by Alex Horne
‘I like lions,’ purred the American lady, ‘and zeeebras.’
‘Hippos and elephants,’ growled her husband.
‘Scrub hare,’ offered the Irish chap. I think this was a joke.
‘Giraffes!’ shouted Rachel, getting into the spirit of things.
‘… er, birds?’ I tried, without much conviction and probably too late. But at least I’d had the courage, eventually, to admit my fetish.
‘OK,’ said Ben. ‘I will try my level best but I am afraid to make some promises because all our animals are afraid of me!’ Much like Duncton at Chichester, Ben’s smile was pretty much permanent, and I was confident that definitely was a joke.
‘Right, sit back, relax and enjoy yourselves,’ he grinned. This was much better than trudging round a graveyard.
To the delight of Jim (the American – he’d introduced himself loudly to the group just as Ben had told us all to shush by a bush: ‘I’m Jim and this is Judy! We met on the internet four years ago, which was great … Oh sorry, yes, shhh! Sorry Ben! Wow! What is that thing?’), the very first animal we came across was a hippo. An enormous hippo. As big as a boat. Big enough to fill our entire garden. We were all very impressed.
But then, for the next half-hour, it was all birds. Perhaps because they are easier to spot than lions and scrub hares, perhaps because Ben himself was a birder (his knowledge was awe-inspiring), or maybe because he had appreciated my plaintive bird request, Ben only pointed out things with wings, using phrases like: ‘That should be a jackal buzzard above us’, ‘That should be a yellow-bellied stork over there’, and ‘That should be a hadada ibis up ahead.’10 Everyone else made admiring noises, but I was positively whooping. These were spectacular birds with spectacular names and I could count them all!
We saw proper Egyptian geese that Duncton couldn’t quibble over, African hoopoes, blue korhaans and an orange-throated longclaw, all looking as exotic as they sounded. Ben would point them out and shout out their names for me to scribble down. I felt a tiny bit like I was cheating, but he’d also give me a titbit of information about the bird that made me feel I was learning something.
‘Those fork-tailed drongos over there,’ he told us, ‘are often found near rhinos. They like to swoop in and out of their slip stream, eating the insects the rhinos stir up.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said. These were the birds I wanted to see: fearless birds that tailed rhinoceroses, the little ones that sit in the mouths of crocodiles, ostriches breaking the speed limit.
‘Do you know which bird has the most feathers and which has the least?’ he asked the group.
No one wanted to look stupid, so no one said anything.
‘Well, the swan has the most with 25,800 and the hummingbird has the fewest,’ he said, breaking the tension. ‘Can you guess how many the hummingbird has?’
Now we got involved. We could guess numbers. ‘How about 10,000?’ said Jim confidently. ‘Or 5,000?’ offered Rachel. ‘No,’ I said, thinking I was being pretty clever. I was, after all, the bird expert. ‘It must be about the same: 25,500?’
‘Oh no,’ Ben laughed. ‘The hummingbird has 950 feathers. It is the smallest bird in the world but it does proportionally have the largest brain.’
The words ‘bird’ and ‘brain’ struck a chord. Must not be a dude, must not be a dude …
We did, of course, see mammals too; wildebeest, buffalo, kudu, impala, springbok, warthogs and wild dogs. Jim got tremendously excited at anything that looked like something he’d seen in America and asked a lot of questions about Ben’s gun. ‘So have you killed one of those?’ he would enquire menacingly, staring at each new animal.
Rounding one dusty corner into a more open plain we came across a herd of giraffes just yards away from our vehicle.
‘Giraffes,’ gasped Rachel. This was what she had come for.
‘So, could I break and ride that?’ drawled Jim. A brilliant question. If I was Veruca Salt and Duncton was Charlie, Jim could only be Mike Teavee. Eyeing Ben’s gun, he fondled his enormously long camera as if it too were a weapon: ‘This is only a 1.4; if you get a 2x you start losing some of your clarity.’ Click, click. ‘Come into the sunlight little son.’ Clickety-click. ‘Got you.’ Click.
