Birdwatchingwatching

by Alex Horne

  With a whole day to kill in Dublin16 I opened up my Birdwatcher’s Yearbook. To my dismay, the closest nature reserve was ninety miles away, on Oxford Island in County Armagh. I’d forgotten that this was a UK publication and only covered Northern Ireland. I resisted the temptation to write another strongly worded letter to Paul Murphy about the pesky border.

  Opting for a quicker and more practical solution, I headed to the nearest internet café and Googled the Irish equivalent of the London Birders forum. Sure enough, I soon found www.dublinbirding.ie and a very helpful section on where to see birds around the city. I scribbled down the details of ‘Booterstown’– the first place on its bird-site list – and made my way to the nearest metro station.

  By 11 a.m., I’d arrived at Booterstown. I didn’t know what to expect from Booterstown. In my haste to get birding, I hadn’t read anything about Booterstown. I didn’t even know where Booterstown was. As it turned out, Booterstown was by the sea. I hadn’t expected that. I just knew I liked the name Booterstown.

  This is one of the only stories I wrote in my writing book that doesn’t involve birds. It does, however, employ the same advanced literary technique as I’ve done in the paragraph above. It might be ‘a bit repetitive’ but, like I said, I liked it (both Booterstown and Charles’ teddy) very much.

  Only two other people got off the train at Booterstown. I watched them closely and was disappointed to see that neither of them was sporting binoculars. By now, I’d admitted to myself that I was at least as interested in birdwatchers as in the birds themselves. Again it was the variety I liked: the flamboyance of an Oddie, the calm of the Davids, the confidence of Evans. I was beginning to see how well Duncton fitted in to this community. He was neither robin stroker nor ornithologist. He acknowledged the gaps in his knowledge, and strove to keep learning. Duncton was not a dude. Duncton’s place was bang in the middle of the birders’ spectrum, at the heart of the birdwatching tribe. Duncton was a birder.

  But it seemed that I was the only person at Booterstown with any interest in feathers, and so I plodded off in search of some alone. After my trip to South Africa, and the various high-class reserves I’d visited in the UK like Pulborough Brooks, Sandy and Sevenoaks, I had lofty expectations, expectations that were soon to be dashed.

  Unable to see a sign for a nature reserve, I asked a lady in the train station ticket office where it might be.

  ‘A reserve for birds?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Birds?’ she asked again.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Birds.’

  ‘No,’ she said. It was Bahrain all over again.

  ‘Oh hang on!’ She called me back. ‘If you turn right you’ll see a waste ground. I think most of the birds are over there. But there’s no specific building or anything …’

  I thanked her and went out and to the right. There were indeed birds on the muddy waste ground. I could make out oystercatchers in the distance. A wren touched down briefly in front of me. Fine. But this can’t be the reserve?

  Checking that I’d written Booterstown down correctly, I saw that I’d also scrawled a phone number. I didn’t know whose number it was, but I decided I had nothing to lose, so I gave it a try. An enthusiastic woman answered: ‘South Dublin tourist office! Hello!’

  I did my best to explain that I had come to Booterstown to look for birds. She couldn’t quite believe this. She was from Booterstown herself, but had no idea there might be a bird sanctuary there. Unfortunately she was the only person in the South Dublin tourist office – she was the South Dublin tourist office – so we were a bit stuck.

  ‘Do you know what you could do?’ she said. I didn’t. ‘You could go up to the Tara Towers Hotel, it’s a big tall building – it’s nice for lunch by the way, or a snack – and ask in there. They should know.’

  ‘Great,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, and there is a little area down there just out of the station where you could see the birds. It’s a sort of waste area. But where the sanctuary is, I don’t know. Or, do you know what you could do?’ I still wasn’t sure. ‘You could go into The Punchbowl, it’s a pub on the corner – they do good sandwiches – you could go and ask in there … Bye!’

  I couldn’t fault her knowledge of Booterstown’s food options, but it hadn’t been all that helpful a phone call. I chickened out of going into a pub and asking where I could watch birds, and headed up to the hotel. On the way I passed a defunct bus stop called, ‘The Bird Sanctuary Bus Stop’. I felt as though someone was playing a trick on me.

