by Simon Barnes
And saw instant wonders. The first park was Gal Oya, a drowned forest with semi-submerged trees full of heraldic cormorants. We travelled by boat, and had a distant glimpse of elephant, and absurdly wonderful water-birds. We were doing it properly, it seemed to me. And we were both enthralled. But that was not my conversion experience.
The following day, at a place whose name I have forgotten, we found ourselves walking across mudflats with a guide, following the dried soup-tureen footprints of an elephant. We never caught up with him, but the pursuit was stirring enough. And then, a long way distant, I noticed some birds. Rather dainty birds, long-legged wading birds, with thinnish beaks. In an unaccustomed movement, but one that would soon be a part of me, I raised my hired binoculars to my eyes. And entered heaven.
Avocet.
I was incapable of speech. The mythical bird of my childhood, the bird that had come back from extinction, the bird that had gone and had miraculously returned, the bird that no one was permitted ever to see – there it was in front of me. A group of about a dozen, gorgeous in their black and white, sweeping their dainty, upcurved bills through the water with a scything action. I felt like the shepherds as they gazed on the flight of angels.
From that moment, I was a bad birdwatcher. I have never looked back.
And so I invite every beginning bad birdwatcher to step outside in search of the conversion experience, the confirmation bird. I do so in the absolute certainty that it is out there waiting for you. And that it is wonderful, and will always be with you.
How do you find it? Just look. Look, and seek to name. And the easiest way to see birds is to go out and walk. As with everything to do with wildlife, you should set out with high hopes and low expectations. You should be ready to be sidetracked and, above all, to revel in what you see rather than what you want to see. I once made a trip to hunt for tiger and never saw them. But I had a wonderful trip-making sighting of the Ganges dolphin, three of them to be precise, leaping out of the water: white and blind, living in the murk and silt of the Ganges river system and finding their prey and each other by sonar, like dolphins from outer space. It was worth travelling for that moment, and my father, who happened to be with me, agreed. But more of that later.
The most popular activity in Britain is going for a walk in the country, and it’s about the best, too. The country being also the park and the common and all the urban local spaces. And here’s how you do it. You put one foot after another, and when you see a bird, you stop, and put your binoculars to your eyes and say: “What the bloody hell’s that?”
You can improve your skills, but the technique I have just described is perfectly acceptable for starters; and it’s good enough to serve you for the rest of your life. The rest is only refinement.
And you learn what the bloody hell they are by thumbing optimistically through your field guide, looking at the pictures until you say: Ah! Here’s the chap. And all at once you find a very good reason for having a field guide that covers as small an area of country as possible. A quick skim through a more ambitious work, and you are totally convinced that you have seen a black-headed bunting. Sorry, but it wasn’t. I know. Trust me. You have to go to Southeast Europe or Asia Minor to see a black-headed bunting. What you saw was a reed bunting, and very nice too.
It’s not very scientific, this thumbing-through technique, yet it’s the way to get familiar not just with species of birds but with the larger matter of family. It helps, for example, if you know that the bird you saw was an owl. That narrows it down to the five species you are likely to see in Britain, so you are almost home already.
If you see a bird you have never seen before, but you do know another bird that is quite like it, then you can start looking at birds on nearby pages. All thrushes have pretty much the same sort of shape, and if it’s not one of the ones you know about, like a mistle thrush, song thrush or blackbird, then it’s probably a near relation. And there it is, on the next page: a fieldfare, and you saw a bunch of them on an open field in winter and got a half-decent view of the black tail.
You start by blundering about and making a good few blunders, too. Everybody does. My advice is to carry on blundering in a totally unembarrassed way. The more you look, the more blunders you will make, and the more blunders you make, the more you will see, and you find that slowly a pattern has been building up without you realising it. This building-up of patterns is one of the deeper joys: once you begin to understand the rhythm of birdwatching, you are beginning to understand the rhythm of the birds themselves. Which is nothing less than the rhythm of life.
