by Simon Barnes
The only thing for a bad birdwatcher to do at this sensitive stage of development is to ignore it, in the most tactful way possible. Acknowledge the presence of the marsh or willow tit, but don’t let it upset you. The point is that even so early in birding life, you meet an unfathomable mystery. And if we are not here for unfathomable mysteries, then what is the point of life?
5. A present from my father
“What’s yon bird, Romany?”
G. Bramwell Evans, Out With Romany Again
“Make the boy interested in natural history.” This was the last message from Captain Robert Falcon Scott – Scott of the Antarctic – to his wife.
It worked. The boy in question grew up to be a naturalist, a conservationist and one of my great boyhood heroes, Peter Scott. He presented the television programme Look. He also founded the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, established its headquarters at Slimbridge, and was knighted.
“Everyone should have a cause,” he once said, or allegedly said. “Even if it’s only bloody ducks.”
Alas, I have been unable to establish the authenticity of this excellent line, and when I tried, his widow had no recollection of his saying such a thing. Me, I like to think that the great wildlife campaigner was also a man who kept all the ironies intact.
That last request of the doomed captain always rather haunted my father. He was always keen himself. As a boy, he had once written to Romany about the early sighting of a celandine. Romany presented a natural history programme for children on what was then the wireless – my father still refers to the medium as “the wah-liss”. Romany – at least the radio and literary character – was, obviously enough, a gypsy. He lived in a caravan, always referred to as “the vardo”, he could speak Romany, he roamed from place to place about the countryside, and knew the birds and the beasts as old friends.
My father’s letter was read out: little Edward Barnes of Wigan had indeed seen that delightfully and unexpectedly early celandine, had indeed found a little sun fallen to earth, there beside his tramping little feet. This was one of the significant experiences of my father’s life. He went on to work in children’s television (as opposed to children’s wah-liss), helping to establish Blue Peter as a programme in which the audience (like little Edward Barnes) actively participates, before going on to become head of BBC Children’s Programmes, inventing Newsround, Grange Hill, Record Breakers and Saturday morning children’s telly. But he remained very keen on natural history, especially birds, though he never really had much of a clue what to do about it. Along with all those telly programmes, he also – at least, so far as I was concerned – invented being a bad birdwatcher. For me, it was the most important invention of them all.
Natural history mattered to him, and he was keen that I took it up. Like Captain Scott, he wanted to make the boy interested in natural history. In a way – like all fathers – he wanted me to do stuff he had never got round to doing himself. He wanted me to take his somewhat chaotic liking for wildlife and do something with it.
He gave me The Observer’s Book of Birds, at the time the only identification book easily available. I read it from cover to cover, many times; I had it almost by heart. Cormorant, I read. Notes: an occasional harsh croak. I read all the Romany books, at his recommendation. I got them from the library, and I longed to walk through the country with the all-knowing, all-seeing Romany, and live in the vardo, and pull the ears of the spaniel called Raq, a dog Romany always spoke to in Romany: “Ava kai, Raq! Custa juckul!”
We lived in Streatham, in the heart of south London, and there was wildlife all around. I watched Look and I watched everything that David Attenborough presented. I realised before the age of ten that Attenborough was a genius, and for my school prize, when I left Sunnyhill School, I was given Zoo Quest for a Dragon, a book I still possess. My father, being a BBC colleague, got the great man to autograph it, one of the few autographs I have ever solicited, let alone kept.
I collected cigarette cards, and got all 50 Tropical Birds – I still remember the thrill of spotting number 35, the very last one I needed, the Indian darter. It was pinned to a noticeboard in the staff-room at Sunnyhill School, and casting aside all shame, I begged for it. With an indulgent smile at the folly of small boys, the teacher, very decently, gave it to me. I wonder if he had any notion that birds would be a pleasure all my life, and, by the time I have finished this, it will be five books, including a novel, that I have written about wildlife and conservation. This shows the importance of a good education; and good education is all about the right cigarette card at the right time. Or the right bird, perhaps.
