Bill Oddie Unplucked

by Bill Oddie

  Worth celebrating with a song. The Song of the Whale. All together now: ‘Meet us, don’t eat us. Meet us, don’t eat us. MEET US, DON’T EAT US!’

  OK, but I wouldn’t mind a biscuit.

  chapter thirty-four

  The Way it’s Gone

  When it comes to environmental damage and desecration, there is nothing like the real thing. I had seen newsreels of oil spills, but it wasn’t until 1993 – when I stood on my favourite beach in Shetland and watched ebony waves as viscous as lava splurging out of the Braer and crawling up the sand like a giant satanic amoeba – that I understood the true disaster of an oil spill.

  The concept of ‘acid rain’ was even more amorphous until, one afternoon driving along the M4 past Port Talbot in South Wales, I saw the cause and effect. Smoky plumes of heaven-knows-what chemicals, swirling upwards from the factories towards a line of silhouetted trees on the near horizon with no more foliage on them than the deadly chimneys themselves. Black misshapen skeletons. Memorials to pollution, or posthumous entries for the Turner Prize?

  I had similar revelationary shocks when I gazed upon the rotting detritus littering the north Norfolk marshes after the floods of ’93; and when I witnessed the power of the Great Storm of 1987, which interrupted my filming schedule by toppling a lime tree so enormous we couldn’t get into the Tower of London!

  I was mulling such thoughts, as our plane approached Kota Kinabalu, the main airport of Sabah, in Borneo. I looked down for signs of the curse that I had been told was threatening to swallow the jungle below and its wildlife with it. Palm oil. This was my first visit to Borneo, and I had not yet seen palm-oil plantations for myself. Would they show up from the air? Looking down, I noticed a few obvious brown squares where forest had been recently cleared, presumably for timber or planting, but otherwise everything looked green and leafy. Several days after landing, I realised that oil palms are green and leafy!

  At first sight, a plantation looks neither unsightly nor barren. After all, they are trees, not dissimilar to the coconut palms that provide shade on many a silver-sanded tropical beach. They are stately and shapely, and their giant fronds ripple and sway like a feathery leaved ocean. You can’t help wondering: ‘Why aren’t these as attractive to wildlife as native forest?’ The answer is because a palm-oil plantation is not a mixed community of different trees. It is a congested ghetto of one species, melded together so closely to prevent light getting to the understorey, and lacking in clearings or what we’d call trunks or branches. What’s more, the fruit yield is so meagre – not much bigger than a bunch of grapes on each tree – that the only way to greater productivity is to plant more and more palms, which means clear more and more forest, and lose more and more wildlife. Primary forest supports 220 species of birds here, palm-oil forest has 12!

  An industry that is clearly contributing a great deal of income to the country is not going to disappear, but an awful lot of wonderful and unique Bornean wildlife will, unless the planting is controlled and the animals protected. This requires cooperation between groups of people as diverse as the forest itself. In Borneo I saw this happening.

  First – in no particular order, as they say on The X Factor – the conservationists. The small group I was travelling with were under the aegis of the World Land Trust. Based in Britain, its role is to raise funding to literally buy wildlife-rich areas, wherever in the world they may be for sale. The Trust does not own the land. It is passed on to be managed by a local NGO. In Borneo, there is HUTAN which, unlike most NGOs, is not a mnemonic. It is the local word for ‘forest’. There is the rather more elaborately entitled LEAP, which stands for Land, Empowerment, Animals, People. Which is as good a recipe of the essential ingredients for conservation I have ever heard! Oh, NGO = Non-Governmental Organisation (a euphemism for ‘charity’!).

  However, there is one more element whose understanding and support is absolutely crucial to the success or failure of… well, just about everything! The Government. We were granted a far from cursory audience – nay, frank and free discussion – with the Director of the Forest Department. His knowledge and concern was convincing, his confidence was reassuring and his practicality was undeniable. ‘It is only because of the income we get from palm oil that we are able to finance conservation,’ he said, thus complementing the words I had heard at LEAP and HUTAN: ‘No point in fighting the palm-oil industry, we must work with it.’ And from what I saw in Sabah, that is what is happening.

