How to be a Bad Birdwatcher

by Simon Barnes

  Every field guide that was ever printed is not merely a book of helpful hints on how to tell one bird from another. It is also a hymn to biodiversity: a song of praise for the fact that such a wonderful variety of creatures exists and has its being in our country, on our continent, on our planet. That line about “endless forms most beautiful”, already quoted, is the last line of The Origin of Species, and every field guide will tell you about an awful lot of forms most beautiful, and, if the beauty dazzles and the endlessness of the forms boggles, stick with it. You are, after all, on your way to understanding the meaning of life, and that’s not supposed to be easy.

  Biodiversity is a bit of a buzzword, and it has become for many an eyes-glaze-over word. It means, at bottom, the fact that there are lots and lots of species. But it is more than that. Biodiversity is not just variety; it is also the fundamental strategy adopted by life on earth. For diversity is rather more than a conundrum for the observer. It is nothing less than the way life works. Life doesn’t work by trying to make one perfect species. It works by making lots and lots of different species, each one talented at making a living in its own particular way.

  There is a myth about evolution: that evolution is a search for perfection. It is one of humankind’s great self-glorifying misunderstandings, for guess which species always seems to embody that perfection – the paragon of animals, noble in reason, infinite in faculty? Yes, the whole point of evolution is you and me. Vast suns whirling through space, spinning planets, the collisions of asteroids, the primordial soup, the rise and fall of the dinosaurs: all of it was planned and preordained in order to produce me, writing a book about birds, and you, looking through the window at the nut-feeder and wondering why the blood doesn’t rush to the head of the blue tit as he hangs upside down on the feeder.

  That is the myth. But there is a real story of evolution which is much grander, much bigger, wider and higher: and infinitely more glorious. No one can say that a man is better than an arctic tern – a bird that spends every northern hemisphere summer in the Arctic and every southern hemisphere summer in the Antarctic, commuting the entire length of the globe to live a life of almost perpetual sunshine. What human could do that? Or want to?

  No: evolution – life – isn’t looking for perfection; it is looking for survival, and life has come up with uncountable millions of survival plans. Each species has a different plan, and they all work. The summit of evolution is the arctic tern, or the woodlouse, or the blue whale, or the brown rat.

  I used to think that scientists opened a bottle of champagne every time they discovered a species that was “unknown to science”. If they did that, they’d be drunk from morning to night. How many species of animals are there alive in the world right now? Er, don’t know. There are new species being discovered all the time, and each pushing back of the frontiers of knowledge only shows the vastness of our ignorance. Well, all right then. How many have we actually discovered so far? Er, don’t know. There’s no central list; that’s not how science works.

  But one tentative count, from the great scientist and thinker Edward Wilson, comes up with a number of 1,032,000. Of these, only 4,000, including ourselves, are mammals, with another 10,000 or so birds and a further 28,000 other backboned animals. There are 12,000 different species of nematode worms. A cake diagram shows that almost three-quarters of all living animal species are arthropods: that is to say, animals with jointed appendages and usually an external skeleton. Most of these are insects. That includes 98,000 flies, 112,000 butterflies and moths, and a whopping 290,000 beetles. That prodigious number gave rise to one of the most famous throwaway lines in the history of science. J.B.S. Haldane, another great scientist, was asked by his theological colleagues what, after a lifelong study of creatures, he could assume about their creator. He replied: “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”

  Human beings come in one species, beetles in more than a quarter-million. Beetles are a quarter of a million times better than us. Quite clearly, the point of evolution is beetles. Other scientists will state that we live not in the age of man, but in the age of bacteria, and that the world has been passing through this age ever since the processes of life first began.

  While we are on the subject of beetles, let us take a brief look at collection mania. Some people spend their lives chasing rare birds and building a prodigious list of the numbers they have seen. I have already written a little disparagingly about the twitchers, and I will do so again later on. But twitching can, if you like, be understood as an act of prayer towards the concept of biodiversity.

  For the greatest scientist that ever drew breath was a twitcher. Not a bird twitcher, but a beetle twitcher. His name was Charles Darwin and he was a maniac. His beetle collection was the driving force of his life when he was a young man, before he set sail on the Beagle to make an infinitely richer series of collections. There is a famous story about the callow and youthful Darwin scrabbling in an attic for beetles. He managed to capture two beetles unknown to him, and had one in each hand. But then he found a third. What would you have done? Darwin popped one of the beetles into his mouth and, with his now free hand, collected the third. This was the man whose book changed forever the way that human beings understand themselves and their place in the world. And it all began with twitching.

  Watching birds is one way of understanding this revolution in thought. Understanding that evolution is not a tree with a bottom, a middle and a top, but a bush with a million twigs. Every twig is equally valid, equally important. Every different kind of bird we see is one of those twigs; every bird is another solution to the problem of life.

  And in diversity, in the million solutions to the problem of staying alive, we find life. The meaning of life is life, and it comes in a million forms. And, if you wish, you can devote your leisure hours to the study of nematode worms, and good luck to you if that’s the way life moves you. But birds are out there, the other side of the window, singing their hearts out and flying on their angel wings. When we turn to study life, birds thrust themselves upon us, with a beauty we can see and hear, and in a diversity that is staggering, but nonetheless graspable. Easier than beetles, anyway.