The Indian darter has a neck that looks like a snake, and it inspired plenty of wonder on its own, as well as doing its job of completing my set. I never thought that I would see real Indian darters, but I have – many times.
I was a member of the RSPB’s Young Ornithologists Club. I wore the osprey badge, and read the magazine when it came. I thrilled above all to the story of the avocet. This was a bird that had gone extinct in this country. Extinct: that was a wonderful, heavy, doom-laden word. It thrilled me with despair in those days. The word has the same power today: a word that lands on the palate and on the page with a dull thud. The avocet – dead as dodo, dead as dinosaur. But a miracle occurred: the avocet came back.
It was a story of incredible romance. This very odd, very singular-looking bird, infinitely dainty with its eccentric, turny-uppy beak, had returned to us. It was incredibly rare, incredibly elusive, a secret, the sort of creature that normal mortals are not fit to see. I remember the huge surge of admiration and envy I felt when I met a man who had actually seen an avocet. I, however, held out no such hope: seeing avocets was not for the likes of me. It was wonderful enough to know that the avocet lived again and bred anew; wonderful to be part of the secret and to rejoice. It was like knowing the location of a family of unicorns.
Now, you will have noticed a flaw in all this boyhood birding. There isn’t much about seeing actual birds. The fact of the matter was that my father liked birds very much and wanted me to enjoy them, but he was a bad birdwatcher. Furthermore, he was a bad birdwatcher who didn’t know how to be a bad birdwatcher. He didn’t know what the next step was: he didn’t know how you went from liking birds to enjoying them more fully.
He didn’t own a pair of binoculars, and nor did I. Binoculars seemed far, far beyond me, like wanting to take a trip to outer space. I wonder now why this was so. Money was tight enough, certainly, but determined asking and scraping and saving would surely have won me a pair in the end. But somehow, I just didn’t see myself as a person who owned binoculars.
So we were restricted to naked-eye sightings, which can be pleasant enough, God knows, but that way you always keep the birds at a distance. Binoculars make the difference: they bridge the gap between you and the birds. Above all, binoculars give you intimacy: the delight of being able to observe without being observed – without forever seeing birds flying away from you, uttering alarm calls. Perhaps naked-eye birding would be the best possible training, in the company of a skilled and enthusiastic observer. My father had only enthusiasm.
I remember one time he took me out birdwatching. It was a sad day. We couldn’t find any birds. We had driven, more or less at random, into the country, and we marched about on farm tracks on the edge of fields hoping to see a bird. All we saw was the odd little grey blob whizzing from one tree to another. It was the wrong place, the wrong time, we hadn’t got the right equipment, we were short of knowledge.
“I don’t think we’re doing it properly,” I said to my father, deeply wounding him. He responded with fury: “I spent days at a time doing exactly this when I was a boy.” No doubt he had, but farming and the countryside had changed beyond all measure since those days. Neither of us knew that, then; very few people did. I remember we saw one thing and identified it. “Goldfinch,” my father said, venomously pointing at the jaunty little chaps. He was right, too; I saw them quite clearly. They flew off, u
ttering alarm calls. It was the last birdwatching trip we made together for 30 years.
But I remember the sighting of a fabulous rarity. We – all the family – were on a boat, cruising up the Fal estuary, on what was ironically termed a pleasure trip. We had already spent several hours at sea. Some of the lads had spent their time trying to catch mackerel; I had spent my own time trying not to throw up. I have never cared much for boats, but, in the less lumpy water of the estuary, I recovered the will to love.
That last word was a typing error, of course, but I haven’t got the heart to change it. Because there, high above the dramatic landscape, was a pair of burly birds, ragged-winged, gliding and soaring with insolent grace.
