that moment, with that hangover, I saw his point.
Nevertheless, with a splash of water on our faces and a bacon and cheese slice from Piemaker slithering down our throats, we were driving out of Scotland again, along the east coast this time, waving to Bass Rock as we passed it. We did our best to ignore the fragile state of our bodies, aiming for the Holy Island of Lindisfarne where we hoped, by some miracle, to be cured.
Tom had been taken here as a kid by Janet and Jamie. It was his turn to retrace steps and rekindle old memories. As soon as the tides let us cross the momentous causeway and the island’s castle rose up ahead, I could tell that this was another Bass Rock, another Fair Isle. This was somewhere that would stay with us for ever.
We acted like children. We gorged on cockles, prawns and salmon from a fresh fish stall, followed by a fry-up in a café for lunch. We got lost and competitive in an enormous maize maze (you see what they did there?) ingeniously carved out by a farmer. We wandered round the island for hours, scrabbled up hills and over walls, exploring kilns, throwing pebbles and, occasionally, looking at birds.
At the northeast corner of the island we stood with our hands on our hips and gazed out to sea. All we could see was sea. Denmark sat about 500 miles away, but my binoculars weren’t that good. Then we noticed a few gullish birds floating on the water between us and the Danes (quite a bit nearer to us) and before I knew it, I’d got two new birds for my list. The first was a Sandwich tern, named not for its eating habits but after the town in Kent where the species was first identified, whose Earl would go on to name the bread-filling-bread recipe and after whom Captain Cook would name the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii, and so confuse people into thinking Sandwich terns are from the Pacific Ocean. Is that clear?