by Simon Barnes
When did you last see a living hedgehog? And hedgehogs, as we know from their sad, flat corpses, are pretty common. That’s because hedgehogs, like most mammals, are creatures of the night. They have their being at times when we light-loving humans are just not around. Or even if we are, it’s too dark to see the bloody things.
And how often have you seen a weasel or a stoat? I live in the country these days and spend a lot of time outside. I saw a deer 300 yards off the other night, because I was carrying an extra powerful torch; and I got a glimpse of a stoat last week. A few nights ago, a hare crossed the road in front of me and performed a spectacular can’t-catch-me leap: gorgeous animals. That’s three decent mammal sightings in little more than a week. A pretty satisfying week for casual observation, I reckon.
And birds? Hundreds of sightings and hearings. Birds are always around for bad birdwatchers to be aware of. Wild mammals are exceptional; wild birds are part of daily life.
Then there is the question of the number of species, of different kinds. There are maybe 20 different kinds of mammals you could hope to see on land in this country; as for birds, there are a couple of hundred easily available. The top twitchers have scores beyond 500.
So birds are available to be seen, and they come in a satisfying diversity. Some of them are hard to tell apart, but you don’t need to catch them, or use a magnifying glass and a collecting box, or kill them and use a microscope. Birds come in a great variety, but not an overwhelming variety. It is the sort of variety that you can cope with, whether you are a very good birdwatcher or whether you are a very bad one.
Now, there is also another reason for studying birds. They can fly. Have you thought for a second how amazing that is?
Flight is the dream of every human being. When we are lucky, we do, quite literally, dream about flying. Freud said that all flying dreams are really about sex. Perhaps they are: I’ve never found that to decrease their pleasure. They are the best of all dreams – you are free, you are miraculous.
The desire to fly is part of the condition of being human. That’s why most of the non-confrontational sports are about flying, or at least the defiance of gravity. Gymnastics is about the power of the human body to fly unaided; so are the high jump and the long jump. The throwing events – discus, shotput and hammer – are about making something else fly: a war on gravity.
Golf always seems to me a piffling game, but every one of its legion of addicts will tell you that it all comes back to the pure joy of a clean strike at the ball: making it defy gravity. Making it climb like a towering snipe. Making it soar like an eagle, at least in the mind of the striker as it reaches the top of its long, graceful parabola.
Think about it: all these sports are done for the joy of flying. Skating is a victory over friction, and it feels like a victory over gravity; it feels like flying. Its antithesis is weight-lifting: a huge and brutal event, the idea of which is to beat gravity. All the horsey events come back to the idea of flight: of getting off the ground, of escaping human limitations by joining up with another species and finding flight. For every rider, every horse is Pegasus.
And birds, as you may well have noticed, fly. They fly in all kinds of ways: the brisk purpose of a sparrow, the airy insouciance of the seagull, the dramatic power of the hawk. Some birds specialise in flying very fast, others in flying very slow. Great hunters like the barn owl work on the edge of the stall all the time. Kestrels are very good at flying without moving at all. Some birds are not so great at flying. Pheasants just about get off the ground into a safe place in a tree for a night. They are poor fliers, but they are unquestionably better than us humans.
And flight attracts our eyes, lifts our hearts with joy and envy. Flight, to us earthbound creatures, is a form of magic – one of the great powers attributed to decent wizards and witches throughout history is the ability to fly, from the persecuted sorcerers of the dark ages to the players of the game of Quidditch.
And so we look to birds for a very deep-seated kind of joy. It goes back to the dawn of humankind: ever since humans first walked upright, they were able to turn their eyes to the heavens and observe the birds. The birds have something we can never have. But merely by existing – by flying before us – they add to the daily joys of existence. Emily Dickinson called hope “that thing with feathers”. Birds are about hope.
Take a basic urban moment – a commute, a traffic jam, a train becalmed. A sigh, a look away from the road or the newspaper, out of the window. A skein of geese in the sky; probably, almost certainly, “just” Canada geese. Too far away to hear them honking to each other, urgent instructions to keep the formation tight and to help the leader out with the hard work. A daily sight, a common sight, an ordinary sight. But just for one second – perhaps even two – you are let off the day’s hassles. At least that is the case if you are a bad birdwatcher and you took the trouble to look up. It will probably be the most inspiring thing you see all day. The day is better for those birds. You proceed with a smidgen more hope than you did before.
Birds seem – are – creatures apart. It is the convention of the west to draw the most sacred things with the feathered wings of a bird. Religious art is peopled with angels and archangels, epicene creatures with the wings of a swan. The Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove.
Birds are, indeed, another class of beings. Quite literally: we are hairless apes who come from the class of Mammalia; they are feathered legions who fill the class of Aves. But another reason why we turn to birds again and again and in such numbers is because we have more in common with them than we do with many of our fellow mammals.
True, we can’t fly. But take a walk with a dog. What do you do on your walk? You look about you, and listen, and when you meet someone of the same species, someone you know, you speak. Make a noise, that is. When a dog goes for a walk, he goes straight into the undiscovered country of smell. He sniffs the floor, he sniffs lampposts, he sniffs turds, he sniffs everything. When he meets a member of the same species he sniffs him or her. Specifically, he sniffs bum and crotch – a politeness among dogs, but not humans.