  Oh, in case you are wondering about the wildlife. We saw a delightful herd of 30 Pygmy Elephants bathing at dusk (they weren’t as small as I’d hoped!), and honey-furred, squishy-nosed Proboscis Monkeys staring at us as we punted by. We heard a couple of distant choruses of gibbon song, and were given a meticulous demonstration of how to build a leaf-hammock by a venerable male Orangutan, which he finished off by adding a leafy, but probably leaky, roof! Impressive primates indeed, but – during this week at least – the most impressive primate of them all was man, and woman, and children, and maybe a politician! You know, I’ve always said it: when it comes to good people and good deeds, there is nothing like the real thing.

  chapter thirty-five

  Harris Hawks

  I was recently waiting for a train at St Pancras station, when a fellow traveller approached me eagerly: ‘Last week I saw a man here with an eagle on his arm,’ he said. ‘Are you sure it was an eagle?’ I asked. ‘Well, no, but it was some kind of big hawk.’ He was obviously hoping I would provide a more specific identification. ‘What colour was it?’ I asked. ‘Er, I didn’t really notice the colour.’ There speaks a non-birdwatcher, I thought, but didn’t say! ‘Was it perhaps dark grey, with chestnut shoulders, and a white tail, with a black band across the end?’ He gasped with delighted bemusement, like an audience volunteer bamboozled by a mind reader. ‘Yes, that was it. What was it?’

  ‘That was a Harris Hawk,’ I announced. ‘It is just about the commonest bird of prey in falconry shows and zoos. They are not British, they are American, but so many of them have escaped from captivity they have recently qualified for a mention in the recent atlas of British breeding birds. If they keep escaping at this rate, they could become honorary UK citizens, like Ring-necked Parakeets.

  ‘But why would a falconer walk his hawk at St Pancras station?’ he asked. ‘Almost certainly, to keep the pigeons away.’ They used a Harris Hawk at last year’s Wimbledon, though presumably not while they were playing. That’d put you off your serve! And the BBC used Harris Hawks to dissuade pigeons from pooing on the newly redecorated Broadcasting House. Not everyone approved, but a BBC spokesman promised that no pigeons would be harmed. Unfortunately, one hungry hawk couldn’t resist pouncing on a particularly plump pigeon, flying off to the roof with it, and tearing it to pieces, before the horrified eyes of a number of BBC staff. What’s more, the supposedly well-trained hawk refused to fly back to its handler. Of course, when it finally did so, it was fired. Actually, there is a fortuitous irony in that these days there are several pairs of wild Peregrine Falcons breeding in central London who dine almost exclusively on Feral Pigeons, and whose territory almost certainly includes several railway stations and Broadcasting House. So that should put an end to the scandalous business of overpaid American raptors coming over here to eat our birds, which, as it happens, are probably not to their taste anyway.

  The fact is that Harris Hawks are not the deadly feathered Exocet missiles that Peregrines are. Indeed, back home they hunt at a rather leisurely pace, in cooperative groups. I don’t mean feeding flocks, like some of the small falcons catching dragonflies and such. Harris Hawks go in for properly coordinated teamwork. Hunting parties are between two and six birds. One of them flies ahead to look for potential prey, more likely a Jackrabbit than a pigeon. Then a second bird moves up and takes over the searching. Once a victim has been spotted, they overtake each other until they have surrounded their supper, which understandably freezes with fear and – acknowledging that all escape routes are barre
d – surrenders to its fate.

  I have seen wild Harris Hawks in the Arizona desert, swooping and plunging against a background of a burning blue sky, sagebrush and giant cacti. It struck me more as an aerial ballet than a hunting party. The local Jackrabbits, however, no doubt would not agree. Any more than a prehistoric lizard would welcome the attention of a team of velociraptors. At which point you may fairly ask: ‘What on Earth have Harris Hawks got to do with dinosaurs?’ I shall tell you.

