How to be a Bad Birdwatcher

by Simon Barnes

  Now that is birdwatching at its best: not the chasing of the rare, but the untroubled contemplation of the special.

  It’s all in the way these things take you, of course, but it will do for me. Rarity for its own sake is not the point. In fact, I wish the bitterns were a lot less rare. Avocets were once extinct, and you can’t get much rarer than that. Extinct as breeding birds in this country, anyway. And now, if you go to the right place, you can see breeding avocets all over the place. Go to Minsmere in April, go to that great bird reserve in Suffolk, and you won’t be able to bung a brick without hitting an avocet. In the right places avocets, once the rarest of the rare, are nothing less than common. And there is not a birdwatcher, good or bad, who believes that is anything other than a good thing.

  So, as you come out of the closet as a bad birdwatcher, you can do so in the knowledge that there are special birds out there waiting for you to revel in them – and also in the knowledge that the pursuit of rare birds is nothing to do with you unless you want it to be. It is a specialised business, with a specialised language. It doesn’t matter scientifically. It is not essential to chase rare birds if you want to be a birdwatcher. It is not the heart and soul of birdwatching. It is not even a question of lowering your sights; it is about choosing the manner in which you enjoy your birds.

  Some of the very best field observers – very good birdwatchers indeed – never chase rarities. They are “local patch” people. Their satisfaction is their concentration on a single place, where they observe the comings and goings of the birds, day by day, season by season, year by year. Bad birdwatchers do this informally; very good birdwatchers do this in minute detail and keep lovingly detailed diaries. Many of them will observe and identify the occasional rarities and do so with glee, but it is bread-and-butter daily observation that enthrals. It is the best of soap operas.

  In other words, some of the very best birdwatchers are more interested in common birds than rare ones. In fact, the notion of common birds and rare birds begins to look like nothing more than a kind of snobbery. Perhaps you thought that there was a hierarchy of birds that takes the birdwatcher on from the lowest of the low – those sparrows, perhaps – to the highest of the high: that first for Britain that is hurled into the country on the back of a howling gale from Siberia and is miraculously spotted by a hawk-eyed observer the second before the poor bird pegs it.

  But that is not the case at all. Just before I wrote these words, I came in from a hard January frost and a feeble winter sun. The sun didn’t do much for me, but it stirred the soul of a dunnock. A dunnock is perhaps the LBJ of all LBJs, the bullish, brownish, smallish, skulking little thing that is about as common as another of his names – hedge sparrow – might suggest. And he, ignoring the cold, was filled with a sudden excitement about the coming of the warmer weather. In that iron frost, he felt the tug of spring; and he sang his heart out as a result. It’s not a great song, compared with that nightingale on Walberswick marshes. It’s not a special bird, in terms of peak experiences; I’d come in telling everybody about my hobby, but I wouldn’t take up anybody’s time with a dunnock moment.

  But there he was against the cold blue sky, every feather picked out by the low winter sun, and he sang his song of spring and gave it absolutely everything. It was a song that made the whole day better. A common bird: a rare moment.

  11. Shirtless Tim and a nice bit of posh

  “See, O Bagheera, they never thank their teacher. Not one small wolfling has ever come back to thank old Baloo for his teachings.”

  Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

  My father gave me a reward when I was able to do my tables, from once two is two all the way to twelve twelves are a hundred and forty-four. It was A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, dated now but recognised as both a classic and a revolution in bird identification. How odd it was to be birdwatching with my bedraggled copy more than 20 years after I had acquired it by knowing that seven eights are fifty-six. Back from Hong Kong, I had to set the divine Karen Phillipps aside, and return to my old friend Roger Tory Peterson.

  I visited odd places, and looked at birds, generally with Cindy, who was by then my wife, and we had fine times and muddled along and saw a few birds here and there. There was always a feeling of being in over our heads, but that was rather agreeable. We visited woods, parks, lakes, the Norfolk Broads. I had what you might call a second Confirmation Bird here. I had read about marsh harriers before, and knew them from the Young Ornithologists Club. I knew they were birds of fabulous rarity: only one or two birds nesting in Britain at secret locations.