Soon we were back to the birds. If I’d had to choose a favourite (I didn’t) I’d probably have picked the glossy starlings that shone out from a perfect African tree like my old CD bird-baiting trap. They were shinier and far bigger than a British kingfisher, and managed to impress everyone on the jeep, which was no mean feat. I offered to lend John, the burly Irishman, my binoculars for a closer look. ‘No! I can see it … I don’t need your binoculars,’ he said in a peculiarly defensive way. I think he thought I was insulting his eyesight.
But then I also really liked the anteater-chat, even if that was mainly because of its casual-sounding name. An ‘anteater-chat’ immediately made me think of my New Year birdwatching friends up in Yorkshire, nattering away, taking the mick out of each other, but nibbling on insects rather than orange segments.
As our first African night fell and we headed back to the almost embarrassingly luxurious camp, we saw lions for the first time and my birdwatching priorities were suddenly under threat. We heard them first, a spine-tingling guttural roar that vibrated through our bodies. ‘Lions,’ whispered Ben, still smiling but serious for the first time. We sat in breathless silence, the only light Ben’s torch searching for the source of the rumble.
A scrub hare jumped right over the bonnet. ‘Yes!’ shouted the Irishman rather too loudly. He hadn’t been joking.
Then Ben’s beam caught a much larger pair of eyes – cat’s eyes, but a dangerous design. He switched on his floodlight and there, about ten yards from the jeep, we saw a majestic male lion, yes, a lion king, resting on his haunches and apparently ready to pounce. Behind him two noiseless lionesses smiled dangerously. Ben’s earlier joke didn’t seem quite so funny now.11
The gasps of everyone on board were testament to the power of the animals. Words like ‘beautiful’, ‘graceful’ and ‘sinister’ were whispered. Jim’s clicks came thick and fast as he did his futile best to capture the scene. It was a bit like the Alpine swift on Hampstead Heath, but far less specialised. No one could fail to be moved by a lion. If you ever get the chance to go lionwatching, take it at once.
But then Jim’s Daytona Beach12 baseball cap blew off and the whole thing descended into farce. Ben said he should leave it. Jim said he couldn’t. Ben had to rev the engine to scare off the lion then sneak out of the car and grab the hat. Then we all went home to bed a little bit cross with Jim.
31 August
The next two days followed a satisfying pattern. At 5.30 a.m. Rachel and I would get up (quite happily, we were on holiday!) and indulge in a full breakfast feast. It would be freezing cold. It was winter in Africa and while it was warmish during the middle of the day, at either end it was more like New Year’s Day in Northern Ireland. In fact, it was so cold and often so wet (too wet, sadly, for the jeep to be able to cross to the part of the park where the elephants hung out) that it was just us, Ben and the American couple on the first morning and just us and Ben on the last. The Irish couple told us they preferred the evening trips, and liked to lie in and read in the morning. Fair enough.13
The birds we saw on these private trips were, frankly, ridiculous. Just reading the names scrawled into my notebook brings back vivid memories of Ben, the jeep, the broad skies and the Wormwood Scrubs-like landscape. We saw brown-hooded kingfishers, a sort of streetwise version of the English one,14 yellow canaries, like the ones people in Britain have in cages, but not in cages, black-eyed bulbuls, red-winged starlings, rufous-naped larks, spur-winged geese, tawny-flanked prinias, a bar-throated apalis and several crowned plovers, all warranting distinctive compound adjectives, because they were all so incredible looking.
I may have missed my golden oriole at Lakenheath Fen, but here I was spoilt with perfect views of the black-headed variety; just as bright, jus
t as golden, except, of course, for its jet-black head. I found my first officially gloomy bird in the sombre boubou. And I saw blacksmith plovers and speckled mousebirds, the first with a call sounding almost exactly like someone hammering metal, the second sociable birds, bathing, preening and roosting in huddles.
We even saw our very own ostriches, not travelling at great speeds but strolling languidly over the plain. Definitely would still be a good way to travel, I decided. Ostriches are the largest, heaviest and tallest of all birds, they also have the largest eyes of any land animal (fifty millimetres in diameter). But I’m sorry to report that they don’t bury their heads in the sand. That’s a myth. They do, however, sit with their necks outstretched along the ground to protect their eggs or chicks (presumably by acting as a sort of tripwire), so they’re undoubtedly some of the most Fun Birds in the world.