  Several years ago, I presented a short series called The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs. It inevitably featured velociraptors. In the film Jurassic Park they were depicted as quite big, which they weren’t – they were about the size of a turkey – and rampantly vicious, which they may well have been. One thing was undoubtedly true: they hunted in packs, pursuing and surrounding prey, before pouncing, killing and eating it, very much in the manner of… Harris Hawks. It is, of course, now widely accepted that birds evolved from small dinosaurs. So there we are, from Jurassic Park to St Pancras station is not as long a journey as you might think! Pity it only goes one way.

  chapter thirty-six

  First Mornings

  Show-business people talk about first nights. Birdwatchers talk about first mornings. Here is a classic scenario. You have gone abroad for a holiday to somewhere new. You arrived at the hotel, lodge or resort in the evening when it was dark. This may be a little frustrating, but it is also tantalising. What is it going to be like out there when you can see and hear?

  Over the years, I have had a few surprises when the sun came up! On my first trip to India we were escorted down a pitch-dark path into a concrete cabin and fell asleep with nary a clue what kind of terrain we were in. I staggered out at dawn and almost fell into a cesspit. The considerable consolation was that there were several Painted Snipe feeding on it, and, even better, the surrounding woodland was pleasingly open and full of birds, many of them species that occur in Britain but rarely (Bluethroats, Red-breasted Flycatchers, etc). They were easy to hear and easy to see.

  This is rarely the case in rainforest, wherever it is. Heaven knows, I am not dissing its importance or the profusion of its biodiversity, but the fact is my worst ever first morning was in Papua New Guinea, when I tramped the jungle trails for three hours without seeing or hearing a single bird! My wife Laura accompanied me on that trip. As, indeed, she did to Kenya, where we shared a memorable first morning at Lake Baringo Lodge. I had been aware of occasional snufflings and grumping in the night, but had not expected to draw the curtains and find a hippo with its nose pressed against the window. At least I could say: ‘See, it wasn’t me snoring.’

  Challenging though it may be, there are few experiences more daunting for a birdwatcher than emerging on the first morning and not being able to recognise a single song or call. Of course seeing the bird should help, but not necessarily, especially in Asia or South America where there are whole families that don’t seem to bear any relationship to anything we have at home. Page 96 of Birds of Brazil includes reedhaunters, foliage-gleaners, Firewood-gatherer and barbtails. And guess what? They are all little brown birds.

  So what was my best first morning ever? Rather bizarrely, it was at a ‘Dude’ Ranch in Arizona. We had arrived in darkness, made even more disorientating by clouds of dust kicked up by every vehicle. The Ranch ‘Cookhouse’ was like the buffet at a Holiday Inn, and our chalet – far from being rustic – was a stone edifice that strangely resembled a Henry Moore sculpture. None of us was happy. The cost of the accommodation was in return for my wife writing a flattering travel piece – so that could be awkward – and my daughter Rosie kept reminding us that she was the only 10-year-old girl on Earth who hated horses. I myself was suffering a period of low mood and not sleeping well.

  However, my insomnia was a blessing in disguise. As soon as I sensed a glimmer of light, I slipped outside into what was in effect a giant rock garden. A small-scale version of the true Arizona desert where cowboys roam, the Coyotes howl, and the cacti reach for the sky. I intended to visit the real thing, but for the moment this would do nicely. The birds clearly agreed. There were Cactus Wrens everywhere, same shape as ours but huge and stripy. There were woodpeckers – cactus peckers more like – laughing as woodpeckers do, and popping and peeping in and out of their prickly nest holes. A parade of Gambel’s Quails danced across the path sporting bouncy little quiffs on their heads. All around me there were warblers, flycatchers, orioles, sparrows, shrikes and raptors. All different from home, but just that little bit the same. I think that was why I enjoyed that walk so much. As I ambled down the path, the species revealed themselves one by one. It wasn’t overwhelming. I had time to take notes and do sketches. I rifled through the field guide over breakfast, and announced that I had seen more than 20 ‘lifers’, including my first Roadrunner.

