How to be a Bad Birdwatcher

by Simon Barnes

  Despite this flawless information, I struggled to keep pace. I always do in such situations. In the hectic ebb and flow of a football match, you can’t always see a player’s number. You have to rely on other, less tangible things, things that are not clear from the field guide. You see a player cut in from the left and cross under heavy pressure from a United player; you see the contrasting colour of his shirt, you know that the United man is Phil Neville, but the other fellow’s already crossed, and I have to look for the man trying to reach it, because if he scores, I need to know who he is, and it would have helped if I knew who had given him the cross, and I’ve already missed it.

  Meanwhile, in front of me, there is a man who watches Northampton Town every week, and he knows the name of the cross-supplier. He could recognise him in the dark, knows that’s what he does, how he moves, where he turns up. Matt, who had a seat on the opposite side of the ground, would certainly be doing better than me, because he is much better at watching football matches and understanding the patterns and the individuals who create them. But even he finds it harder to watch Northampton than England.

  So why do I find it easier to watch England than Northampton? Well, I can recognise the players even when I don’t see them properly. I know it’s Beckham even when I can’t see the number, the name, the haircut. I am deeply familiar with the look of him, with the cut of his jib. And if I see a little ginger fellow appear out of nowhere, I know it is Paul Scholes, and for the same reason. I have looked at both many, many times. I have a clear image of them in my brain, I can process all kinds of small and rather vague clues and they combine to give an immediate and totally accurate identification.

  That is what birdwatchers call jizz. Jizz: savour the word. Jizz is a very good word indeed. It’s a word of obscure origin, and not to be found in the Shorter Oxford. Some have suggested that the word comes from an obscure dialect form of the word “guise”. Others have speculated that it is a jovially flawed acronym (like OK for All Correct) – perhaps from the United States air force, and its need to be able to recognise enemy aircraft for General Impression of Shape and Size. Experienced etymologists will tell you that acronyms are almost always guesses. A friend of mine suggested that the word is a contraction of “just is”. As in the answer to the question: “How do you know it’s a lapwing?”

  The wonderful book A Dictionary of Birds claims that the word was coined by a chap called T. A. Coward in 1922, and defines it as a “combination of characters which identify a living creature in the wild but which may not be distinguished individually”. Rob Hume, former head of the Rarities Committee, wrote a book called Birds By Character, subtitled A Field Guide to Jizz Identification. “Lengthy country character,” it says for magpie. “Canny, knowing every trick.” Note the careful avoidance of scientific language, the flight from precision. Identification by jizz is by definition vague and hard to categorise. I talked to Rob about the etymology of jizz, and after we had spoken, he embarked on a Google search for the word as he sat at his desk at RSPB headquarters in Sandy. Alas, his screen was flooded with the most lurid types of porn, and he was forced to abandon his investigations before he got sacked.

  But let’s have another bash at explaining jizz. You get up in the middle of the night busting for a pee. It’s not your own place, you have been royally entertained, and the thing to do is to get to the lav and back without waking the entire house. And God, it’s difficult: hands in front of your face, doors at odd places, the corridor twice as long, or perhaps twice as short as you had supposed. You bash your hip on a table and jar your shoulder on the door, and the desired retreat that is your goal turns out to be down a step that certainly wasn’t there when you went to bed. And then you have to get back – slightly easier, because you’ve learnt the route, but still tough enough.

  Now let us say that the position is reversed. You are the host, you have royally entertained your guest, and once again, you need a midnight pee. You stroll along the corridor at your ease, and back again. You need no light, you take no false step. You see that small metallic gleam: it is a doorknob, it tells you exactly the position of the door, the angle at which it is open; that slightly paler oblong is your destination. You ascend the waiting three steps without ever having counted them in your life, and your hand is there at just the right height to find the door-handle.

  In one house, you can see in the dark; in the other, you are blind. It is a striking contrast, and you had drunk just the same amount in each house. So what has happened?

