Bill Oddie Unplucked: Columns, Blogs and Musings (Bloomsbury Nature Writing)

by Bill Oddie

  I telephoned the appropriate resident Scilly birder, knowing that he would spread the news. Next morning, I got a call myself. Somebody had reported what ‘might have been’ my bird over another island. There was also a rumour of an Eleonora’s ‘somewhere in Cornwall’. To cut a long, rather annoying, story short, in due course I submitted my claim, and a copy of my field sketch and scribbles. I added that I knew the species well from Majorca. Eventually, I got a reply, and a verdict. The letter stated that ‘there seems to have been some confusion as to the age of this bird.’ I had diagnosed it as a first-year male. It certainly wasn’t a totally black adult. After looking at pages of photographs in specialist raptor books, I concluded that it might have been an intermediate morph or a dark female. Eleonora’s Falcons notoriously come in various shades! But there is one feature that they all have and other species don’t – black underwing-coverts!

  My bird was rejected. I was dejected. But not corrected! I don’t know what those other people saw, or what they said, but I know what I saw, and what I drew. Mind you, I have occasionally wondered: did those who passed judgement even look at my drawing? And another thing: if it had been drawn by Eric Ennion or Richard Richardson, or Killian Mullarney or Chris Rose, would they have accepted it then? Or would they have demanded a digital photo?

  chapter twenty-three

  Invisible Bird

  Some birds are hardly worth seeing. Their looks aren’t what make them special. Which in some cases is just as well, since it is almost impossible to get even a fleeting glimpse of them. I rather feel that about Nightingales, and Cetti’s or Grasshopper Warblers, and certainly about Quails. Nevertheless, they are all shameless show-offs compared with the Noisy Scrub-bird, an extremely rare Australian species. It is well named, in that its song is so loud that it can carry over a kilometre, and it does indeed live in ‘scrub’, more specifically in a small area of scrub at the very southern tip of Western Australia. However, it also qualifies for some kind of alternative name such as the ‘might as well be invisible scrub bird’. This would also act as a warning to those birders intent on adding it to their list, such as, for example, myself. It must be a dozen or so years ago that I drove down from Perth to Two Peoples Bay with a trio of eminent Aussie ‘birdos’. We say ‘er’, they say ‘o’! We all say ‘twitching’.

  Since these fellas were part of a Save-the-Noisy-Scrub-bird-type project, they knew instantly which sections of the considerable expanse of thick vegetation held territory-holding males. Not that I wouldn’t have figured it out for myself, when my ears were serenaded by a burst of birdsong that sounded rather like a Cetti’s Warbler using a megaphone. ‘Fruity’ and ‘explosive’ would be apt adjectives, and of course ‘loud’, or indeed ‘noisy’. A few seconds later, another one replied that was surely using a microphone and an amplifier. Then another song at even more volume. He had obviously turned his amp up to 11. My Aussie mates were clearly enjoying my slightly bewildered reactions. ‘How many of them are there?’ I asked. They smiled: ‘Just one!’

  Noisy Scrub-birds are real little teasers. Their song attracts your attention and lures you into the bush, much as sirens lure sailors onto the rocks. You creep forward, homing in on the dense and shady spot wherein surely lurks the hidden singer. Then there is a slightly longer silence, broken by a burst of song, further away and from a completely different direction. You state the obvious: ‘It’s moved!’ Only to be corrected: ‘Not necessarily. They are ventriloquists!’

  ‘Oh. Have they got their dummies?’ I quipped.

  ‘You’re the dummy, mate! No offence, but you’ll never find them by following them. You’ve got to get them to follow you.’ I guessed what was coming next.