I got back to Hong Kong with my mind ringing with avocets and all the other wonders I had seen in Sri Lanka, and the first thing I did was to buy a bird book: after The Observer’s Book of Birds, the best bird book of my life. It was called, appropriately enough, A Colour Guide to Hong Kong Birds and it was packed full of wonderful drawing by Karen Phillipps, and a plain, helpful test by Clive Viney. Hong Kong is small: not all that many birds, not all that many places. It was a great place to start and the right sized book to start with. It included useful local information such as the fact that the black-necked starling is frequently seen on Fanling golf course, and that you will see azure-winged magpies in the Botanical Gardens.
And by dint of walking and looking and thumbing through the book, I soon learned the more obvious local birds on Lamma island, where I lived. I already had a pair of binoculars, the ones I got for horse-racing. They cost HK$100, or about ten quid; not a lot, even then. They were, in snobbish birdwatching terms, or even in ordinary optical terms, complete crap. But even the crappiest binoculars are great. My binoculars were utterly brilliant. They brought the birds closer, you see.
One of the first things I realised was that the rock on the edge of the harbour was the favourite fishing perch of a kingfisher. Crowds of people, hundreds at a time, marched past within 20 feet, to and from the ferry eight times a day, all indulging in cacophonous Hong Kong conversation; and the kingfisher sat there, bobbing his head and occasionally arrowing into the chill waters to come up with a tiddler. It had, presumably, always been there. But I was a bad birdwatcher now. I saw him every day.
The great thing about being a beginner is that it doesn’t take much to please you. And if you have any sense, you will keep that. But the initial naming of the common birds – literally the common or garden birds – is a great voyage of adventure, as well as the basis of something that will give you joy everywhere and always.
I have brought the Colour Guide to my desk for reference as I sit writing these words, and just thumbing through the book, as of old, looking at Karen Phillipps’s gorgeous illustrations, takes me back to that time when a magpie-robin at first filled me with the thrill of discovery, and then with the greater joy of familiarity. I saw him – jaunty, black and white, bold and confiding as an English robin – and I knew his name. It was a new intimacy: with the bird, with my beloved island, with all of nature.
But there were gaps, too. Pages and pages I didn’t really want to look at: two pages of warblers, a page of pipits. I only ever saw a couple of the warblers, though Clive Viney assured me that plenty of them were common enough. And the pipits and larks all looked the same. I hurried past those pages, slightly embarrassed at my ignorance, but also secretly doubting that these birds really existed, and whether it mattered. I was opening my eyes, which was great. But that was only a start.
10. Well done, medium or rare?
Aye, madam, it is common.
Hamlet
We value what is rare. We can’t help it: twenty-pound notes are rarer than pennies, beautiful girls are rarer than plain ones, diamonds are rarer than flints or, for that matter, cherts. This brings us to the question of rare birds. And it is one of those strange facts of life that there are more common birds than rare ones.
There is a popular notion that all birdwatching, whether done by good or bad birdwatchers, is about rare birds. The reason for looking closely at a flock of sparrows i
s to see if there is some bird of indescribable rarity – perhaps a first winter savannah sparrow – lurking half-concealed among his less glamorous pals. If there isn’t, you let the sparrows go and cast your eye elsewhere.
Well, what is a rare bird? You can look at the idea entirely from your own viewpoint, and say that a rare bird is any bird you haven’t seen, which is fair enough, if limited. Or you can say that a rare bird is any bird that nobody sees very often. Perhaps a barn owl, a bird that eluded me for some years… but I now live in a place that barn owls like, and I see them very often, so in a single bound, barn owls have gone from rare birds to – well, not exactly common birds, but certainly birds that are part of the routine of life. So barn owls aren’t rare in any demanding sense of the term.
Or what about the laughing gull? You won’t find that in your British field guide. But a laughing gull was seen at St Mary’s on the Scilly Isles in November 2003, according to what is thrillingly referred to as “an unchecked report”. This is a very rare bird indeed, and it will have given great pleasure and excitement to those that saw it, and they will have no doubt spent subsequent months waiting in agony for the checking of their report. I was not among those that saw the laughing gull. And I have seen heaps and heaps of laughing gulls: I have visited a brackish lagoon that was thronged with laughing gulls filling the air with their laughter. The sound is described in one field guide – for these birds do appear in field guides, you just have to get the right one – as ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-haah-haah-haah etc, which about covers it.