  The hotel receptionist was as helpful as everyone else.

  ‘Birdwatching? Are you sure?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Well, there are some seats and a bit of grass down there by the waste ground. I think there used to be a sign with various things on, but I’m pretty sure they took that away.’

  I went back to the waste ground, realising once more how good Brent’s Welsh Harp was and how hastily I’d slagged it off. From a solitary bench I watched a couple of curlew and a few sandpipers digging away in the mud but my heart wasn’t in it. I needed information, I needed help. I was still a novice birdwatcher and I needed signs with pictures and descriptions. More importantly, I needed other birdwatchers to point me in the right direction.

  I decided to abort the trip. But just as I was nearing the station once more, a miracle happened: I found a birdwatcher. He emerged from the station like a binoculared angel. Impossibly tall, he wore a bright yellow shirt with a pen tucked into the breast pocket. This was not typical birdwatching attire, but I didn’t care. I rushed right up to him and pleaded for help.

  ‘You’re a birdwatcher are you? Well, come this way.’

  With these words he led me to the corner of the station carpark and we clambered into a bush. ‘Out there,’ he pointed back to where I’d just come from, ‘that’s the bird sanctuary. You see the railings at the end and that bench? That’s the viewing area. And out there,’ he gestured to the famous waste ground, ‘out there you’ve got dunlins, greenshank, curlews, sandpipers – that’s about it. That’s my patch. That’s Booterstown.

  ‘You probably want to see more,’ he continued.

  I nodded.

  ‘And you’re travelling on foot? Yes?’

  I was still nodding.

  ‘Well I’ll tell you what you should do – if you want to watch birds in Dublin for a few hours, go to Bull Island. Get the train now – it’s an incoming tide, full tide is in four hours’ time, so you should be fine – get the train now to Raheny then walk down the causeway to Bull Island. That’s the best place. In the high winter you get pintails, long tails, tufties, wigeon, pochard, shoveler; they all come there. About 25,000 birds winter in Dublin Bay. Not many of them will be there yet, but the Brent geese should be coming in soon. They normally arrive in the first week of October so you may get a couple. Does that make sense? Good man,’ and off he went to his viewing area.

  I stopped nodding, breathed out, and hopped on the next train back into the city then out north to Raheny. By 1.15 p.m. I was strolling down the causeway towards the sea. This was more like it (and less like waste ground). I was determined to find these Brent geese. Any new species at this late stage of the year would consolidate my lead. I looked up the species in my guide (they looked a little bit like Canada geese, a bit more like barnacle geese, but smaller than both) and kept my eyes well and truly peeled.

  Ten minutes later I’d crossed over on to Bull Island, the sun was high, the tide was low and I was somewhere in between. Out on what looked to me very much like severals I saw some assorted gulls, more curlews and more oystercatchers. I also found a visitor centre but it was closed. ‘Opening hours, 10.15 a.m. to 1.30 p.m.’ read the sign. I had missed it by minutes. Oh well, at least I could concentrate on these geese.

  By now the causeway had turned into a path and the grass had become dunes. I made heavy weather of walking over large tufty banks of sand, but eventu
ally reached the final ledge and sat looking out to sea for the umpteenth time that year (not an exact number, but way more than in a normal year). I spotted more gulls and wee willie wagtails, but no geese. I watched people drive up to the seafront and potter around, making the most of their lunch hour, but there were no binoculars. I waited and waited, hoping for another miracle, praying that the Brent geese would choose this moment to arrive.

  But they didn’t. An hour later the tide started rising and I was forced back into town. I hadn’t got another bird but I’d had another adventure. I’d explored the town and seen far more than its shopping centres and cinemas. Everything was fine.

  1 A much fairer name than ‘hummingbird’ I thought. ‘Humming’ sounds so facile, so mundane, so pointless. ‘Sun’ is far more powerful and symbolic. These birds may not have been as mighty as the Golden Condor, but they wouldn’t have looked out of place on one of Esteban’s adventures.