  So you read the field guide, and the ducks, right near the front, are full of charm and obvious diversity. You probably know a mallard, and maybe a tufted duck or tufty. And that dapper little teal looks rather special, too; no trouble telling him from a tufty. But always there is lurking at the back of the book that terrible collection of LBJs, that inordinate number of warblers.

  There is a story about an expert birdman, the alpha male of a bird-ringing group, who caught a warbler. Surrounded by his disciples, he weighed it, measured it, rung it (ringers prefer the strong verb) and recorded all the details. It was, he said, with utter confidence, a willow warbler. He then let the bird go. Unabashed by its experience, it flew to the top of a nearby tree and sang: “Chiffchaff-chiff-chaff.”

  And if an expert holding the bird in his hand can make a mistake, what chance have you got? Little enough. It’s true that willow warblers and chiffchaffs have different leg colours – a chiffchaff has blackish legs; a willow warbler pale brown. But that can be pretty hard to see, since both birds like to lurk about behind plenty of leaves. And what’s far worse, the leg colour varies. Birds are not only members of a species; they are also individuals. Leg colour is not something you can utterly depend on with willow warblers and chiffchaffs. But that doesn’t stop them being completely different birds. Both species come to this country for the spring and summer, and spend the rest of their time in warmer places. But the chiffchaff goes no further than southern Europe and north Africa; some of them even hang around for the winter in Britain. But a willow warbler flies all the way to southern Africa. Imagine that – you could hold half a dozen in your cupped hands and they fly across the Sahara, and back. I have heard them in the Kalahari, singing the sweet song that you normally hear when the high spring is with us back home in Britain.

  For you can tell th
em apart when they sing. That happens to be dead easy: the chiffchaff sings his name, but the willow warbler sings a lovely lisping trickle of descending notes. And I hope that, in time, you will hear it, too.

  But for now, diversity is the thing to cling on to. We are here to celebrate diversity. That is what birdwatching means, and it wouldn’t be interesting if it was easy. So for now, the thing to do is to note that warblers exist, and do so in prodigious numbers, and then to concentrate on the easy birds. You are not bound to put a name to every bird you see. Nobody, not even the best birdwatcher in the world, can do that, so why should you?

  A bird you don’t know is not a mark of personal failure, a strong hint that you should give up, that the whole business of being a bad birdwatcher is pointless. It is just another small celebration of biodiversity; part of your own celebration of life. It was Einstein who said that the universe is not only weirder than we understand. It is weirder than we are capable of understanding.

  7. Falling in love again

  That’s right, the Mascara Snake – fast and bulbous.

  Captain Beefheart

  It is remarkable how much of our lives we spend doing things we really don’t want to do. More remarkable still is how much time we spend doing stuff we think we are enjoying, only to realise later on that it wasn’t enjoyable at all, and that we’d far sooner have been doing something else.

  I feel these things very strongly when I look back at The Wasted Years: the years when I wasn’t birdwatching, or even getting The Observer’s Book of Birds by heart. I read books at school, all the time, and that wasn’t a waste of time at all. But I did things like playing football, which secretly bored me, and getting involved in drama, which I secretly hated. When I reached the sixth form I was interested in revolutionary politics, for which I secretly had no taste whatsoever, still less talent or understanding.

  Perhaps if the right opportunity, the right person had come along, I’d have been off a-birding. But perhaps not: I wished to be – needed to be – both successively and simultaneously, a good mate, a fancy-Dan intellectual and a dangerous radical. Birdwatching can cater for all those desires – I will demonstrate later on how hanging out peanuts for your blue tits is an act of revolution. But I didn’t realise that at the time.

  Then there was travelling and going to university and that sort of thing. I was involved in the traditional pursuits of youth, of course. But again, looking back, I secretly hated an awful lot of rock and roll and I was secretly terrified of drugs. The other part was all right, though no doubt an understanding of the way birds do it – in song and dance and finery – would have helped me on my way with my callow courtships.

  This was the end of the 60s, the start of the 70s, and it was considered a fine, even enviable thing to be “into nature”. Or better still “heavily into nature”. A fine thing, so long as you didn’t get too specific. “Wow, man! Far out!” That was the OK response to a sunset, a tree in the acid green of spring or the flight of a seagull. I think it’s a pretty good response, on the whole, and I still think it when I see a barn owl, say, or I hear the first willow warbler of spring. Sometimes I even say it; it slips out in moments of unexpected delight. But then no birdwatcher, however good, however bad, ever really grows out of the wow-response. You just get to add other things to it.

  But being too specific would have been a bit of a faux pas in those days. One of the set texts of hippydom – a book I never cared for – was Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. Jonathan Livingstone black-headed gull? Audouin’s gull? Bonaparte’s gull? Don’t be uncool, man: it’s a seagull, just dig it. Precision was frowned upon. “Perfect speed is being there,” said the book. Or perhaps it was a glaucous gull.