What is he doing? What does he understand from this? What is it like, living in the land of smell? Try telling colour to the blind. Humans can smell a bit, but we smell in black and white. Dogs can understand the entire spectrum of smell: they smell the world in glorious Technicolor, and cannot understand our bafflement, still less our impatience, when they wish to remain for some considerable time at the site of a particularly fascinating bit of smell.
Try reading up on mammal behaviour. Most mammalian lives seem to centre around a fascination with urination and defecation. Dung enthrals them; piss pierces their souls. They use urine and droppings for understanding who they are, who has been here, who claims this place as his own, who is interested in sex. All mammalian life is there.
And it is understood through the nose. Sniff sniff: this tells me all I need to know about the age, sex, sexual availability, position in the dominance hierarchy and – like as not – the personal identity of the individual that dumped and sprayed here. I am Dog; my name is writ in urine.
Most mammals understand the universe, each other and themselves through the nose. If you were to write a novel for a dog, it would have to be written not in sound symbols, like the words you are reading now, but in smell symbols.
And it is all completely baffling to us apes. We smell, as it were, bloody awful. But we have damn good colour vision and pretty decent hearing. These are the senses we work through. Colour and sound are our way of communication, and they form the basis of our art – for what is a book but fossilised sound?
Birds also have great colour vision and, like us, they inhabit the world of sound. Mammals are not colourful, save for the curious exception of the mandrill’s arse, but then we apes are better at colour than most of our fellow mammals. Mammals are mostly blacky-browny-ruddy-grey. But birds rejoice in colour.
They communicate in colour: the brightly coloured birds flaunt
their gorgeousness because, for a bird, gorgeousness is unambiguously about sex. When they court each other, they show off their colourful bits.
And they sing. They sing to tell us who they are and where they are and what they are and how bloody marvellous they are. And we humans, who can only guess at the world of smell, can thrill to the song of a nightingale almost as if we were nightingales ourselves. It has been suggested that the song of a nightingale actually alters the state of the female nightingale’s brain, quite literally as if it were a drug. John Keats wrote that on hearing a nightingale, it was “as though of hemlock I had drunk”: a perfect example of human empathy with birds.
Keats would not have written the same poem after smelling a pile of dog turds. Humans cannot empathise with dogs, with fellow mammals, in that way. But unquestionably, we can empathise with birds, thrill at their appearance and at their song.
Like birds, we humans are creatures of eyes and ears: we both love colour and sound; and birds make colour of outrageous perfection and sounds of perfect beauty.
Of course, we turn to birds. When speaking to each other, in their languages of colour and song, they inadvertently speak to us. They include us. And we cannot help but respond – so long as we have some streak of life left in us.
4. Let’s fill the whole screen with tits
From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Let’s start with the bird-feeder, for that is the easiest place in the world to get close to a bird, and it is the place where an awful lot of bad birdwatchers do an awful lot of their birdwatching. Many never get beyond the quiet and deeply pleasurable observation of the comings and goings of the garden and its ever-alluring tube of peanuts.
Which is fair enough, though you’d have missed out on my hobby had you restricted yourself to these limits. But right now, let us look out of the window at the peanuts and enjoy the birds that come to visit. And, as the Hollywood producer famously said, let’s fill the whole screen with tits.
For it is tits that are famous for peanuts. Their name, by the way, is short for titmouse, which is a mixture of the mose, the Old English name for these birds, and the Middle English tit, a term for any small creature. Wrens have been called “titty wrens”, and in Devon, apparently, “titty todgers”. Some birdwatchers call great tits “Dolly Partons”, ho ho ho.
But back to the tits that eat your peanuts. The first thing a bad birdwatcher notices is that tits are terribly good at eating peanuts, especially the little chaps that hang upside down. The second thing you notice is that there are two different kinds of tits.
The little blue chaps are blue tits, and the bigger fellows are great tits. They are pretty easy to tell apart, especially as the big fellows have bright yellow fronts with a black stripe down the middle. Blue tits and great tits are similar in some ways, both being tits and both liking peanuts and both being bold enough to eat them in front of your window. And both being acrobatic enough to hang in there and get them out.
But they are clearly different. So we have two interesting things to concern us. The first is that the birds are very similar, and the second is that they are very different. A whole lot of the whole meaning of life is caught up in those two matters, and we’ll have more on the meaning of life as we go on.
As you watch, you will notice that the big chaps can chase off the little chaps whenever they want to. Great tits have automatic precedence over blue tits. If a blue tit wants a peanut, it has to wait for a great-tit-free minute, and then fly in and be quick and skilful. And by good fortune, or good evolution, quick and skilful is exactly what blue tits are.
So you can tell these two species apart, after a not very long period of study. And you could go on and look for another kind of tit, which is a good idea. Or you could wonder why on earth there are two different kinds of very similar birds who both like peanuts; and that is another good idea.