  Nowadays, it would be an MP3 player or a smartphone. Back then it would have been a portable cassette tape recorder. However, being a bit of a purist, I wasn’t totally comfortable with ‘tape-luring’. I always had a vision of the bird being really narked when it realised it was being flirted with or challenged by a machine. My compromise was to produce my Audubon bird caller, which is a small device that looks like a little wooden whistle, but is in fact ‘played’ by twisting it in your fingers so that the friction produces various squeaking noises that supposedly puzzle small birds enough to make them come closer to investigate. It’s the equivalent of ‘pishing’, but without tingly lips. Neither technique is guaranteed to always work, but this scrub-bird found the Audubon squeaker irresistible. It ceased flaunting its ventriloquial skills, and its song got noisier and noisier and closer and closer, until I was convinced that the bird had to be in the middle of a small isolated bush, no more than a metre away. Even the Aussies were cautiously positive. Whispering ensued, and we literally surrounded the bird, so that it was equidistant from four keen-eyed, sharp-eared birders, armed with close-focus binoculars. We waited. Then it went quiet, or rather, it ceased to be noisy. Then it sang again, from what sounded like 100 metres away, but for all we knew it might as well have been under my boot. But when I lifted my foot, it wasn’t there.

  I have still not seen a Noisy Scrub-bird. Well, actually I did see one released – launched more like! – back into the wild from a ‘captive-breeding’ aviary. I saw it for barely three seconds, and only in flight, but well enough to confirm that it was yet another little brown bird. Hardly worth seeing? Well, that depends… can I count it?

  CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

  chapter twenty-four

  In the S**t

  Back in the 1960s there was nothing I looked forward to more than a day out at a sewage farm. Young people today wouldn’t know what a sewage farm was. ‘They used to grow sewage? And harvest it?’ No, they pumped it into lagoons. ‘Lagoons of...?’ Quite. ‘Didn’t it smell?’ Oh yes. We always used to check the wind direction before we walked round. The birds loved it. In 1970, Wisbech Sewage Farm was declared the best place for migrant waders in Britain, if not in Europe.

  Sewage is, of course, universal. Twenty-nine years ago I did my first proper wildlife series for the BBC. The producer’s idea was to show what it was like for a British birder to be plonked down in a totally unfamiliar country. For example, Bill Oddie in Papua New Guinea. ‘So, Bill,’ he asked me, ‘how would you go about finding the best birding places?’ My reply would have been the same anywhere in the world: ‘I’d ask if there was a local sewage farm.’

  As it turned out, there was a beauty, just outside the capital city, Port Moresby. Locals rather poetically called it the ‘S**t Pit’. As at all the best sewage farms, there were not only lagoons, but also reedbeds, ditches, damp grassland, hedges and trees, sprinklers and – at this one – a network of neatly trimmed grassy banks you could stroll along, while admiring relaxing ranks of wildfowl, egrets, herons, gulls and terns. Easy birding, and very easy filming. Unlike the rest of the trip, most of which was spent sloshing around in damp and gloomy rainforest, failing to find whatever we were looking for. I still smile at the irony of doing a series enticingly entitled Oddie in Paradise, which was mainly shot at the local sewage farm. A shame the producer didn’t let me say so! Alas, since then, the S**t Pit has become the haunt of thieves and muggers and declared a no-go area.

  However, there are no such dangers or delinquency at what may well be the best and possibly biggest sewage farm in the world, at Werribee in south-east Australia. Not only does it deal with the effluent of more than half of Melbourne, but it is also home to literally tens of thousands of birds, of nearly 300 species, including a colony of highly endangered Orange-bellied Parrots, which, by the way, do not mingle on the mud with the waders and wildfowl, but stick to the more manicured lawns and plantations.

  Werribee Water Treatment Works (it sounds like a spa, but it’s still a sewage farm!) is a king-size example of what Richard Mabey called ‘unofficial countryside’. I’d amend that to ‘incidental nature reserves’. Both phrases imply precarious impermanence, and to prove it Wisbech has been ‘modernised’, as has the nearby Cambridge Sewage Farm, another star venue in times gone
by. Most others have gone the same way.

  There is, however, one whose state remains a mystery. Perry Oaks Sewage Farm was too close to London’s Heathrow Airport to be anything but an ear-shattering day out, but it was worth it. The birds ignored the planes, as did the birdwatchers – including myself – who slipped through, or even over, the security fence and scuttled around under cover of the embankments, occasionally popping up to scan a lagoon, flushing snipe and assorted shanks, plovers and sandpipers. I never did know whether or not Perry Oaks was private, but a terrorist threat to shoot down a British airliner assured that it definitely was. Thus, one of London’s birding hotspots became totally inaccessible. It presumably still attracted birds, but no one was allowed to look at them.

