The spectacular Vercors plateau and its wild, forested landscape would make up for any frustrations and discomforts of the long journey to get there. And, after my experience with David and Milan in Serbia, I knew I would end up making some new friends. I now knew about the ‘Force’. I knew the bond, the birdy camaraderie born of a deep common interest that ornithology types always share regardless of borders and language barriers. I was starting to know the lengths people would go to in order to tick off a bird. I suspected that these new people in France would be actual Real Twitchers, with telescopes (which I did not have) and lists (of foreign and unknown birds). This was the next level of birdwatching, charged with a degree of gravitas beyond my wandering quest.
Now, I have to make it clear that I didn’t ever in a million years think of myself as a twitcher. I’ll even admit to some negative feelings towards this tribe of obsessive bird-addicts, especially after my experience of their habit of needing to ‘tick’. It seemed to me that chasing rare and unusual birds to tick them off a list in a kind of ritual frenzy was silly. During the years we had spent living on the aptly named Isles of Scilly in the late 1990s we had experienced twitchers for the first time, and I had been taken by surprise. I knew the word, but not fully what it meant. We had gone there to take up my first job as a teacher in the secondary school, and our first autumn there as a young family started with some violent storms. The tourist season was over and with the start of October and the Very Bad Weather there arrived strange, camouflaged clusters of blokes. They were dressed in greens and browns, each of them bulging with binoculars, no-nonsense boots, long-lens telescopes and proper head-to-foot waterproofing.
We had been looking forward to relishing our splendid isolation on our new island home, and had begun to enjoy the novelty of increasingly extreme winds, violent rain squalls and shocking waves. We soon realised that we couldn’t even go off-island and the jolly flat-bottomed ferry, the Scillonian, ceased to arrive from the mainland. But we were happy. We had each other. We could beachcomb in peace and relish the tranquillity of winter by the Atlantic. But instead of the delights of peaceful isolation, along with the Very Bad Weather came wave after wave of these odd-bod hordes. We asked around: what was going on? What was this invasion of blokey bird-nerds? How long would they be staying? Would I ever be able to pee in a hedge in private again?
Lining up in crowds and gazing into pittosporum hedges, flower fields and rocky promontories, these people were looking for disorientated and migrating birds. It was all about a list – certain rare birds needed to be ticked off, and then they would all go away.
Since we couldn’t go anywhere, and actually there was not much else to do, apart from gazing at the odd washed-up dolphin, we decided to join in. Why not profit from the close-up views of bee-eaters, snow buntings, spotless starlings and other unusual rarities? Soon, our heads began to swivel and bob along with these camouflaged enthusiasts. As the Scilly hotels, B & Bs, pub gardens and any spare piece of ground swelled with welly-booted feet it felt as though our tiny islands would sink under their weight. At the most intense flurries, people were trampling over private gardens and blocking the (very sparse) traffic. In every bush, hedge and roadside tuffet at least sixteen watchers rustled quietly beneath their coating of camouflage windproofs. They spoke excitedly into walkie-talkies (this was just before mobile phones took the world by its horns); we’d find them in front of our house, staking out the slipway to the beach. None of the locals seemed to mind, so we didn’t either.
When we left, five years later, my bird knowledge had improved vastly. But soon, work and mainland life made sure that any serious twitching faded to a distant memory and we put it all behind us. But when my mischievous friend from France sent me the film of the Pygmy Owls of the high Vercors plateau, I felt that whoosh of bird-love once more. I had not thought twitching would re-enter my life so suddenly.
*
It was raining warm May rain in Geneva when I arrived. Waiting to collect me with a comradely lift-share were fellow owl-ists Guy and Sandra, who fitted me carefully into their car amongst their long lenses, camo gear and camera equipment. As we took the motorway and zoomed across the border into France my heart melted into the meadows bordered with poppies, pine forest-smothered mountains whose peaks were hidden in mist. Comfortably snuggled in the back seat I spotted black kites. ‘They’re quite common here,’ Guy, a Swiss native, explained as we gazed at them circling over the fields.
