by Alex Horne
‘For two days, they pursued the rose-coloured starling from garden to garden hoping to take photographs for their collection,’ an article read back in September, ‘and eventually they chased it to its death. After repeated attempts to evade the camera-wielding throng, it was left so exhausted that it was unable to fly away before a cat called Mittens pounced on it.’
After eleven months of birdwatching I had mixed feelings about twitching. The act of driving (or flying) thousands of miles to see every single rare bird that alights on these islands is clearly not an environmentally sound one. At a time when climate change is such an enormous issue it seems odd that bird lovers might behave so rashly.4 That is, perhaps, the heart of the issue – are these people bird lovers? Or are they only interested in adding another tick to their tally? I have to side with the twitchers here. Almost all, I’m sure, are genuinely fascinated by birds. They might be too fascinated perhaps, too keen to drop everything and see a rare species at all costs, but I believe that for most the interests of the birds do indeed come first. That poor rose-coloured starling was eaten by Mittens, not Twitchers.
It’s too easy to tar all birdwatchers with one faintly patronising brush. There are, undoubtedly, some bad egg(collector)s, but the majority are peaceful, nature-loving, interested, interesting people. And I could understand why many people – who wouldn’t dream of calling themselves twitchers – would want to pay homage to something like the murrelet, the birding equivalent of Halley’s Comet, an audience with the Pope or an England World Cup win.
So, from a computer in my hotel on Wednesday I checked Birdguides once more with bated breath. I wanted to see the bird. I wanted to see the flock of birders too, but I’d become caught up with the story. I wanted to pay my respects to the long-billed murrelet. Logging on to the website, I was as tense as when I find out a big football score. Unfortunately, on this occasion I’d failed, Liverpool had lost, the bird had disappeared. ‘No sign at 6 a.m. or 8 a.m. Weather worsening.’ read the message.
But then again, if it was a little stormy, the bird may have headed further out to sea. ‘It could well be back this evening,’ said David. ‘I think we should go.’ Who was I to let him down?
I was on stage first at my gig that night and managed to get home at a reasonable hour, which was lucky because I’d invited David to spend the night at our house. You get a lot of time to chat when you’re birdwatching for eleven hours at a time and we were getting on well, so I didn’t think it was too weird to offer him a bed. But I also didn’t want Rachel to spend too long alone at home with a strange birdwatcher I’d met on the internet.
Thankfully I arrived at Kensal Green about half an hour before David, and the two of us retreated to a pub for a drink before grabbing a few hours’ sleep. Over our pints, getting up at 4 a.m. to drive the 207 miles to Dawlish seemed reasonable, sensible even. ‘We’ll keep an eye on the bird texts,’ said David, ‘and if it’s not around I know a couple of other places we can nip into for a few of the seabirds you haven’t got yet.’ How is that not a rational thing to do?
But at 8.30 a.m., when we parked the car at Budleigh Salterton in Devon after four straight hours of sleepy driving, part of me did wish I was still in bed. And that part of me was much bigger than the part of me that was happy to be there. My eyes definitely wanted to be in bed, they were sore. My limbs were tired too. I think maybe only my nose and my ears were glad they were here: the birds were singing and I could smell the sea. Apart from that, everything about my bed was better than this.
David was feeling fine. ‘If you have a baby,’ he told me, ‘you’ll get used to no sleep.’ I tried to pull myself together, the words ‘if you have a baby’ reminding me why I had started this birdwatching challenge in the first place. That’s right, I thought, I need to get used to this. So, trying desperately to get used to total exhaustion, I walked like a zombie behind David as he headed off on a path by some fields, to where he’d heard a cattle egret was lurking.
‘So these cattle egrets,’ I asked wearily, ‘are they called that for the same reason bullfinches are called bullfinches? Are they like normal egrets but with massively wide necks?’
‘No,’ said David. ‘They hang around with cattle. That’s it really.’
‘OK. So if you see a cattle egret you’re bound to find cattle.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And if we find cattle we’re bound to see a cattle egret.’
‘That’s not right.’