Now ask yourself why I have seen flocks and flocks of laughing gulls, when the sighting of a laughing gull is a matter of great excitement to such august publications as British Birds. Perhaps you leap to the conclusion that I must have been lying all along and that I am in fact an extremely good birdwatcher. Not so, alas. So perhaps the answer is that I know of a secret place where these birds are to be found.
Got it in one. And that secret place is North America and the West Indies. I remember the brackish lagoon from Antigua; I was there for the cricket tour in which the West Indian captain Viv Richards, failed to get on to the pitch in time for the start of the match because he was in the press box slagging off a journalist. Every evening when work was done for the day, I would sneak off to the lagoon and take a stroll, enjoying the walk, the birds, the laughter.
Laughing gulls are common on the far side of the Atlantic, and they are exquisitely rare here. That is because they don’t live over here. They live over there. You might wonder what that lone laugher was doing on the Scilly Isles. So, I imagine, did the gull. He didn’t mean to be there at all. He had got lost: blown across by unsympathetic winds.
You can walk through Central Park in New York in the autumn and, as you fight off the muggers and endeavour not to snag your feet on too many syringes, you can see any number of small American warblers: yellow-rumped warbler, American redstart, ovenbird – lovely little birds. Common birds, true, but well worth seeing. Every year, a few of these get blown across the Atlantic, and some of them get spotted by eagle-eyed good birdwatchers. But what happens to the birds?
They change in an instant from being very common birds to being very rare ones. And then, mostly, they die. They are not equipped to make a living here. They are in the wrong country, and exhausted by a ludicrous journey they never wanted to make. No wonder the people who seek them get twitchy: they have to get there in time to tick the bird before the bloody thing keels over and dies.
That is how things work at the extreme end of the rarity business. And there are more and more rarities turning up; or, to put it another way, more and more being noticed. Birdwatchers not only have access to all kinds of information that wasn’t readily available in former times, but most of them travel abroad to look for birds, which was impossible for normal people 50 years back. These birdwatching travellers will have seen laughing gulls by the hundred in North America or the West Indies, and are therefore able to spot a doomed wanderer with relative ease.
Of course, they don’t all die. There was once a black-browed albatross that somehow ended up in the wrong hemisphere and fell in with a bunch of Northern seabirds, and travelled with them on their annual commute to winter feeding waters and summer breeding grounds. He was to be seen for years – for albatrosses are long-lived creatures – off the coast of Scotland every summer, a bird greeted annually with great affection and called, obviously enough, Albert, which is short for albatross.
These windblown vagrants are rare if you think of them as British birds, but generally they are not at all rare in global terms. You can read about them, most particularly in British Birds, and they are treated with scientific language and a passionless fastidiousness. Which is fair enough, though the recording of lost birds doesn’t seem to me a scientific pursuit of the highest possible value.
Let’s go back to that flock of sparrows, the one in which the first winter savannah sparrow lurked so memorably. A rare-birds-man would leap at the oddity, the rarity, the freak. But a true ornithologist would be more interested in the sparrows. For here’s a thing: birdwatcher and ornithologist are by no means the same thing. A birdwatcher likes looking at birds, and may be very good or very bad. An ornithologist is a proper scientist. Perhaps he or she is preparing a paper on mate selection in house sparrow Passer domesticus, or is conducting a survey on flocking dynamics, or perhaps this ornithologist is a conservation scientist on the cutting edge of the science and is researching the mysterious decline of the house sparrow. It is more important and interesting in scientific terms to know where the sparrows have gone, to suggest a way to arrest their decline and perhaps a method of bringing them back up to decent numbers, than to relish the thrill of the rogue savannah sparrow.