  Familiarity enables you to process scanty information and interpret it in a meaningful way. You may not be able to draw a foot-perfect map of your own house, but you can read those small clues and walk through the darkened corridors as easily as if it were midday. You can’t tell it, but you most certainly know it.

  That is the principle on which jizz works. Jizz is the art of seeing a bird badly and still knowing what it is. And there is only one way of learning how to do it and that is by watching birds. Not chasing them or ticking them. Watching. Birdwatching is a despised term in some circles, which prefer the meatier term “birding”. But, without watching, there is no birding. You watch, you seek a name, you carry on watching, and from watching you learn. Or rather, you absorb. You see your bird from awkward angles, making curious, ungainly shapes, half hidden by leaves; as we have already noted, birds do not, in the main, line up in profile looking hard left, as they always do in field guides. No field guide can teach movement; you can only learn it by watching. Silhouetted birds, flying across a field – that one with the all-day rowing action is a crow; that buoyant glide and side-slip is a gull. That switchbacking flight is a great-spotted woodpecker. That flap-flap-glide is a bird of prey.

  Once you have begun to get the hang of jizz, you have begun to get the hang of bad birdwatching, and good birdwatching, too. Of course, jizz is never wholly infallible: a bad glimpse of a small white bum disappearing furtively into the bush could indeed be a bullfinch, as you thought, but it might also be a brambling. But looking and absorbing the shapes and sizes and movements – the general vibes of a bird – is how you begin to get the hang of the birds. You get to know them. You get familiar with them; they get to become part of your life, not just as birds, but as members of a species. From the chaos of biodiversity comes a pattern, and from the pattern comes the beginning of an understanding. In a strange way, the bird you have learnt becomes your friend; or, if you prefer, your relation. As indeed they are, being fellow vertebrates.

  You can recognise friends and relations in a way that you can’t recognise strangers. Rob, who wrote the jizz book, likes to compare jizz to waiting on King’s Cross station. Say you ask me to meet your wife, husband, father, mother, son, daughter, at King’s Cross. You send me a description you have written yourself. You send me a photograph. I make sure I learn both. And is that just the same as you doing the meeting?

  It is not. You can recognise the person without reference to description or photograph. You can recognise any one of them from 100 yards through a crowd with their back to you. It is not just recognition; they are part of you. And that is what happens when you begin to get the hang of jizz: the bird becomes part of you.

  You acquire the skill of jizz recognition simply by looking. By looking at birds you have already identified; because, you see, identification is the beginning and not the end of the process – and that is why birdwatching, good and bad, is the exact opposite of trainspotting. Every seeing is a moment of greater understanding. Every seeing makes the bird more fully a part of you, a part of your life.

  And again, I don’t mean this in a sloppy New Age way; I mean it in a hard, no-nonsense way. You can’t recognise a bird by jizz unless it has become a part of your life: until, that is to say, its pattern and behaviour are stored in your brain, ready to be accessed next time you lay eyes on it.

  You start with the common birds – how else could you do it? There are, as I have said, more common birds than rare ones. And understand this
: the hunt for rare birds can’t be done until you know the common ones. How do you know it’s rare unless you know all the other birds that are not rare?

  When I travel abroad to an unfamiliar place, I seek to learn the common birds. The ambient birds, the birds that are always around in towns and suburban gardens. Once I have got the more obvious birds under my belt, I can begin to understand the place where I find myself. I have some kind of grounding. And when you have cracked a dozen of the most common birds and you see something else, well, then you know it must be slightly more unusual than the birds you have already got the hang of. You have a place to start, even if it is a negative one.