  There was a period in which I listened to the dawn chorus every day, though not entirely on purpose. I did it by staying up for it, rather than getting up for it. I well remember the daily horror of drawing back the curtains and finding instead of night a pale blue-grey morning alight with the cacophony of birds. “Hey, wow, man it’s the tweeties! That’s too heavy.”

  We compared the sound unfavourably to that of Captain Beefheart playing the saxophone. If you have ever heard Captain Beefheart playing the saxophone, you will understand that the tweeties were not soothing. It was a violent invasion, the new day interrupting our night, a great shock to the senses and to the mind. Odd, now, to think that I can listen to the dawn chorus – blindfold if you wish – and know most of the birds that sing. I can tell a thrush from a blackbird, and even, when the wind is southerly, a blackcap from a garden warbler. Had I been able to do such a thing then, I would have done better to keep quiet about it. Just listen and say wow. Not such bad advice, as I say. But you can add other things to it, which is what happened to me and why I am writing this book. The more you know, the more you wow.

  After university, I started work on local papers, and my principal memory of the first couple of years is of anxiety and stress and the feeling that I was never going to get anywhere. It was a horribly uncomfortable time, and no birds to help me through. These days, out on assignment, in the stresses and the self-pity that come from high-octane work, I almost always manage to slip away and spend a couple of hours birdwatching. I am a sportswriter by profession, but I have never been monomaniacal about sport, or anything else for that matter. A healthy biodiversity of interest is something to cultivate, I think. I remember, for example, a roseate spoonbill seen in front of a garbage incinerator in Tampa, when I was there covering the Super Bowl. It sent me back to the football with a spring in my step and a little calmness in my brain.

  Birds are great removers of stress – so long as you are not a twitcher. A twitcher might be defined as someone who actively seeks stress in birdwatching. The very name came about because of the neurotic behaviour on view when these people are close to a rarity and believe they might miss it. But, for most of us, birdwatching works the other way: making life both richer and calmer, a pretty good double, I think you will agree.

  So, I had no birds to help me with the stresses of the first years in a professional life. Just the memory of the pleasure I had once found in birds – or at least in the idea of birds. That and the occasional more-than-casual glance at such chance-countered delights as a kestrel hovering by the motorway, or a bunch of jackdaws riding a Ferris wheel of air in a winter wind. I had a hankering for birds, a nostalgia for birds. I just needed the right moment, the right excuse, the right place, the right person, the right bird.

  Meanwhile, my father continued his high-profile, high-stress stuff at the BBC. He didn’t do any birdwatching either. He looked at them all right, especially when he was on holiday in Cornwall. He, too, was waiting for the right place, the right person, the right bird.

  I was unable to supply such things for him, nor he for me. The years of radical politics hadn’t brought out the best in either of us. My father, for some reason, saw it all as a rejection of himself and everything he had worked for. He was unable to take things with a detached, boys-will-be-anarcho-syndicalists sort of air. And I had a wicked way of winding him up. The word “bourgeois” would do it every time. Never failed. Television was bourgeois, wearing a suit was bourgeois, drinking wine was bourgeois – not that this ever stopped me from enjoying my fair share.

  We were not altogether reconciled during the university years. If I had dropped the political labelling and posturing, I was still intolerant of what we called “straight society”. This, too, he took as a rejection. Partly it was, but the 60s were more than a Freudian rebellion-for-the-sake-of-rebellion. No. We all felt we were on the verge of creating a new way of living: more tolerant, less stressful, more spiritual, more meaningful – richer and more amusing. The accepted routes to this desirable state were the smoking of plenty of dope, wearing a great deal of fancy clobber, and an awful lot of music. The aims had a lot going for them; the routes were flawed. I have since discovered a far more effective way of getting closer to all those desired things. If you’re still reading, you might gue
ss what it is.

  But please remember that there was, in the full outpouring of hippydom, a deep and heartfelt desire to put things right. There was a feeling everywhere that things had gone badly amiss in modern Western life: and that it was our job – our duty, our destiny – to make it better. Or at least to do our best. Perhaps you think I should have grown out of all that sort of thing. I have not. I still feel that there are one or two areas in which Western society has got it a bit wrong; I still feel that we should do our best to make it better. I don’t think I am unique in this, either.

  And quite a lot of all this comes down to birdwatching; it really does. Birds are not only a delight; they are a cause, a battle, a purpose, a meaning – and no trivial one, either. I will be talking more about that later on. But before the meaning comes the joy. Marriage, for many, is what gives life its meaning. And in marriage, before the meaning comes the joy. You don’t find the meaningfulness of marriage without first falling in love. I want every reader who likes birds – who, as it were, fancies birds – to move on. Stop ogling them from afar and make your big move. Stop admiring birds; start falling in love with them.

  The 60s had substance behind the poses, you see, though the posing seemed pretty important at the time. Naturally, this involved a fair amount of perversity. Take Tim. I was to meet him a few years later, and he was to teach me a huge number of birdwatching skills and, more importantly, pleasures. He was so perverse that he not only refused to wear a tie. He refused to wear a shirt as well. But birdwatching with Shirtless Tim opened my eyes.