At the rendezvous in Valence the sun was beginning to come out and the warm ground steamed. We parked and stood by the railway track to wait for Gilles and the others from the group. Skylarks circled overhead, and from the sun-washed fields came aromatic scents of chamomile, honeysuckle and wild thyme. All at the same time, we heard the familiar ‘ki-kiki-ki’ of a bird of prey and scrabbled to get our binoculars: ‘Un faucon crécerelle!’ Guy said, and in a flash got out his telescope. I know all these bird names in French because of Christine, I thought to myself. She and I would go walking together when we were in our late teens and early twenties and I lived with her in the Loire valley. She was as interested in nature and birds as I, and taught me all their names in French as we walked. Rouge-gorge, mésange bleue, pic vert, corbeau, héron cendré, chouette hulotte: I remembered all of them. Crécerelle: easy to hear where our English name for the kestrel comes from. So many of our bird names have French origins, in large part due to the Normans’ conquest of our islands and our absorption of their lovely language. We watched as the kestrel pair fed their two young, wheeling around the tracks and fields. There was plenty of feeding for them around the station with its mouse-rich scrubby banks and railway sidings.
Then at last Gilles pulled up in his silvery Dacia Duster and leant out of the window to say a professional bonjour. He was wearing sunglasses and the outdoor guiding gear, just as in the film.
That evening, we all assembled. Thierry, Evelyne and Valérie were an awesome threesome of friends who had gathered from distant parts of northern France, the Vosges mountains and a tiny island off Brittany; they admitted to me that they allowed themselves one big birdwatching trip away from their families each year. Soon I was in the club: next year, I could go with them if I’d like to? As I write this now, they’re all coming to stay with me in England and we’re very excited to be going birdwatching – guess where? In the Isles of Scilly. From Switzerland there were Guy and Sandra of the heavily laden Mercedes. There was another Thierry from the north who walked with a stick and yet still managed to bring a bundle of photographic gadgetry and a special parabolic shotgun listening device, and his affectionate young wife Sophie. And finally Danielle, the only other ‘single’ on the trip, who had left her husband at home as well, somewhere around the Belgian border near Arras.
We were to drive everywhere in a sleek safari-style convoy of three cars. On the second day, Evelyne grabbed me and ordered me to ride with them. Thierry, she said, whose car it was, would be needing to practise his English. We took it in turns to sit next to him in the front. To my delight, the formality most French people would abide by of using the polite form of address, vous, appeared to be absent from the start and everyone was already applying the more informal tu. I concluded that this must be because we were all birders, and therefore in the same club. That formality dispensed with, and now that we had eaten our three-course meal, Gilles was itching to take us out into the field. He tried to distract us from dessert, but the others objected – being French, missing dessert would be an outrage and Gilles was made to eat a bowl of fresh strawberries like the rest of us. Then we drove out over the plains of the Rhône valley to fossick amongst the farmsteads for the first on our owl list, not the Pygmy yet, but Athene noctua, the Little Owl.
The sky was grey and heavy with rain. Gilles was lugubrious, his face lined with anxiety. ‘It never rains like this so near to summer,’ he complained. Fat drops fell all around. Mist rose in columns between the hills, and more downpours bulged in dark grey clouds on the horizon
. It had been a very bad start for all birdlife this spring, he explained: the unseasonal rain was finishing off fledglings just as they left their nests. It was not good.
The Little Owl, however, can hunt in the rain, unlike Barn Owls who become rapidly waterlogged, cannot fly and can die of cold in bad weather. ‘The Barn Owls are nearly all gone in this area,’ Gilles said. ‘We put up Barn Owl nest boxes but the owls didn’t even breed this year. I only know of one or two pairs. There are many roads all over the plains here,’ he explained. ‘It’s not like the mountains where there is just one road: here there are many dangers for Barn Owls: they fly low, and people drive fast, plus the farmers don’t make it easy to put up nest boxes.’