  2 This was the longest bird name of my year so far. I like statistics.

  3 I was blown away by the gannets around Bass Rock and I was knocked out by the whales on the Garden Route. But which is better – 100,000 gannets or five whales? According to my comedy hero, Harry Hill, there’s only one way to find out: Fight! That’s a skirmish I’d pay to see.

  4 I’ve been fascinated for a while by the dog spectrum. I find it amazing that a tiny Chihuahua can look at a Great Dane and think, ‘Yes, we’re the same animal, everything’s fine,’ and then run round, trying to sniff parts of the bigger dog’s body that it can’t really reach. But these are different breeds of one species. There are ‘only’ hundreds of breeds. There are thousands of species of birds.

  5 Not even that early, I know. But unlike the safari, this was voluntary, this was my idea, this had better be good.

  6 We were heading for the Cape of Good Hope, which isn’t actually the southernmost point of Africa. That title is held by Cape Agulhas, about ninety miles to the southeast.

  7 Rachel couldn’t take her eyes off these incredibly sweet chicks. ‘It looks like a little ferret,’ she said of one youngster, a quote that I caught on tape and played during my Edinburgh birdwatching show. I think it was something about how reverential she sounded that made everyone laugh so much.

  8 I’m definitely not being creepy, just saying that if he wanted to visit, he’d always be welcome.

  9 The park also boasts an ornamental waterfowl collection, with about sixty different species from around the world. They were captive birds so not countable, but I didn’t know that at the time. I got very excited when we arrived at the manmade lake on which they live. ‘Tony,’ I cried, ‘take a look at these!’ He dealt with the situation professionally.

  10 By now I’d realised that ‘spotted’ birds were always (and ironically) the hardest ones to spot.

  11 He hadn’t heard of Ali, the Italian birdwatching magazine. I did ask.

  12 Although now that action has been written about, it doesn’t really count as procrastination.

  13 This was only the ninth ever recorded sighting of the bird in the capital. Not as impressive as the first ever American robin, but still big news for the capital’s birders.

  14 In January 2008, a white-crowned sparrow miraculously turned up in Cley, the Norfolk town famous for its birdwatching history. It had been blown off course from North America and, amazingly, decided to land in this significant spot on the east coast of England, rather than any more logical place further west. Over a thousand twitchers made the pilgrimage to the house of a retired clergyman in whose garden the bird was resting.

  15 Which it couldn’t.

  16 Just in case you’re wondering, I don’t mean that I had twenty-four hours in which to commit a murder in the capital of Ireland. You probably weren’t wondering that, but if you were, that’s not what I meant at all.

  CHAPTER 10

  Soggy Fish and Chips

  ‘I was far removed from the person who began the year and yet further from the one who was to finish it.’

  – Adrian M Riley

  Alex:

  254 species

  Duncton:

  209 species

  1 October

  FOR THE FIRST time in the year, I began the month as leader. With just the measly last quarter to go, there were now forty-four species between me and Duncton. That’s a big bird gap. But I couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable in my metaphorical yellow jersey. I’d certainly put the hours in, I’d definitely stayed within the rules of our game, and I was closer now to a birdwatcher than I’d ever been before.1 So why did I feel like I’d cheated?

  At first I told myself I’d simply been trying too hard; I was embarrassed by how seriously I’d been taking the whole thing, and envied Duncton’s cooler approach. But that wasn’t it. I hadn’t really tried that hard. I’d been on a few walks and visited my brother in Africa, but I hadn’t done anything that was genuinely arduous.

  So maybe that was it. Maybe I was embarrassed because I hadn’t done anything gruelling or onerous. It had all been too simple. I’d overtaken Duncton’s hard-earned total with relative ease, and looked like I might romp home by several humiliating lengths.