My brain wasn’t really working yet. We passed a lot of cows but didn’t find any egrets. I started singing ‘No (R)egrets’ by Robbie Williams. I think David may have been regretting ever replying to my email. But eventually he did find the bird, skulking, as he’d promised, amongst a herd of cows looking like they’d also rather be asleep.5
On the way back to the car we found a water rail too, another rarish bird that was doing exactly what the bird guide said it would: ‘scurrying across a muddy gap in reeds’. The book went on to describe its voice in typically colourful language: ‘rich repertoire: a discontented piglet-like squeal, soon dying away, “grüiit grroit grui gru”; a weary, “all-in”, choking moan, “ooouuuh”; short “kip” notes when disturbed’. Our one, however, was clearly shy, and scampered off without even a whimper.
The various birdlines were just as silent. There was still no sign of the murrelet. We tried not to contemplate what was looking like a fact: that the rarest bird of our lives may have already packed its bags and headed home. David gritted his teeth and I drove to Dawlish in what I hoped was an optimistic fashion. Perhaps we’d be the ones to find the bird. Now that would be something.
As we drove through Dawlish town centre, I pointed out the black swan still minding its own business on the pond. ‘There’s a black swan,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said David, ‘that’s an Australian import. It’s come further than the murrelet but not all by itself. That won’t count for your list.’
I later checked in my bird guide, and he was right, of course, so I now had to cross one species off my total. I’d driven to Devon to lose a species. Black swans were in yet another section at the back of the book entitled ‘introduced breeding species and species recorded only as escapes’ – ‘rule-breakers’, in other words, ‘rogues’. According to this illicit list, I might also see a California quail, a northern bobwhite or an Indian silverbill wandering round Europe but not one of them would be an acceptable tick.6
The rest of Dawlish was deserted. The place we’d seen crammed full of birdwatchers in the newspapers and on TV over the last few days was barren. We needed breakfast badly so went into Geronimo, a bizarrely themed café by the station, for a bacon sandwich. The waitress took one look at us and asked if ‘the little bird’ was here again.
‘No,’ said David despondently.
‘That’s disappointing,’ said the lady, summing the situation up brilliantly. ‘I had the café shut all week and was hoping to cash in on the extra trade …’
Unbelievably, when this small town had been flooded by unprecedented numbers of hungry birdwatchers, she’d decided not to open her café! This made me feel a tiny bit better. We weren’t the only ones who’d missed out. And anyway, I was quite pleased she’d picked me as a birdwatcher. I was, admittedly, wearing my binoculars, but this was one of the first times anyone had assumed I was part of that gang – even if, on this occasion, we were a slight and unhappy gang, sitting quietly at a small table amongst rather a lot of American Indian paraphernalia, munching on bacon sandwiches when we really wanted to be watching a long-billed murrelet.
Feeling slightly better after what was a really rather delicious bap, we made our way down to Dawlish Warren and the location of the murrelet’s last appearance. We tiptoed up to the exact spot like mourning relatives arriving at the scene of a crash. ‘So this is where it all happened,’ sighed David.
‘I guess so,’ I sighed back. We both sighed again.
Slowly raising our binoculars, we looked out
to sea. I wasn’t optimistic. If it was here, surely someone would have sent out the alert. But then again, we were the only ones here. Perhaps it was here! Perhaps we had done the right thing! Perhaps we were the only ones doing the right thing, the only ones keeping the torch burning for the poor weary traveller?
Or perhaps not. We stood and stared for ninety minutes without success. That’s a long time to stand and stare at something without success. Well, it’s the same length of time as a football match. So, it was like watching a football match but with no football or football players or other football supporters. It was a bit eerie.
‘Let’s try the hide,’ suggested David.
‘Yes, let’s,’ I agreed. I’d wanted to suggest this myself for the last eighty-five minutes but didn’t want to say something inappropriate at a very sensitive time. This was the same hide I’d spied but missed out on with Jamie, Janet and Key at the start of the year, back when I’d only seen fifty species and had never heard of a murrelet. It felt good to finally complete that journey.