Quite soon Gilles found us a Little Owl: he knew where they would be, and using his owl app he played the melancholy tone of the Little Owl call; we waited, and then suddenly there it was, on cue. Shaped like a small pear perched on the apex of a roof, the feisty little character surveyed the intruders to its territory. The atmosphere lifted, and Gilles became happier. The first target species: ticked.
All around, between the sandy, cobbled houses draped in roses and vines, amongst the woodpiles and vegetable gardens, house martins and swallows skimmed the ground catching flies and midges. The semi-rural, agricultural landscape must have a perfect patchwork for Little Owls: mature trees; good nesting sites in old buildings, woodpiles and brushwood; hedges and meadows providing plenty of insects and small mammals. Then, just as the sun was going down, an even better encounter: Thierry spotted it first, a small silhouette on a branch – and for ten minutes we watched another Little Owl hunting from the low bough of an ornamental pine in somebody’s back garden. It stared at us for a moment at first, and through the scope I saw it blink its heavily feathered lids over two pale yellow eyes. When it got back to the serious business of scanning the ground it dropped repeatedly, as if catching some small insect or invertebrate prey.
‘Most of the time, people don’t know they’re here,’ Gilles said. ‘It’s not like in England. Your RSPB is huge, filled with bird lovers. All of them standing up for birds and their habitats. You have petitions and campaigns. We don’t have anything like that here.’
I felt a mixture of pride and concern all at once.
‘You have one million members,’ Gilles went on. ‘We’ve got just a few thousand in the LPO.’ The French bird conservation organisation was created in 1912 in protest about regular massacres of puffins on the north coast of Brittany. Each year the local railway company traditionally organised safaris to shoot the puffins, and this was the catalyst for an enthusiast, Lieutenant Hemery, to lose his temper and try to stand up for the birds. He created a league for their protection and ever since the logo has been a pair of puffins. So far it has only 45,000 members, whereas the RSPB in Britain has over a million, 200,000 of whom are young people.
‘We’re decades behind the British. And in the provinces, people like to shoot birds; here, hunting wildlife is important to people, and “les ornithos” are very unpopular, a rarity themselves.’
‘We shoot birds as well in Britain,’ I offered, thinking of grouse and other game-bird shooting.
‘No, it’s different. It’s worse here – it’s more widespread, more popular,’ Gilles argued. ‘We shoot any bird, not just game, sometimes even if they’re protected.’
I was going to bring up the issue of the hen harrier, a protected bird that is often persecuted in Britain, but was upstaged by the arrival of a rain-soaked Little Owl. Perched raggedly on a pine branch, it was determinedly hunting something in the grass between the trees. As we watched, the Little Owl dropped like a stone, down onto something in the long grass, then flew directly with its prey dangling – it turned out to be feeding on earthworms that had risen to the surface during the rain. It flew around the barn and darted skilfully inside the broken window of an outhouse. No sooner had it delivered its wriggly cargo than it reappeared and repeated the whole process. ‘They have adaptations for these conditions such as waterproofing, and short wings, for flying through trees and clearings like this,’ Gilles pointed out. ‘They hunt even if the weather is bad, not like Barn Owls. But still, it must be hard work in this rain,’ Gilles said. ‘Look, it’s drenched.’ It had young to feed, we concluded, and the weather was no impediment. Little Owl ticked, we moved on.
I couldn’t believe birdwatchers were not liked.
‘I can’t leave my bird book on show on the seat of the car in the countryside: people would slash my tyres,’ Thierry said.
‘It’s true. My friends have had their car scratched and the windows broken,’ Evelyne said.
Gilles nodded grimly.
We drove on through purple mountains of vetch at the roadside; scarlet poppies shone amongst vast twists of prickly thistle and tall grass heavy with seed. All around, the scent of hay and honeysuckle, the relentless, rasping song of crickets, and overhead, skylarks wheeled and sang. Suddenly Gilles stamped his foot on the brake.
‘Pie grièche écorcheur!’