In fact, compared to stuff like conservation science, the pursuit of rarities looks decidedly thin. It is not science. It is not ornithology in the terms that someone who studies species-specific brood parasitism and mimicry among the indigo birds of southern Africa would recognise it. But it is something I recognise very well, being a sportswriter by trade. It is sport. In fact, I once made this remark to Rob Hume. Rob, editor of the RSPB’s Birds magazine, for whom I write every quarter, is not a bad birdwatcher. He is a birdwatcher a very long way beyond good; so good he was for a time chairman of the Rarities Committee. You can’t really be a better birdwatcher than that, for this is the committee that sits in judgment on such solemn issues as first records for Britain. They examine all the evidence, most particularly your field notes, and after deep esoteric discussion they come up with a decision. Yes, they say, it was a red-eyed vireo. Or they say, well, we’re awfully sorry, but there is still an area of doubt here. And their judgment brings joy to some and anguish to others; for that is the way these things go. Some you win, some you lose.
Course it’s not bloody science, I told Rob. It’s bloody sport, innit? Rob laughed and said: “Well yes, obviously.”
Bloody good sport it is, too, the addicts tell me. Good on ’em. Any way that people enjoy their birds without harming them seems to be a very good thing indeed. But chasing and collecting rare birds is not the only way to do birdwatching, it is not the whole point of birdwatching, it is not what the best birdwatchers do all the time.
I say this not to demean the rare-bird chasers, but to clarify things for the confused beginner. “Bit of a twitcher, are you?” people will ask you, when you have come out of the closet as a bad birdwatcher. People think that birdwatcher and twitcher are synonyms, and that if you are a birdwatcher, you are chartering planes and hanging out with crowds of strange fellows, all of you hoping for a sight of that bobolink that was certainly there yesterday.
There are many other kinds of birdwatching, and I will tell you about them as we go on. In the meantime, I suggest we all stop worrying about rare birds of the Arctic redpoll and Northern parula kind. But perhaps I have confused you. I mentioned the names of a dozen or so mega-rarities and you say: Well, what about the birds in my field guide that I haven’t se
en? What about the avocet? What about that hobby you went on about back in the first chapter?
Well, no, an avocet is not a rare bird, not when compared to a semi-palmated sandpiper. If I wanted to go and hunt for one, I would only have to leave my desk for an hour or so. It’s not a rare bird, not like those American and Siberian wanderers. Let us just call it a special bird.
A bittern is a special bird. It’s not rare like that bobolink. In late April and early May, I know exactly where to go to find one; nor is that knowledge a secret. But there aren’t very many of them. They are rare because they make their living only in wet reedbeds. They are not very adaptable. They are specialists: they are brilliant at working with reedbeds, but they struggle in any other kind of habitat. Such specialisation is something that people working in the science of extinction call “the tender trap”. Bitterns may be great at wet reedbeds; but if you take the reedbeds away, they are buggered. Their specialisation – their very brilliance – has undone them.
And reedbeds have indeed been taken away at a ferocious rate, mainly with the draining of land for agricultural use. Bitterns were common as sparrows before the draining of the fens. But these days, rivers are controlled and canalised. Reedbeds are no longer forming spontaneously. These days, bitterns are rare because reedbeds are rare. No home, no bird.
If you are interested in looking after wild birds, then the bittern is much more important than the lesser yellowlegs that turned up in Northumberland. The lesser yellowleg is rarer, but the bittern is a very great deal more special. It is more important, in the grand scheme of things, to look after the special birds than merely to clap eyes on the megarare ones.
Though clapping eyes on the special birds is one of the great special experiences of life. Dawn on Walberswick marshes in May, and one of the true concerts of a lifetime: nightingales hammering away from every side, giving out their impossibly loud and varied repertoire from the tree behind. And in front of us the bass boom of the bittern. I stood and listened for a good hour, because times this special don’t come for the asking. And then, in that soft orange light of first sun, the bittern came out of cover – for they are birds far more often heard than seen – briefly paraded in his reed-coloured livery, and then withdrew into his kingdom beneath the seedheads.