  And I saw one. They are unmistakable birds: nothing flies like a harrier. They cruise with wings held in a shallow V – a dihedral, to use the nice technical term from aerodynamics, which I remembered from the cadet corps at school. And, as with my Sri Lankan avocets, there was that sense of amazement and privilege. I wanted to drop to my knees; I wanted to whoop with excitement; I wanted to weep for their scarcity and weep again because they were still here; here, now, in front of me, quartering a field in a remorseless dihedral, performing every now and then a shuttle-cock drop on to some luckless creature of the reeds.

  I was not thrilled because it was a tick, because my list was at a stroke one bird longer. Birdwatching is not trainspotting, and must never be confused with such a thing. Birdwatching is – this harrier was – a soul-deep matter. It was more than beautiful; it was a meeting, and understanding, a linking of myself with the bird and the world. My heart in hiding stirred for a bird – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

  If you think my prose style has suddenly changed for the better, I must sadden you. That last sentence is from Gerard Manley Hopkins. Idiot interviewers are always asking victorious sports stars: “How does it feel?” They reply: “I’m over the moon” or “It hasn’t sunk in yet.” When Hopkins saw his kestrel – for the poem I was quoting is for a kestrel rather than a harrier – he didn’t have any one to ask him: “Father Hopkins, how did it feel when you saw that bird?” (“My son, it hasn’t sunk in yet.”) But he was to tell us anyway:

  Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume here

  Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then a billion

  Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  All of which confirmed me as an English birdwatcher. I bought a pair of second-hand binoculars for 40 quid, and they weren’t bad, ten times better than my hundred-buck racing jobs, anyway. I had come out of the closet as a bad birdwatcher in England: bins, field guide, sense of wonder, sense of both trespassing and belonging, and the habit of taking walks while carrying binoculars. That difficult transition phase from casual, naked-eye viewing to committed walking and binocular-carrying had been accomplished pretty comfortably. And I was ready to move on a stage further.

  Which brings us back to Shirtless Tim and the mighty Tewin Irregulars. What a great cricket team we were. I kept wicket; it was generally agreed that the strongest part of my game was the shouting. Tim was one of our more regular players. It was proper cricket, no jeans-wearing pick-up game. We all wore proper gear: white trousers with a white shirt and white woolly in cold weather. Tim, of course, played in white trousers and a white T-shirt. I don’t recall anyone ever remarking on this, apart from the time when he had got his laundry out of sync and played in a white T-shirt emblazoned with a large aubergine.

  It’s a matey business, playing cricket, and there is plenty of time for talk. Not much, admittedly, while waiting for your turn to bat, because of the ever-precarious nature of Tewin Irregulars batting, but at least in The Plume of Feathers afterwards. And so we talked. Tim wrote, mainly novels for children. He is a person drawn to the north, the cold and the uncomfortable; the warm and the lush repels him. A tent, the farther edges of Scotland and its islands, Scandinavia: such are his pleasures. By no means puritanical, certainly not in his choice of post-match relaxation, he nevertheless has a certain gluttony for austerity.

&nb
sp; He is hugely knowledgeable on an astonishing range of subjects, a great enthusiast for sport, for the children’s books of C.S. Lewis, for combative conversation (“Not at all, Stalin was quite right…”), and for discussing Tewin Irregulars and their failures with a point and vividness. He is also a memorable giggler, which probably explains why his period as a schoolboy Maoist came to an end. He once clean bowled one of the best batsmen who played against us – a man, I believed, who played for Berkshire Second XI. (At village green cricket matches, there is always someone who used to play for somebody’s second XI.) This paragon was homing in on a deeply resented century when Tim inadvertently bowled him a ball that soared skywards from his hand: the biggest, ripest and juiciest full toss ever seen, even at Tewin. The man from Berkshire Twos opened his shoulders to swat the ball away for six with a finely judged contempt. Alas, he missed. The ball landed on top of the stumps. Tim did not punch the air, or whoop, or cheer. He fell to his knees with helpless laughter.