This caused a flurry of excitement – no time-wasting, but the professional birding sort of flurry: pull over safely, equipment up, lenses/eyes to three o’clock. Here was a bird name that was only vague in my French memory. A shrike, was it? Grièche: shrike. Sounded very similar. I’d never seen one in the UK, which is not surprising since this species has declined dramatically and is now virtually extinct in Britain. But the name is striking enough to say it all: écorcher in English means to skin alive. In England we call it the Red-backed shrike, or the butcher bird, and its taxonomic name is Lanius colurio, lanius being the Latin for butcher. This is a bloodthirsty predator, a shrike that impales its victims in a larder of thorns to store them. When I saw it through the scope I knew it was indeed a shrike: wheatear-like, but definitely not a wheatear. There was a smart pair of them, tense, jerky: hunting insects by dropping down into the grass. I had never expected to see one, but then why would I? We were here for the owls.
I looked at my fellow groupies whose hungry eyes were now glued to their binoculars. Valérie was hastily setting up her scope and framing the bird meticulously in the lens; Thierry and Sophie capturing it on film. Thanks to all this I could savour the amazing markings, the vivid chestnut back, grey head and nape and the black, bandit-style mask. I noted the thick, black, hooked bill and the grasping claws, but most of all, the sunset-pink-tinged breast and belly, smooth and pale as candyfloss. Tick! I was hooked.
It turned out Jenny was right. The minute I met Gilles I knew he was going to dispel any worries: beneath the serious, knowledgeable surface of the professional naturalist guide was a human whose warmth was so infectious that after a few days I would not want to leave. Obsessively committed like all the best birdwatchers, Gilles loved people as well as birds. He turned out to be an expert’s expert, and was thoroughly communicative and generous with his knowledge. Although he appeared to be totally obsessed with his subject, encyclopedic in fact, and would pause to deliver a lecture in detail at any question big or small, he was typically French about some things. For example, mealtimes. At table, the rigours of ticking birds were put behind us and like most French he liked nothing more after a long day’s work than to drink wine, and get down to the serious business of eating while discussing a range of topics. These times, when we were not looking at birds through binoculars, were the moments we spent bonding as a group. There was an unspoken camaraderie, a professional respect and understanding amongst the group, but over meals this was intensified.
In France consuming good food and good wine, and sharing laughter, are taken as seriously as politics, work and education, in fact more so. One evening, the subject of Britishness came up, and I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone mentioned what the French consider to be the lowest common denominator of British culture. During my time with Christine I’d noticed that the French were fascinated with one particular 1970s slapstick comedy series. You know the one, packed full of bawdy double entendres and star
ring a particularly silly comic. This very silliness had been hugely popular in France. In my mind I began to count down from ten to one. At six, Gilles, sitting opposite me, tried to catch my eye. Sliding his fork mischievously beneath the last mouthful of his meaty main course (made of something exquisite including dark sauce and some kind of pâté), a giggle rumbled up. ‘J’adorais regarder le Benny Hill Show,’ he admitted.
‘That was not one of our best exports,’ I pointed out sternly.
Gilles’s eyes were now wrinkled with jollity, but the conversation turned to wider things British.
‘And Madame Thatcher? La Guerre des Malouines … The Falklands War.’
‘Not good either.’ Sage and sympathetic nodding rippled around the table, indicating that we were all of an age to remember. Again, now we were on to politics, I knew what contemporary item was looming next.
‘… And what about Brexit?’
The referendum was just days away. All eyes rounded on me. Suddenly a wave of something like grief welled up in my chest. I was being asked to explain something to my new friends that was beyond words; a pending calamity of separation, a rending from my lovely friends, the old ones, and these new, like an unwanted but unavoidable divorce. I didn’t know where to begin.
‘But what do you think will happen?’ everybody pressed anxiously. ‘Which way are people going to vote?’
The air was stiff with concern and the small vortex that had opened up somewhere around my solar plexus now deepened into a chasm – for my French friends, an adopted family of sorts, for the bonds of all the shared European history. In that moment I felt the memory of the wars of the twentieth century and their aftermath – the closeness we shared post-war, and ever since – the common aims of peace and reconciliation. It was one of those moments when we find that we have so much in common, in our blood and in our genes; how could we ever be anything but together? I reached for my glass.
Owl Sense Page 25