*
One bird was genuinely ridiculous. Replacing the glossy starling as my favourite bird of the holiday, the secretary bird made even Ben’s smile grow. We saw it near the end of our final, private trip out on the reserve and, remembering my chosen specialist subject, Ben gave me time to sketch a picture. A cartoonish cross between a bird of prey and a waterbird, it had the body of an eagle, the legs of a crane and a wingspan of over two metres. It had a crest of plumes on the back of its head that resembled, according to legend, the quills of a secretary, and long black shorts that look to me like something a secretary might wear on a night on the town. Brightly coloured Fun Birds. Why Birdworld hasn’t yet managed to nab some, I do not know.
I loved the exoticism of these birds. It was great to see zebras and giraffes in the wild, but we’ve all seen them in zoos and so they weren’t all that surprising. OK, the lion really did knock my socks (and Jim’s hat) off, but there was so much more diversity and colour among the birds, so many more quirks and calls. And besides the exotica, there were birds here that I had grown up with, and that I recognised with genuine excitement: a house sparrow nibbling on a worm, grey plovers and curlews digging about at the edge of some hippo-infested pool as though it was the most normal thing in the world. Most thrilling of all were the swallows, the exact same swallows (I liked to think) that I’d seen in Sevenoaks earlier in the year. There were just a few here in Addo, but they were on good form, wheeling round, chasing the jeep, skimming the grass. We watched them duck and dive around four rhinoceroses, tank-like animals that tried to blink away the birds like flies.
On the final morning we arrived back at camp, soaking wet but glowing with excitement, bubbling over with the names of everything we’d seen. The Irish couple were sitting in the kitchen in their khaki pyjamas, Maria, the wife, looking slightly upset.
‘Do you want to see my photos?’ she asked right away.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Rachel, polite as always.
‘The trouble is that they look like photos of photos in a book,’ Maria complained.
We had to agree.
‘I took them from this book here,’ – she brandished one of the lodge’s glossy coffee table books – ‘but I wanted them to look genuine. No, it’s no good. They just look like photos of photos from a book.’
That’s because they are photos of photos from books, we thought. You’ve been bookphotographphotographing, and that’s not normal.
I don’t think she was planning to pass these photos off as her own sightings – I wouldn’t have to contact the Rare Men – but it was strange. Rachel and I packed our bags hurriedly and bade farewell to Ben, wishing him good luck for the forthcoming football season, my fingers tightly crossed behind my back.15 On my final stint on the balcony, I’d texted Duncton to say I’d already seen forty new species. Just before pulling out onto the N2 and the Garden Route south, Duncton texted back with a short and apparently grumpy message:
I JUST GOT ONE AGAIN THIS MONTH. HAVE A GREAT TRIP. LOVE, D.
I was going to have a great trip. I could almost see his total, just ahead of me down the road.
1 And where Lee G R Evans had also spent many of his formative birdwatching years.
2 The longest abbreviation in the book.
3 Usually a cringe-worthy statement but hopefully I can get away with it because I’m comparing myself to a tiny bird.
4 The second most widespread service station operator, with twenty-seven stations, beating Roadchef (twenty) into third place, but not really coming close to Moto, who run no less than thirty-eight, including Woolley Edge, Trowell and Pease Pottage.
5 According to Tolkien (and the film Donnie Darko) the most pleasing combination of words in the English language is actually ‘cellar door’. To me, however, this has quite creepy connotations. So I vote for ‘cheese pillow’. That sounds nice. Especially if it’s a ‘cheese pillow’ filled with ‘eiderdown’.
6 Coventry became the world’s first ‘twin city’ when it was twinned with Stalingrad during World War II. Lucky old Stalingrad. They’ve since gone a little bit mad and twinned themselves with twenty-four other cities including Dresden in Germany, Kingston in Jamaica and Sarajevo in Bosnia Herzegovina. London is far more conservative in its choice of siblings, twinned with Beijing, Berlin, Moscow, New York, Tokyo and, interestingly, Paris.