  But it hadn’t been all that easy (although it hadn’t been hard either – it had been fun). I had sacrificed a lot, I had got up at the cracks of several dawns, I had neglected Rachel at weekends and I had made birdwatching my priority for nine long months. Then again, I’d also taken shortcuts. I had originally intended only to visit places near to where I was working, so I shouldn’t have gone to South Africa and hired a guide for a day. Duncton’s approach seemed a whole lot more honourable than mine. While he was plugging away at his local patch, I’d flown over to Cape Town and paid a man to show me his birds. Sure, Duncton had spent a week or two in Romania, but even that seemed more admirable, since he’d worked hard for what were often quite unspectacular birds. I’d been chauffeur driven to penguins and pelicans.

  I didn’t feel worthy of my lofty perch. I’d somehow got myself into a laudable position which I didn’t feel I deserved. I felt slightly ashamed and just a little bit awkward. And this wasn’t the first time in my life I’d felt this way.

  About twenty years earlier the Horne family arrived in Kemsing near Sevenoaks for one of our reasonably regular visits to Duncton’s parents, Granny and Grandpa (Trader). I must have been about seven or eight years old. As we now know, Trader was into his rocks and he’d often show us a couple of his favourites, just as he had with Duncton as a child. Mat, Chip and I would gather round and he’d let us examine amazing stones, all different shapes and sizes, some jagged like quartz, others as smooth as glass. I remember in particular two nuggets, each about the size of a golfball, that were incredibly heavy. Grandpa somehow cut one of them into three pieces (one each) and showed us its shiny core. It had fallen to the earth from the sky in a meteorite shower, he told us.

  Their home, South Cottage, seemed massive to me as a child. Then, one day, I grew up and the house shrank. I remember walking in when I was about sixteen, having to duck through a doorway, and looking at the place as if for the first time. It was like when you talk to an old family friend at a wedding and suddenly see what they look like. All your life you’ve known this person, they’ve always been there, but you’ve never before examined their face. Now, for some reason, you notice their laughter lines, their unmanageable eyebrows, the twinkle in their eye.

  South Cottage had a porch where Granny and Grandpa hung their coats and keys. On a shelf on the right hand side, Grandpa had placed a small collection of his stones. That was where his meteorites lived. When I was little they were high above my head, only just within reach, a treasure trove to gaze up at with wonder. As I grew taller, they became easier to see, but I stopped noticing them. They became just a bunch of stones on a shelf. I wanted to get inside my grandparents’ house and play a game or eat crisps.

  On this particular trip to Sevenoaks all those years ago we must have grabbed our coats from the porch as we le
ft South Cottage for a walk in the hills. We probably aimed for Toys Hill or Doctors Wood, places that were devastated by the storm of 1987, but were then still huge and magical forests in which we kids could get lost.

  As we walked across one rubbly field, I dropped behind the rest of the family. Duncton strode on far ahead as usual and everyone else was meandering along, gossiping, bickering, laughing. It was easy to fall back unnoticed.

  A stone had caught my eye – a smooth piece of what looked like pottery, perhaps about four inches long, with slightly curved edges and a satisfying feel. It was the sort of pleasing object every little boy would pick up and treasure. I rushed back to the group to show them what I’d found. Mum took my discovery seriously and congratulated me. She suggested we go and show it to Grandpa to see what he made of it. Grandpa was even more earnest, turning the small piece over and over in his grand-fatherly hands. ‘It’s old,’ he said wisely. ‘Yes, well done Alex. This could be quite a find.’

  Back at South Cottage we all had a closer look. Grandpa declared that it might possibly be a shard of a Roman pot. Everyone told me I’d done very well to spot it. Mum suggested we take it to the local museum to see if they’d be interested. I carefully tucked the fragment into my pocket and held it safe all the way back to Midhurst.

  A couple of days later Mum drove me to Haslemere, the closest town with its own museum, and I reluctantly handed the piece of pottery over to a kindly curator who agreed with the rest of my family that it was fascinating. A month or two later she rang to confirm that it was indeed part of a fine Roman pot, about 2,000 years old. The museum would like to display it. Once again everyone congratulated me; I was the centre of attention. But I felt a little uncomfortable. I felt like I’d cheated somehow. Yes, I’d found this interesting thing, but that was it. I hadn’t known it was anything special – that was all thanks to Grandpa.