The view through the wooden window back over the bay gave us something else to think about for a while. David tested me on various waders; I made plenty of mistakes but did get grey plover, ringed plover and curlew right first time. David was very nearly impressed and rewarded me with three more new species for my list: stonechat,7 red-breasted merganser8 and, at last, some Brent geese. I’d been too early to see them over in Dublin back in late September but they’d finally caught up with me.
‘The Brent boys back together,’ I murmured.
‘Sorry?’ said David.
‘The Brent boys – me from Kensal Green in Brent, them, the Brent geese – we’re back together!’ I explained, wishing I’d never murmured ‘the Brent boys back together’ at all.
‘Oh,’ said David. This probably wasn’t my best bit of hide banter that year.
We noticed a few more people gathering on the beach, so hauled ourselves off our bench and headed over, hoping a homecoming murrelet had attracted the crowd.
There was no murrelet. There was only a group of birders who, like us, had only just been able to find the time to get off work, drive the many miles down to Devon, and were now putting a brave face on their tired heads. David got talking to a bloke who’d driven all the way along the coast from Brighton and I managed to chip in with some stuff about the starlings. It felt good to be able to talk to a stranger in a reasonably informed way about something that wasn’t the weather or football. But then he pointed out a great northern diver way out in the distance, another first for me, my fifth new species of the day (fourth if we’re subtracting the black swan).
‘Great northern diver?’ I said. ‘Sounds a bit like a certain Cristiano Ronaldo to me.’
I winked, trying to rescue a poor joke with a subtle reference to the World Cup.
‘He’s great, yes,’ said the Brighton man, ‘but he’s no diver. That was a foul, I’m afraid. And Portugal were the better team …’
He was a Man Utd fan. Typical.
At 2.30 p.m. I was forced to concede. I had another gig that night in Edmonton, North London, and would have to wend my way through the capital’s traffic at rush hour to get there. I could tell David wanted to stay longer, but I had to put my foot down.9 We sped back to London in silence, David asleep, me in a bit of a daze. Should I bring this up at the gig? No, I decided, they wouldn’t understand. I didn’t understand.
The only real consolation was that the murrelet didn’t turn up a couple of hours after we’d left. I was dreading a text saying the bird had miraculously reappeared, and having to decide whether to miss the gig or deny David his golden opportunity. But the murrelet didn’t turn up again, not that evening, that week, that year or at any time since. We’d missed our chance. We’d dipped the bird of the century.
17 November
I woke late the next day feeling surprisingly satisfied. Partly I felt smug because it was 10 a.m., I’d had a decent night’s sleep and I didn’t have to drive to Devon and back or stand on a beach and stare at the sea all day. But mostly my satisfaction was of a deep-seated sort. I was glad we’d given it a shot yesterday, I was glad we’d sacrificed a day of our lives to try to see this bird. We hadn’t found it, but it’d been worth the effort.
At the gig in Edmonton I did end up telling the story, in great and probably quite dull detail. I don’t think you can really get up at 4 a.m. and spend the whole day doing something like that and then not mention it if you have to stand on stage and talk for thirty minutes the same evening. The audience found the ludicrousness of the jaunt amusing if a little odd; it was, to them, a wacky adventure, funny because of its pointlessness. But that wasn’t what I felt. I’d loved our road trip. It was a day David and I will always remember, long-billed murrelet or not. Actually seeing the bird, for me anyway, wouldn’t have made the day that much better. We could always talk about it as ‘the one that got away’ and that’s got to be part of the fun of hobbies. If Liverpool won the Champions League every year, it would (eventually) get boring. The losses make the victories even more enjoyable (perhaps that’s why people say it’s so good to support a lesser team like Tottenham) and like football seasons, there will always be more rare birds. Maybe there won’t ever be another murrelet in the UK but that’s fine too, that makes it a better story. I was proud to think we’d done our best.
Twenty years ago in Sevenoaks, I found that piece of Roman pottery, but I felt empty. This time I felt fulfilled. What I didn’t mention before, and what I have never dared mention to anyone ever before, was that I didn’t actually find that piece of Roman pottery in the field. I’d found it on the shelf in the porch by the door to Granny and Grandpa’s house. I’d seen it when I was going to put on my coat, I’d picked it up and before I’d thought about what I was doing, we were walking out the door and it was tucked away in my pocket. Impulsively, I’d nicked it.