  Then, as the terrorist alert abated, another threat arose: Terminal 5! I am sure there were lots of objections to Terminal 5, but I doubt anyone pleaded that it would disturb or entirely obliterate Perry Oaks Sewage Farm. The truth is, I don’t know if it did or not. Is there still a totally unwatched ‘incidental nature reserve’ down there? Or did they simply bury the sludge beds under the concrete of Terminal 5? Do you remember the film Poltergeist where a development had been built on the site of a cemetery, but ‘they only moved the headstones!’ thus desecrating the departed, whose spirits wreaked a terrible revenge?

  Well, call me crazy, but every time I fly from Terminal 5, I swear I can hear the plaintive calls of Ringed Plover and Ruff, and I begin to feel a powerful force is trying to suck me down, down into a lagoon of… Now that’s what I call a horror story.

  chapter twenty-five

  Jewels in the Dark

  I found an old lady in my lampshade last night

  Of course she was dead, she’d been lured by the light

  But her lace was unsinged, and her smock undefiled,

  So I took her downstairs, and I called to my child…

  The Old Lady was, of course, a moth. The child was my youngest daughter, Rosie. ‘Why do you think it is called an Old Lady?’ I asked. ‘Because it looks like a lacy frock thingy.’

  ‘A crinoline.’

  ‘Whatever.’ After a few more seconds of moth perusal, Rosie and I spoke in unison: ‘And this affects me how?’ This immortal expression of teenage indifference was first uttered in response to me showing Rosie a fox when she was about 13. She is now 24, and while she has hardly blossomed into a committed naturalist, she is appropriately appreciative of most of the wild things I draw her attention to. Meanwhile, the feigned disdain of ‘and this affects me how?’ has become a sort of family catchphrase. As indeed has the outraged cry of ‘Dad! Oh my God!’ indicating that someone has opened the fridge door and discovered that the egg rack’s eggs have been replaced with small specimen jars. They may look like moth coffins, but I assure you the occupants are not deceased. They are sleeping, or rather in a torpor. When I release them in the garden their wings will start to shiver and quiver, until they fly off, hopefully avoiding the nimble and intelligent Robin who has learnt to recognise the appearance of my moth tray, moth book and moth jars as the promise of an easy meal.

  I am an inveterate garden moth-er. This year it was 25 March when I first set up my trap. It is very basic. A wooden box, an especially bright light, two sloping sheets of clear plastic and – providing shade and warmth for anything that is lured in – a layer of egg boxes. I like to think that this means the moths are not so disorientated in the fridge. March 25th had been a record-breakingly warm day, but the night was chilly, so I wasn’t too optimistic. Nevertheless, the morning inspection of the egg boxes did not draw a blank. It produced five moths of three species. Two Common Quakers, two Hebrew Characters and a Brindled Beauty. Add in the Old Lady, and you may deduce one of the reasons I love moths. Those names! Some, simply descriptive: Scalloped Hook-tip, Purple Treble-bar, Pinion-streaked Snout; others more playful: Maiden’s Blush, True Lover’s Knot; and a few almost fearsome: Death’s-head Hawkmoth. All of them are testimony to the assiduousness and imagination of the Victorian naturalists who catalogued and named them.

  Get into moths and you instantly become a member of a club. It may be literal –‘moth groups’ abound – or it may seem more subversive or even slightly secretive. I first realised this when I filmed an item for Bill Oddie Goes Wild. My producer, Alex, had clearly grasped the atmosphere, and was determined to relish it. We convened at dusk and formed a circle round a single lamp while chanting: ‘The first rule of Moth Club is you don’t talk about Moth Club.’ Then each member solemnly intoned their name and origin: ‘Jack from Tewkesbury, Timothy from Chipping Norton, Bill from Hampstead’, and each one stood by their traps, which incidentally were all home-made and collectively looked like an exhibition of outdoor scrap sculptures. There was a ritual synchronised turning on of mercury vapour lamps, followed by two or three hours of me talking to the camera and the club members quaffing red wine, an activity that continued well into the small hours as we all pored over identification books. Another rule of Moth Club: ‘No moth goes unnamed.’