Buzzard. I could hardly believe I was privileged to be breathing the same air as so exceptional, so wild a pair of creatures. Perhaps you who read these words might smile at the idea of a buzzard being a rarity: in the West Country you see them all the time, sometimes 50-odd together. But back in the early 60s, buzzards were going the way of the avocet, the dodo and the dinosaur. It was something to do with the changes in farming, and it was a thing no one properly understood. It was a poisoning of the land unprecedented in history; and then, to see a buzzard was something deeply special. I have never forgotten it; I can still see them now, remember the impossible, nonchalant confidence with which they rode the big air. I think it was my father who first spotted them, though it might have been the boat captain or some other pleasure-tripper. No matter; I’ll give my father the credit now. He deserves it all right.
But, without binoculars, you are pretty limited. You can never get intimate with a bird, never appreciate the detail. Old naturalists solved the problem by shooting them: the great bird artist John James Audubon killed birds on a massive scale in order to produce one of the masterpieces of natural history.
But these days, we can most of us afford a pair of binoculars. Get a pair. It’s the next stage in being a bad birdwatcher. Yes – but what sort should you buy? Ah, shut up – any old pair, cheapest you can find, don’t worry about it, don’t think about the need for an investment. These days you can get crappy binoculars for no money, or not very much, and they may not be quite as good as the ones that cost getting on for a thousand quid, but they all have one thing in common: they bring the birds closer. It’s not something to debate about. Grab anything; it’s the start of getting intimate.
Birdwatchers are famous for being boring. I would reject that claim myself – birdwatchers are capable of having conversations that are meaningless to outsiders, but so are football fans, musicians and gardeners. But, when it comes to the subject of binoculars, I have to concede the point. Birdwatchers can be the most crashing bores on the subject of optical glass.
I have done it myself: well, I must disagree, I find the added weight a bit of a disadvantage, certainly, but when you compare the size of image, etc etc, shut up and look at a bird. Birdwatchers are not boring about birds, but God are they – we – boring about bins. Never mind, I’ve got not one but two jolly nice pairs of binoculars, so aren’t I lucky?
And if you haven’t got any at all, get a pair now. If you think that there is the slightest danger of being able to increase your enjoyment of birds, then get hold of any pair of binoculars you can. And start looking through them. Ever seen an upside-down blue tit on a nut-feeder close up? Then it’s time you did.
But as a boy, I didn’t do that. This meant that my enthusiasm for birds didn’t have enough to feed on. I grew up, or at least got older, and met a girl and went travelling and that sort of thing.
I always had a great liking for birds. I can remember the delight in the kingfishers when I went to Kashmir. I spent an hour counting the successful and unsuccessful dives one of them made from the stays of my houseboat. It was as confiding a bird as an English robin – no need for binoculars to get intimate with this chap, and he was successful far more often than you’d have thought possible. And I recall my fascination with the black kites when I went to live in Hong Kong. I had a deep attraction to birds – and especially the idea of birds. But I didn’t really know how to get to grips with the reality.
But I had a pair of binoculars by then. I had bought them for going to the races – to see the horses. And that made all the difference.
6. Teeming hordes
“O stop, stop,” cried the Mole in ecstasies: “This is too much.”
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Perhaps you’ve already got a bird-book. That is to say, a book that seriously tries to help you tell one bird from another. It’s called a field guide. Probably because no person who fancies himself a good birdwatcher would be seen dead carrying one in the field. It’s a snobbery thing; you are supposed to know most of the birds already, and, if you can’t put a name to one, you take extensive field notes (distinct supercilium, paleish edge to tertiaries) and look it up in your comprehensive collection of the best field guides when you get home. Eventually, you come to a thoughtful and mature conclusion and write it up at length in your diary.
Well, respect to all good birders who really do their birdwatching in this way – and yahboo sucks to all snobs who never carry a field guide and hope that someone else will clear up the mystery while they don’t give themselves away too badly (“Ah yes, I see what you mean, and the longer primaries is diagnostic, isn’t it?”).
But what most bad birdwatchers do is have a thumb through while looking at the pictures and say: why, that’s the chap. I’d know him anywhere. Which is all very well for a start but, as a technique, it runs out of steam after a while.