  A good companion, then, and not a man you meet every day. And a birdwatcher. Having established, over post-match pints, that we both cared for birds, it became inevitable, after having shared enough humiliations of the cricket field, that we should go birdwatching. It was pretty clear that Tim knew what he was talking about here, and that I did not. But Tim, with exquisite sympathy, never made an issue of this. He just led, picked the routes, showed me the birds, and acted as if I really knew as much as he did but was too shy to make this knowledge public.

  I can’t tell you how important this phone-a-friend business is, if you wish to go on to more rewarding ways of being a bad birdwatcher. If you have a friend who birdwatches, exploit him or her for all he or she is worth. For a thousand reasons, the friend is likely to be eager to come with you. It is a real pleasure to show people birds, it is a real pleasure to share birds, and besides, it is an excuse to get out and do it when you would otherwise be creosoting the fence.

  Tim took me birdwatching. He knew where to go and when to go: essential skills. He was familiar with certain places, and he knew what to look for in them. He was an experienced birdwatcher. He knew what he was likely to see, and what he was less likely (but hoped very much) to see.

  We went first to Staines reservoir – an intimidating sheet of black water with a wind that sucks the warmth from your body and blasts the flesh from your fingers. I remember my momentary dismay: endless numbers of birds, sitting on the water, and not a single one I recognised. I was overwhelmed by panic. Tim put me at ease with consummate tact; all at once he started to recite a reassuring litany of the most obvious birds. And sanity returned; a pattern emerged; outcrops of knowledge appeared in a landscape of ignorance. Yes, of course, there were great-crested grebes, they just didn’t have their great crests, it being winter.

  Soon I was aware that Tim was able to recognise birds I could hardly see at all, a fractional glimpse, a dart, or a distant dot, and he would tell me the name of a species. Since Tim happens to be a bullshit-free zone – he abandoned bullshit long before he abandoned shirts – I knew he wasn’t showing off or making it up. It is customary on such occasions to remark on the acuity of vision thus displayed, but Tim has terrible eyesight. He wears glasses at all times, and, to see a bird, he has to nudge the glasses off his nose and jam the eyepieces of the binoculars over his newly denuded eyes. (Most spectacle wearers, incidentally, can use binoculars and spectacles together; Tim somehow never got the hang of it.)

  So I couldn’t say: “What good eyes you have.” I was forced, instead, to say: “What a good brain you have,” though I didn’t say it out loud. But I rapidly became aware that Tim was able to process very scanty visual information in a meaningful way, and I was not. This was not because he saw better than I did, it was because he looked better. My sister Rachel lectures in art. She is better than I am at looking at paintings, because she has had a great deal more practice and has given it a great deal more of her mind. We don’t really see the same painting at all: she sees her paintings in the context of a lifetime of acquired knowledge. As Rachel with pictures, so Tim with birds.

  Much as I like looking at paintings, I like looking at birds still more. (I think they have more to tell us.) And like every angst-ridden teenager, I wanted to be better looking. Or at least, better at looking.

  Tim knew some old gravel works where cold weather would sometimes drive the delightfully natty little ducks called smew; and we found them, more than once – a bird I always associate with Tim. At one time, deep in his past, Tim had a girlfriend from one of the smarter parts of Essex, insofar as these exist. She was, in fact, a nice bit of posh from Burnham on Crouch. Tim had come out of this affair a much wiser man: he knew exactly where you could find short-eared owl in winter.

  And so we walked one whole and glorious and bitter winter day, from Bradwell nuclear power station to Burnham on Crouch, looking not for bits of posh but for short-eared owls. And all kinds of other stuff as well. For that is one of the constant pleasures of birdwatching: you never know what you will see. The usual stuff is usually there to enjoy, and as for the more special things, they might come, or you might be thrilled by something totally unexpected and unlikely: the Ganges dolphin rule.