  Let’s go back to this country. You see a little bird, and it has the jizz of a tit and yet it’s not like any of the tits you know, and you know blue tit and great tit, coal tit, too, on a good day. And you are pretty certain it’s a tit even if it is a bit pink and the shape isn’t quite right. You know it’s not a great tit or a blue tit because you know those birds by jizz. But something about the jizz of this new little bird is a bit tit-like. Or new little birds, because there was a crowd of them, being very busy and bustling and agile and acrobatic and tit-like in the upper branches of a tree in the park. So you know the first place to start looking is among the tits, and the first place not to look is great tit and blue tit and coal tit. And by golly there it is: long-tailed tit, and you always thought they were fabulously rare. “Unique, tiny, ball and stick shape,” says Rob in his jizz book. And you watch them, and next time you see a group of bouncing, cheeping, pinkish ball-and-stick birds in a treetop you will say: “Aha! Long-tailed tits.” And you won’t have seen them at all well. You will have recognised them by their jizz.

  It is like learning a foreign language. The first couple of phrases are obvious: bonjour, je t’aime, pas du tout. The next stage is hard, but once you have got a pattern and you can make sentences, you are away and talking. And even if your accuracy is at times suspect, you can normally make yourself understood. Bonjour, je suis un spectateur des oiseaux tres mechant.

  Jizz is the key. Jizz is the beginning of understanding. Woody Allen famously described himself as being “at two with nature”. Once you start recognising birds by jizz, you move away from that terrible duality in which we live; a world with humans on one side and everything else on the other. You begin to find some kind of unity; you begin to understand – not just with your mind, but with your gut and your heart as well – that there are no hard and fast boundaries. You, a mammal, can reach out and have some kind of understanding of these feathered fellow vertebrates. It is one of the most liberating feelings on earth.

  The more you look, the more you see. Every passing minute is richer, more rewarding. The more birds you see, the more birds you see. When you recognise the patterns of daily life among the birds you know, you will recognise something that breaks that pattern. Those familiar starlings, feeding in a gang on the ground, quarrelling companionably with each other. And in an instant they are all gone: Why? What?

  And you learn to look up when this happens, and behold. You are rewarded – a sparrowhawk swerving away, missed its pass, the starlings were too fly this time. Once you understand the ordinary, you prepare the way for the exceptional. Once you have begun to savour the quiet joys of everyday birds, you have made yourself ready for the peak experiences. You are ready for that combination of the gloriously normal and the staggeringly unexpected that is the heart of the life of the bad birdwatcher, and the good.

  Followers of Zen have a saying: when the pupil is ready, the teacher will come. When the birdwatcher is ready, the jizz will come. It comes slowly and cautiously, and it must be cultivated. It is not acquired consciously; it is just that the more lapwings you see in flight, the more you will recognise their floppy-winged passage through the air. Jizz: if you can let the birds come to you, the birds will stay with you.

  13. Treasure houses

  Hardly had we started when we came across signs that there were indeed wonders awaiting us.

  Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World

  The best thing about Streatham was the 49 bus. It used to take me away from Streatham, away to the great treasure house of the Natural History Museum. In those days before paedophiliophobia, I used to take the enchanted bus there every Saturday at the age of nine and ten, and gaze on stuffed birds, stuffed mammals and the bones of dinosaurs. That apart, Streatham didn’t have much to recommend itself to a boy birdwatcher. Admittedly, Naomi Campbell was born in Streatham, but too late for me. At any rate, there was no one like her at Immanuel Church youth club.

  But, despite the obvious disadvantages, we lived there for years. It was not an address that suited a media mover-and-shaker like my father – perhaps that was one of the reasons why the “bourgeois” jibe was so effective. But it was a nice house, and my father, by means of trial and error and serious thought given over to labour-saving, had made the garden a very pleasant place for sitting and drinking. Streatham Common was a hundred yards away, and there he would go for a walk with Duff, an important part of his daily routine.

  When the birdwatcher is ready, the birds will come. Two or three years after I had returned from Hong Kong, my parents moved. My mother, by the way, wrote for television. She wrote one series about the museums, collections and stately homes of Britain. It was called Treasure Houses.