But we can worry about that later. The first thing to do is to get a field guide, if you haven’t got one. Which one? The smaller the area it covers, the better. If you can get a field guide devoted entirely to the birds in your back garden, it would be ideal for starters. Unfortunately, most publications have a bit more ambition than that. My advice would be to cut out anything that bears the word “Europe” or, worse still, “North Africa”. You can get some wonderful little books with perfect little drawings of all the birds you are likely to see – but they throw in things like wall-creeper, which you might see if you are dead lucky on a serious birding expedition to the Alps. Or Ural owl, which is helpful indeed if you happen to find yourself in the Urals, but a mite distracting if you are not completely sure of the difference between a tawny owl and a barn owl.
So try and get something restricted to the birds of Britain. You don’t need to start your birdwatching life by confusing a curlew with a glossy ibis, or wondering why you didn’t see a Dalmatian pelican (disappointingly, not a pelican covered in spots) on Margate Sands. But get a field guide. Any field guide. Thumb through it. Familiarise yourself with its salient points. If you don’t mind a fairly gross suggestion, keep it by the lav. After all, learning about birds is just a natural process.
And you will see a number of birds you know, like swan and robin, and a number of birds you half-know – lapwing and nuthatch, maybe – and a number of others you have heard of. And the thought will hit pretty soon: bloody hell, there’s an awful lot of them.
Aha! That’s the whole bloody point!
Most field guides follow roughly the same order, starting with grebes and ending with buntings. And you get towards the back of the book and start turning the pages that describe the warblers. And you discover, horror upon horrors, that it’s even worse than the marsh tit/willow tit business. Your field guide might have 20 or so different species of warbler. If it is wider in its geographical scope, it might well have as many as 50. Fifty different birds – practically all of which look almost exactly the same. This is calculated to put off the most intrepid beginner.
These warblers look almost exactly the same in drawings that have been carefully produced and organised to show off their differences. Imagine how these birds are going to look when all you see of them is a fleeting glimpse of a browny-olivey shape flitting through the undergrowth. That’s the trouble with birds: they very rarely stan
d still while you count their feathers and thumb through your field guide.
And you get resentful. What business have these birds in being so ludicrously numerous? Why are there so many different species? What’s the point, other than to confuse people who want to become bad birdwatchers? It’s inconsiderate, it’s off-putting, it really shouldn’t be allowed. Perhaps the scientists are completely wrong and this whole lots-of-different-species business is a fantasy, a work-for-the-sake-of-work scenario, something that doesn’t matter in the slightest, something that is as pointless as counting the angels who dance on the head of a pin. It matters to the birds, though. A willow warbler may look almost identical to a chiffchaff, but it certainly doesn’t want to mate with a chiffchaff. You are a human being. Imagine mating with a chimpanzee. The very thought is horrific: really profoundly disturbing. But humans and chimpanzees have 98.6 per cent of their genes in common. That is actually more than is the case with a willow warbler and a chiffchaff. A willow warbler, therefore, finds the idea of mating with a chiffchaff even more repellent than you find the idea of making love to a chimpanzee.
The question of species really matters, then, especially to the species involved. It is not something man-made, or imposed, a matter of pedantic irrelevancies. It is deeply and seriously real.
LBJs, say some people, meaning Little Brown Jobs. If life is too short to stuff a mushroom, life is certainly too short to try and tell a willow warbler from a chiffchaff, not to mention a Cetti’s warbler from a Blyth’s reed warbler.
Fair enough: stick to telling the difference between a swan and a duck when you start off. Don’t let the bewildering variety put you off. Instead, let it inspire you. Bewildering variety is not an unfortunate occurrence. Bewildering variety is what life is all about. When you try to tell the difference between a willow warbler and a chiffchaff, you are not just posing yourself a puzzle to test your own observational skills. You are also entering into life’s deepest mystery. The name of that mystery is biodiversity.