  The rest of the week was not so good. It was wet, cold and almost birdless. Laura lied (‘fab for families’) and Rosie fell off a horse.

  chapter thirty-seven

  Going Bananas

  I’m no stranger to dressing up as a mammal or a bird. My first experience was at primary school when I was cast as a baby dragon in the school play. I do not remember the play, but I do remember the costume. It was like a scaly-patterned ‘onesie’. It was tail-less, and I was therefore puzzled when our comely drama teacher asked me to spice up my exit with a vigorous wag. I protested that I had nothing to wag, but she insisted that I had. To this day, I am not sure if I was being dim or provocative. All I do know is that she finally had to resort to using the ‘b’ word, at which she blushed and the class fell about with joy. ‘Miss! You said “bum”! Teehee.’

  I was clearly traumatised by the experience, as I went through secondary school and three years at university without feeling any compulsion whatsoever to wear scales, fur or feathers. However, I more than made up for that during the 1970s, The Goodies Years as I like to think of them, though I am not of course insinuating that nothing else happened during the seventies. Actually, it was a decade in which wearing animal costumes was all too rife – reprehensibly, in the case of supermodels, and gleefully in the case of The Wombles. In the case of The Goodies, it was downright peculiar.

  In the episode with the giant kitten, all three of us spent several days dressed as mice. I also gave solo performances as a Dalmatian dog, and as a Dodo (I did of course become extinct), and Tim and Graeme became intimate inside a pantomime horse, a role which I enjoyed greatly, since I got to ride them and give them a damn good thrashing with my whip. Comedy is rarely painless, but if I had to choose the least enjoyable animal costume I have ever had to wear it was when all three of us played giant rabbits and re-enacted extracts from Watership Down. Being run over by a lorry was pant-threateningly scary, but at least it was soon over (after seven takes!), unlike the seemingly never-ending, ever-worsening torture of being slowly broiled in our own sweat, leaving us so soggy and smelly that even our loved ones were repulsed.

  So, if dressing up as a rabbit is uncomfortable, what about a gorilla? There must be plenty of opinions because – let’s face it – unlike the magnificent animal itself, people in gorilla suits are not exactly an endangered species. One of the reasons is that costume hire companies don’t know their primates. You can ask for anything from a Chimpanzee to a gibbon, but they’ll always send you a gorilla. (You can imagine my pedantic strops when promoting ‘The Funky Gibbon’.) You will see gorillas at Halloween, gorillas in panto, gorillas in tutus and gorillas in top hat and tails (which is ironic, ’cos they don’t have tails. Any more than I did).

  I don’t think many people would disagree with the statement that as far as gorillas are concerned you can’t have too many of them. It is a fair rule of comedy that ‘more is funnier’. One dwarf is unremarkable, but seven are a hoot. One pantomime horse may get a smile, but a Grand National of them brings the house down. One gorilla is probably less than hilarious – no matter what it is wearing – but a whole rock band of five or six gorillas will keep an a
udience whooping for several songs before the truth becomes obvious – that it is almost impossible to play a guitar wearing a gorilla suit! More gorillas than half a dozen and the rule kicks in: the more the merrier!

  The greatest gorilla gathering on Earth convenes in the region of Tower Bridge in London on a Saturday morning in late September, when there are more men and women in gorilla suits than there are endangered gorillas in the wild. The event is known as the Great Gorilla Run and it is indeed great. The laughter, good humour and waving of bananas at the start is truly uplifting. The state of the runners after an hour or two is something to be pitied. The effects of hopping in a rabbit suit are positively cosmetic compared with running as a gorilla. Rabbit-fur-induced perspiration is as fragrant as fine cologne compared with the fetid stench of gorilla sweat. Added to which, if the runner isn’t instantly released from his or her costume, there is serious danger of being suffocated or drowned. One of the few consolations is that hair becomes so drenched that it can mimic the effect of gel or Brylcreem, which can look slick on gentlemen. Ladies should not wear make-up to avoid emerging like one of the Addams Family, unless you fancy going Goth.