As we strolled towards the hills I did have time to think. I can’t write this off as a moment of madness. I could have smuggled it back to the house and returned it to its rightful shelf, but instead I hatched a plan to pretend I had found it in a field. I wanted people to think I’d uncovered it. I wanted the glory of its discovery. I wanted the attention.
Or so I thought – I was only eight years old, after all. As soon as I got that attention I felt awful. I felt bad at having lied, I felt bad that my lie might be exposed and I felt bad about how nice people were being. Grandpa must have known the piece of pottery had come from his shelf – he’d found it in the first place, I guess – but he let me tell my story. I’m not quite sure why, but he supported me. I’ve tried to understand what he was thinking (if I’m contemplating fatherhood I might as well look at grandfatherhood too). Perhaps he didn’t have the heart to embarrass his grandson with the truth. Perhaps he thought that I would own up myself. Or perhaps he knew that by letting me have my moment, the undeserved attention and unmerited congratulations would become so unbearable I’d learn my lesson the hard way over the next twenty years. Probably he was just being a good grandfather. I was only eight years old after all.
Birdwatching relies on people telling the truth. Unlike fishing, you don’t have to produce evidence, you just have to be credible. If you say you saw a rare bird, your story has to add up. The Rare Men have to believe you. If people think you are lying, your birdwatching career will be forever blighted. As Mark Cocker said about ‘stringing’: ‘We don’t tolerate it.’
Unfortunately, by this stage of Adrian Riley’s far more competitive Big Year, accusations of deception had started to spoil his fun:
Lee (G R Evans) … had disqualified me from his tabulations [sic] for, ‘… persistently fabricating sightings from Shetland to Devon,’ … Of course, I was furious but, at the same time, was strangely relieved. I no longer had to take Lee seriously, as he was satisfyingly in danger of hoisting himself by his own petard by repeating his risible attempts at publicly discrediting his opponents.
Birdwatching can be an emotive
hobby. I was happy to admit that I hadn’t seen the murrelet, but I’d also insisted I’d seen that lesser spotted woodpecker. Twenty years on from my Big Lie, was I still a stringer?
I don’t think so. I think you have to be a proper birdwatcher before you can be a stringer. And anyway, as Duncton taught me as we strolled through those severals down at Pagham in April, there’s a big difference between lying and bluffing. Dads must be able to bluff.
25 November
I decided to make another pilgrimage. Without telling my wife or my parents, I used the pretext of a gig in Farnham to make my second ever visit to the Haslemere Museum. I would only be ten miles from Midhurst, but I didn’t call Mum or Duncton. I had to see if this time I could find the Roman pottery all by myself.
Once again, the place looked far smaller than I remembered. I think I’ve now revisited pretty much every significant place from my childhood, so I should soon be over this size fixation.
It was Saturday afternoon and the museum was buzzing. Well, there were quite a few white-haired visitors and there was definitely some noise – more of a mellow murmur than a buzz, but there was something. It’s an independent museum, free to wander round and a proud example of British heritage. I promised myself I’d make a donation on my way out.
I asked the wise-looking volunteer on reception where I might find the Roman pottery. ‘Very good,’ he said, sounding as wise as he looked. ‘We don’t have an awful lot of Roman pottery on display, but what little we do have is up in the history gallery. If you go up those stairs, past the geology section then through the natural history section, you should find it.’ I thanked him and hurried off, feeling, yet again, like a child.
His instructions were spot-on. It’s a small museum – more of a cottage than a stately home – but I appreciated his accuracy. At the top of the stairs I found myself surrounded by huge quartz crystals: amethyst, jasper and aventurine, and was immediately whisked back to those days at South Cottage in Kemsing. There were only a few geology exhibits, but the rocks found along the Weald and the Downs between Sussex and Kent were just the things that had captivated me as a child. A couple of large ammonite fossils reinforced these memories.