7 ‘Illustrated by Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterström, with text by Lars Svensson and Peter J. Grant, this is the strongest team ever to produce a field guide,’ was the bit of the blurb that sold it to me.
8 ‘He’s actually 5′ 3″.’ Almost a foot shorter than Natasha Kaplinsky.
9 Gulls can be notoriously difficult to tell apart. Luckily, some of their names give at least a bit of a hint: slender-billed gull, black-headed gull, ring-billed gull, lesser black-backed gull, great black-backed gull, glaucous gull, ivory gull, sooty gull, white-eyed gull, little gull, laughing gull and the tanned Mediterranean gull.
10 Ben always began his identifications, ‘That should be …’ At first I worried he’d go on to say, ‘But, it’s actually a wren.’ I soon learned that Ben was always right. His ‘That should be …’ represented supreme confidence. If something wasn’t what it should have been, I imagine he’d have had serious words with the offending species.
11 See if you can spot two of my favourite anagrams in that paragraph. They’re sitting next to each other.
12 Where Jim and Judy lived. I didn’t think it was a real place but it is. It’s in Florida.
13 Well, not really fair enough. Don’t go on holiday to a safari in Africa then!
14 Actually, not as beautiful a kingfisher as the British kingfisher, something that made me feel jingoistically proud of ‘our birds’ back home.
15 Arsenal had already had a shaky start to the season, drawing one and losing one, while Liverpool had drawn away at Sheffield Utd then beaten West Ham at home so I could afford to be reasonably generous to my smiling rival.
CHAPTER 9
Hornes of Africa
‘I shall never forget the backslapping and self-congratulation on arriving home from that trip. I had never met Mike before yet, from then on, consider him a friend. Journeys such as these have little to do with birding; they are more about achieving something as a team.’
– Adrian M Riley
Alex:
189 species
Duncton:
208 species
1 September
MY BIRDWATCHING IN South Africa differed from Duncton’s birdwatching in Romania in several ways. First, birdwatching wasn’t the sole point of our trip. It wasn’t even the main point of our trip. We were there to have a holiday. Birdwatching was something I did on that holiday, like reading a book. I noticed the birds. Second, we weren’t stuck on a boat with twenty committed birdwatchers for company. Third, the birds that we did see weren’t little brown jobs. They were resplendent, spectacular, unbelievable birds. In fact, they were eye-catching birds. They caught my eye. They did all the hard work. I’m sure there were little brown jobs darting around just out of sight, happy to get on with their lives in the shadow of these stars, but I did
n’t notice them, couldn’t identify them, or just didn’t care about them.
In South Africa, I came to the conclusion that I’m a glory birdwatcher, in the same way that I’m a glory football supporter. I like the flashy stuff, the glitz and the glamour. Unlike Duncton, I’m not patient enough to spend hours watching little brown jobs or non-league teams (or Tottenham). I wanted ostriches and FA Cups, secretary birds and the Champions League. I admire people who do spend their time doing ‘proper’ birdwatching or supporting ‘proper’ football teams. I appreciate that they are the true fans, the bedrock of both activities. But I was comfortable with this realisation. I was happy to be a glory supporter. Glory supporters, like robin strokers, have their place too.
And even without Ben, I could indulge myself in South Africa. As we sped down the Garden Route I couldn’t help but notice more Premiership birds.
As it was winter in South Africa, the roads were virtually empty. Even better for us, the hotels were offering cheap rates in the low season, so we treated ourselves to some luxurious rooms overlooking the coast on our way to my brother’s. The first, in a sleepy village called Nature’s Valley, was a wooden beach house with a verdant garden round the back, where water splashed from fountains and bells tinkled on trees. It was designed, George the owner told us, for maximum relaxation. Rachel’s face lit up.
While she was being pampered by a masseur I explored. On the balcony round the corner from our room I found four bird feeders. By now I thought of myself as something of an expert in the bird feeder market – I knew my bird feeders, I was a connoisseur of cylindrical seed dispensers – but these were different. For a start, they were spherical. Perfect globes, each with a five-inch diameter, each filled with something liquid, golden, gloopy and, I imagined, sticky. It looked delicious. This was the first time I was actually tempted to try bird food. It looked far more appetising than mealworms.