  Alex’s closing shot through the cottage window was of us crouched over a desk surrounded by wine glasses and empty bottles, all romantically lit by an oil lamp. You can just hear the lady of the house offering a choice of coffee or cocoa, while inebriated voices struggle with tongue-twisters like a Three-humped Prominent or a Triple-spotted Pug. At least one person had fallen asleep. It was one of those experiences that remind me that there is more to watching wildlife than the wildlife. Company, humour and shared enjoyment.

  chapter twenty-six

  On the Fairway

  Birdies, eagles, albatrosses. Am I talking wildlife or golf? Well, both actually.

  The fact is that most naturalists – and birdwatchers in particular – are rather fond of golf courses, especially if they are sited by the sea, which many of them are. It means that many migratory birds’ first landfall is on a golf course. The greens and tees may be a bit too velvety, manicured and possibly doused in insecticide, but the short-cropped fairways are much beloved of wheatears, pipits and larks, while warblers and thrushes lurk in ditches and any available scrub or bushes. What’s more, landing in the ‘rough’ may be a nightmare for golfers but it is a joy not only for birds but also for small mammals, wildflowers and attendant insects, especially butterflies. Indeed, there are some golf courses that look as if they have been designed for nature. Some of them have.

  A few years ago I was given a guided tour by the environmental manager of a holiday village in Suffolk. He showed me an area destined to become a golf course, but also a nature reserve. Islands of ‘rough’ had been left undisturbed and – encouraged by a little planting and management – were glowing on that May morning with heath-loving wildflowers, many of which had lain dormant until the construction work had emancipated them. These included some of the common orchids. If you hanker after less common varieties, there are few better sites than Sandwich Bay in Kent, or – to be more specific – the fringes of the Royal St George’s Golf Course, sporadically home of the British Open and permanently home of Lizard Orchids.

  So, is there a Ryder Cup of nature-friendly courses? Well, I have to admit that my most lavish experience of ‘life on the links’ – surely the title of a TV programme? – was in the US, at Walt Disney World, in Florida. There is a lot more to the Disney complex than Mickey Mouse, Thunder Mountain and Cinderella’s Palace. An area almost the size of an English county is covered by woods and waterways, much appreciated by the usual brazenly tame Florida birds, such as herons, darters and ibises, plus the occasional alligator, and three kinds of chipmunks: real, animated and actors in furry suits.

  There are also many golf courses. One of them became my temporary local patch for the week. I saw warblers and woodpeckers in the surrounding trees, kingfishers hovering and diving into what I assumed was a ‘water hazard’, but was also an ideal nesting beach for a small colony of Least Terns. I wondered if they ever ended up incubating a stray ball instead of their egg. Most fortuitous of all, i
t being a baking late August, the drought was drenched every morning by a cascade of sprinklers that left the greens and fairways soggy and soft and an ideal habitat for migrant waders, the passage of which varied entertainingly from day to day. When the golfers arrived the waders simply fluttered a few yards to another mini-marsh, both birds and golfers oblivious to the danger of a hooked tee shot bringing down a Semipalmated Sandpiper. At which point surely no golfer could possibly resist announcing: ‘I got a birdie at the 12th!’

  I see no reason why wildlife and golf courses should not co-exist. Nor, indeed, birders and golfers. Unless, of course, there is a rarity involved. This happened back in the 1980s in south Wales. The bird in question was a Little Whimbrel (a Whimbrel is like a Curlew only smaller, a Little Whimbrel is even smaller) normally found in Australasia, and only twice seen in Britain. That is rare. It was first spotted within the bounds of Kenfig National Nature Reserve. However, just before dark, it flew to roost on the adjacent golf course. The news spread like wildfire. All night the twitchers of Britain travelled from far and wide. Before first light, several hundred of them were assembled – not at Kenfig Nature Reserve, where they were welcome, but at the end of the first fairway, where they weren’t. Imagine the scene as, just after sunrise, the first golfer shuffled to the first tee, placed his ball on the pin, selected his driver, adopted his stance and peered down the fairway. At which point, 500 khaki-clad twitchers appeared over the horizen, plonked down their tripods, and pointed binoculars, cameras and bins apparently straight at him! Even Rory McIlroy would have sliced his shot.

  ‘Eagle’, ‘albatross’, why not ‘little whimbrel’? It never has caught on.

  chapter twenty-seven

  Birth of an Island