  By the time of the great move, my father and I were pretty matey. I had made a fair success of Hong Kong, despite the somewhat unfortunate start of getting sacked within six weeks by the South China Morning Post. I managed to establish myself as an effective pan-Asian freelance journo, and on my return I began to write for the Times. The old tensions between us had gone.

  And so the departure from Streatham took place. My parents went to live in Mortlake: nice shops, the river, friends in the media close by, a much more comfortable shade of bourgeois. Duff was, alas, no longer with us, but Floss was now in situ, and my father took her for walks along the river. Once, while doing so, he took a small path that led off the towpath. Like Alice, he entered a magic world, an open-air treasure house.

  This was Lonsdale Road reservoir, sometimes known as the Leg o’ Mutton reservoir – a small stretch of still water that lies just where the Hammersmith Bend unwinds if you are rowing in the Boat Race. It is overhung with trees, but has sudden vistas of open water. And on that water come birds. One of the great things about open water is that there is nothing to stop you seeing the birds; if they are there, you can see them. They don’t keep getting hidden by leaves; they generally don’t fly off the second you are in binocular range. On the water, they feel safe: they know you can’t get them. The snag is that they are often quite a long way away, as I had discovered when staring at Staines reservoir with Shirtless Tim, looking at a distant black blob that would certainly be a scoter if it was quarter of a mile closer. But this stretch of water is tiny, 50 yards across at the most, and the birds came there in disproportionate numbers: cormorants, herons, swans, geese and lots and lots of ducks.

  There is a lesson to be learnt here and we shall explore it later on. But enough to say that my father was filled with delight. This was birdwatching as it ought to be: you go for a walk, with the dog, and there the birds are. He had a pair of binoculars, which he had bought when visiting me in Hong Kong, for no better reason than he thought it might be nice to have them. They were not much better than my horse-racing glasses, but they did indeed bring the birds closer.

  And so, when I paid a family visit, I would bring my binoculars, and my father and I would walk round the reservoir together, and he would show me a crowd of shovelers with such pride you might have thought he had brought them all in himself. Thanks to Shirtless Tim, I was slightly ahead of him, and so I began to take the lead.

  “Isn’t that a female mallard?”

  “I don’t think so,” I would say. “For my money, it’s a female gadwall. Observe the white speculum.”

  Nice word: I was impressed, anyway. A speculum is the dist
inctive patch of colour on the wing; the mallard has a blue one, and the gadwall white, male and female both. My father had never observed a speculum before; now he always does. It is a small part of that process of establishing an understanding of the birds. Not just birds: it was a rare thing we were doing. He had given me birds, now I was giving birds back to him. He was also, rather splendidly, able to overlook my occasional bouts of bossiness about speculums and so forth.

  There were rafts in the middle of the reservoir. A lot of birds like them: surrounded by water, you are safe. And better than that, if you make your nest on a place surrounded by water, none of those hateful, land-bound creatures is going to eat your eggs or your chicks. You’ve got away from the bloody rats, in short. A raft is a Safe Place, and all animals, humans included, have a special feeling for Safe Places: a nice house in Mortlake, a nice raft in the middle of the water.

  The rafts were put there by conservationists for that very reason; and plenty of birds made use of them for roosting and for nesting. But I knew that there was one bird in particular they wanted. And a season or so later, they came.

  You may have seen tern without noticing them. Plenty of people have: seagull, they say, as a white bird flies past, a white bird with a black cap. But the habit of looking, the habit of watching, turns those seagulls into birds of spectacular beauty and perfection. I remember seeing them for the first time with my father, years before, when walking along the cliffs in Cornwall. We had acquired the habit of half-hearted, naked-eye birdwatching as we walked. I remarked that here was a pair of black-headed gulls. Instantly, they stopped dead in the air, hung there for a second and then arrow-dived into the sea. They were about as much like seagulls as Concorde is like a jumbo jet.