  Thus Tim and I found red-backed shrike when hunting for smew, and white-winged black tern when hoping for black tern (which we got as well). But perhaps that walk towards Burnham on Crouch was our definitive expedition. For there, at least half a dozen times, we saw the not-at-all elusive short-eared owl, in plain view, there so that we might admire his cross expression as he squatted on the ground, or his marvellous, balanced, floppy-winged flight, poised for ever on the edge of a stall. Tim was my Gandalf: a magician who could pull birds from the air, from the trees, from the ground, put a name to them, and change my relationship with them for ever.

  The walks came to an end when Tim moved to Dorset. I have scarcely seen him since those days, though I send him good vibes on a regular basis. Last time we talked, he spoke with the greatest distaste of birdwatchers and, by implication, birdwatching. They were all ignorant fools with overpriced optical glass who blundered around not knowing what they were looking at. These days, he only looked at invertebrates, and was particularly hot on butterflies and moths. A man not without perversity, as I have said.

  But he showed me birds all right. There was nothing prissy about it. Nothing difficult, either. We didn’t sit in a hide staring at nothing; we didn’t stand for hours peering through a telescope. On the whole, we went for a walk, and we talked just about all the time: the time the Tewin Irregulars captain ran out four batsmen in a single over, the time that man from Berkshire seconds was out to Tim’s full-bunger, the impossibility of anyone ever taking over from Liverpool at the top of the tree of English football, Moby Dick and Aslan, girls from the past and from Burnham on Crouch. And birds, birds, birds: where to find them, how to know them, birds we have known, birds we have missed, birds we have shared, birds we have never forgotten. And we generally had a pint at lunch and another pint or two when we got back to town.

  I was a bad birdwatcher still, but a much better one than before. Better, not so much in the extent of my knowledge as in the extent of my enjoyment. Tim lifted the limits I had set myself, and showed me things that lay far beyond. He turned what had been special birds into birds of daily delight, and he turned birds of mythology into birds of occasional and glorious reality.

  As a boy I turned the pages of bird-books looking at birds I knew I would never see. Now I see birds I have seen and birds I may yet see. And by turning the birds of myth into birds of feather and blood, I have not taken away from them their sense of mystery. Au contraire.

  Tim was a good birdwatcher, a bloody good birdwatcher, but not that good. His was not the sort of talent that was out of my reach; and he was always, with great generosity, sharing his knowledge, helping me to try and catch up with him. Not by instruction so much as by example. He shared some great and glorious birds with me – and did so as if it were the most n
atural thing in the world.

  12. And all that jizz

  One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.

  John 9:25

  It’s easier to cover England than any other football team. When I am writing about an England game for the Times, I know all the players. I know what they look like, I am familiar with the way they move. If I see someone with a fancy haircut playing a 50-yard ball from somewhere out on the right-hand side of a pitch, I know it is David Beckham. I don’t have to see his number. If I see a stocky chap making a rapid, scuttling run up near the front, I know it’s Michael Owen. I know the formation England play in, I know the habits of the individual players, I know their haircuts, I know the way they run, what kind of body-shapes they make. It’s easy. It’s less easy with club sides, though Manchester United are familiar enough and so are Arsenal. After that, it gets harder: I simply don’t watch enough club football to have the knowledge. My colleague Matt Dickinson, the Times football correspondent, knows all the top clubs about as well as, if not better than, I know England. It would be highly to his discredit if he did not. It is, after all, his job.

  The other day, I had to go to Northampton to cover an FA Cup match. Yes, they were playing Manchester United. Now understand this: all the Northampton Town players looked different. They had different haircuts, different faces, different skin colours, different ways of moving; they were of disparate heights and diverging body shapes. To make it even easier to tell them apart, each helpfully wore a different number on his back. I had a team-sheet, football’s equivalent of a field guide. The diagnostic feature of each player is his number; the sheet said which number applied to which man.