They have more than peanuts in common. They both like decent-sized deciduous trees, and they both like to nest in a hollow in one of those deciduous trees. They are, then, in competition for life’s essentials – food and accommodation. And as we see, the bigger bird can always beat up the smaller bird. So how does the blue tit survive?
If you watch your feeder for a while, you will see that the great tit doesn’t actually have to do any beating up. All it has to do is be there, and the blue tit will leave without even thinking of taking the great tit on. And if the blue tit is ever so slightly cheeky – or desperate – and looks as if he might want to make an issue of it, all the great tit needs to do is flex his wings – making himself look even greater – and the blue tit will take the hint and fly away. Better to lose a nut than your life, after all.
So why are there blue tits and great tits in the same wood, or even in the same tree? Why don’t the great tits chase the blue tits off? The answer is simple enough: because they are not – apart from when they are both on your bird-feeder – competing for the same thing. Certainly, both birds look for caterpillars, grown-up insects and spiders in the warm weather, and for seeds and plant matter in the cold.
But in the main, the blue tit prefers to forage in the higher part of the tree, and along the outer edges of the branches, while the great tit prefers the lower part of the tree and the inner part of the branches. In other words, the blue tit’s smallness – a disadvantage on the feeder – is a positive advantage in everything else it does. It can look for food in tighter places, hang from thinner twigs, and, being small and nimble, it possesses greater acrobatic skills. It can nest in a hole far smaller than one that would suit a great tit, too.
In other words, the great tit and the blue tit have quite different ways of making a living – they inhabit a different ecological niche, as scientists say. So we have before us two different ways of making a living in a wood, and God, or evolution, or whatever you care to call the process, has come up with these two different species to live them. Their lives overlap, but they are different in just about everything they do.
And they look quite different. The birdwatcher can’t confuse them – and, crucially, nor can the tit. A great tit male and blue tit female couldn’t get together and make medium-sized bluish babies. The two species look different and live different: and that’s the way that the processes of life work. Life works by making lots and lots of very different forms of life capable of living in lots and lots of different ways. Which is why there are lots and lots of different kinds of birds; which is why being a good birdwatcher is very difficult, and why being a bad birdwatcher is endlessly fascinating. After all, when you’ve finally got the difference between great tit and blue tit clear in your mind, there are another 10,000 or so species to go before you’ve sorted out all the species in the world.
I bring you this notion of the immensity not to fill you with horror and make you give up, but to fill you with wonder. Watching birds, however badly, is like looking at the sky at dusk on a frosty night: endless numbers of stars, endless mysteries, and the more you look, the more you see. Some can put a name to every star in the heavens, others can name just one or two, some can’t even do that; but the great celestial mystery inspires awe in all who raise their eyes upwards.
And, as you continue looking at your bird-feeder, you will notice that there is a third tit that comes to snaffle the odd peanut. Smaller even than the blue tit, less flashy, too, but with a natty white stripe down the back of its neck. It’s a coal tit, coal for the black of its head. And yes, it gets hooshed off the peanuts by blue tits and great tits, so it has to be pretty sharp and precise when it goes for a nut, and pretty patient while it waits for the bigger lads to get out of the way.
Now, you ask: how does a bird smaller than a blue tit survive? If a great tit works the middle of the branches while a blue tit works on the edges, what place is left for a coal tit? If a blue tit can feed on the wobbly far reaches of the twigs, then there is nothin
g left for any other bird, however small.
The answer is that the coal tit doesn’t try to compete with the blue tit. It prefers conifers. It’s even more agile than the blue tit, and it works the crown of conifers with great acrobatic skill, using its neat little bill to find insects and seeds between the pine needles. It is not competing with the other, bigger tits: it has its own niche. It’s only when there is a free meal going at a bird table that the coal tit clashes with the rest.
So it is not all a battle out there. Nature is not red in beak and claw. It is just that the bird-feeder is so desirable that – particularly when food is short elsewhere – it is worth coming down and scrapping and hustling and waiting for. This highly desirable commodity provides us with a crash course on the way birds (like anything else that’s living) break down into different species. But it doesn’t show us why and how.
Of course, it’s not only tits that come to the bird-feeder, but let us, for the moment, turn our eyes away from the finches and sparrows and nuthatches and the occasional glorious visitation of a great-spotted woodpecker. Let us concentrate on the tits.
And – oh dear. Have you noticed a fourth tit? You might well have done, for they come to some gardens and some feeders. Sombre, quieter than the other three, almost a tit in mufti. And it is possible that you have got ahead of me and bought a bird-book and looked him up and despaired.
Because this is either a marsh tit or a willow tit – and do you know what? You simply can’t tell the difference between them. This is the most horrible shock. They are both pretty ordinary-looking birds: tits without any of the attractive bits of the great tit, the blue tit and the coal tit. It is just a basic tit: greyish sort of a back and a black cap. Apparently the willow tit has a slightly less shiny cap than the marsh tit. Oh really? Buggered if I can see it. And it has a pale wing panel, and that’s not the easiest thing in the world to see, either. Really: you make an effort to like birds and right at the start they throw a curveball like that at you. It’s the rank ingratitude of it all that gets to you.