by Simon Barnes
And there they were, over this funny little stretch of water on the rim of the Thames – sleek, elegant, fast, and prone to those reckless headlong dives, masters of the air. If black-headed gulls are the Neville brothers, a tern is David Beckham. So my father had a world of wonder on his doorstep, and I was able to drop by and share it. We had telephone conversations about the arrival of the terns, or the nesting of the pair of swans: local-patch birdwatching.
My mother wanted to buy my father a really special present. She had been ill for some time; perhaps she knew it would be her last present, and she wanted to make it a good one. She asked me to get him a pair of binoculars, and gave me a budget of £250. So I went to a specialist shop (another treasure house) and spent a happy half-hour peering across the road at pigeons and chimney pots and discussing the endless fascinations of optical glass, and I made a hideous mistake. I bought a pair of optically brilliant binoculars. But as with everything else, there is a payback. They weighed about as much as a dead albatross, and were about as pleasant to have around your neck. You can get the same quality in lighter binoculars: but for about two or three times the price. I was pleased with the brightness and vividness of the image, but as soon as I got them home, I knew they were wrong. So I went back and changed them – In Focus is a good firm to do business with – and I went for the exact opposite extreme. I bought a pair of Leica miniatures. They weigh little more than a dead wren and yet the image is stunning, sharp and clear. They are not as big and spectacular as the big jobs – but on the other hand, you’d always take them with you when you left the house.
It was a brilliant decision. To this day, my father scarcely leaves home without them: takes them to the opera, the reservoir, his favourite Cornish walks, and when he comes to visit me in Suffolk. They are perhaps the ultimate binoculars for a bad birdwatcher.
The combination was perfect; the reservoir and the binoculars combined to bring birdwatching into his life – not an occasional treat but as a matter of day-to-day living. And that, I think, is the principal aim of this book: to encourage everyone who picks it up to look about, all the time, every day. Not obsessively scanning, just always aware. Everything else comes from looking. Birdwatching isn’t something you do; it is something you are.
A rum coincidence, then, that within the space of a few years my father and I both became bad birdwatchers in this committed sense of being aware of birds as an enthralling aspect of daily life. Birds became a perpetual topic of conversation – I saw this today, that arrived yesterday, the first I’d seen this year, and I saw something that looked like this, what the bloody hell do you think it was?
Birds are life-enhancing: they bring joy when you see them, and it is a constant joy to share your life with them; and to share that joy with fellow humans.
It would be easy and cheap and inaccurate to say that it was birds that brought me and my father together. No; time did that. Alcohol certainly helped – pints here and shared bottles there.
Bad birdwatching was a shared aim at one stage; more than 20 years later it became a shared achievement, a shared joy. He was the teacher when we began; I was the teacher when we continued – make the old bugger interested in natural history. There are many better teachers, but I was at least there, and always a step or so ahead, thanks to Shirtless Tim and others we will meet in a chapter or so. But bad birdwatchers we were; and part of the joy was and is that it was a shared thing. It was a shared discovery and re-discovery, for we both got better at the same time; I don’t recall any mad oedipal need to make sure I stayed ahead, but sharing my newly acquired knowledge was and still is one of life’s quiet pleasures.
It would have been good enough had it been an interest in trains, but an interest in birds is something different. And I remembered that tern, that pair we saw years ago, plunge-diving into the Atlantic. Back in those days, my father and I would sometimes go for a spot of wild talk, generally over a third pint, or an additional bottle of wine; times when differences and disappointments had been submerged by the companionable glugaglug. We had a thirst, it seems, to find something in common. And often, we would talk about walking the Cornish coastal path, the longest footpath in Britain, and we would say, well, why the hell not?
I remember we once mentioned this plan to an old family friend, a writer named Martin Worth. “We’re talking about walking the Cornish coast path,” my father told him over a vinous lunch. “And that’s where it will end,” Martin said expansively. “Talking about it.”
14. The right place
What a stroke of luck –
Hawk spied above
Irago promontory.
Basho
That reservoir was the clue. Place. It was the discovery of the right place that propelled my father into the life of a bad birdwatcher. Chance opened the door, and he walked through spellbound. All bad birdwatchers who wish to discover birds must discover place. In order to understand birds – in order to see birds – you have to come to terms with the idea of place. In order to meet all those birds in the field guide – the ones that seem to be as rare as unicorns and hippogriffs and cockatrices – you have to know where to go.
Let’s say you have never seen a dipper. Well, it’s not your fault. It’s not because you are too bad a birdwatcher to see dippers. You have read that they like streams, but they are never to be seen on the streams that you walk along. They are never around at that brook in the park; they are never there when you walk the dog along the Thames.
The fact is that dippers are extremely picky about the places they live. What I am about to say sounds obvious, I know, but it is the step that takes you to the next level of enjoyment of your birds. The fact is that you won’t get to see different sorts of birds unless you go to different sorts of places. But birds are creatures of place. Some birds have a broad range of places they like – peregrine falcons like cliffs, but they can also put up with the ledges of city buildings, so long as there are plenty of pigeons for them to eat. Other birds are very specific. Like the dipper.
Mostly, they like fast-flowing streams with plenty of rocks, because they are odd little birds, like big fat wrens, except they have the unnerving habit of flying straight into waterfalls. And, if you go to the right sort of stream, you are almost certain to see a dipper, and if you walk along it for a way, you will see several. You will probably see the same one again and again as he flies away along the line of stream to avoid you – until he runs into the territory of the dipper next door and finds some way of doubling back. Find your stream, and you have found your dipper.
That is why the field guides tell you that they are common; and they certainly are, but only if you go to exactly the right sort of place. I remember visiting Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, a wonderful and holy place. And I had an odd feeling that to complete the sense of perfection, the sense of sacredness of the place, what I wanted was a really nice bird. Not a frivolous wish. Blake, who clearly had never been much troubled by mosquitoes in the night, said: “Everything that lives is holy.” And, strolling around the noble and pious ruins, I observed a shallow, swift-flowing, rocky stream, and at once I thought: “Hullo!” There had to be one. And sure enough, within a couple of minutes, I had my bird: dumpy, brown, dapper, busy. A dipper: right place, right bird.
I used to wonder why I never saw a nightjar. Field guides tend not to over-commit themselves, for the very good reason that birds often turn up in unlikely places. Any open country, you can read, is good enough for the nightjar. True: but you are highly unlikely to see them unless you go to the right sort of open country, the sort of open country that nightjars like very much indeed. Suffolk heathland is one of those places; and there I heard and saw them – two, no three together, just like the 49 bus.
Certain species, then, are pretty specific about what they need. Bearded tits are supposed to be pretty common, but you won’t see them unless you visit a reedbed. And there are certain places that many different kinds of birds like an awful lot, while there are others t
hat they don’t like at all.
Capricious? Not at all. They need to find food, safety and, in breeding times, somewhere to meet and mate, lay an egg or two and rear some young. If a place doesn’t supply those needs, then there won’t be any birds there. You won’t see many birds in intensive arable farmland, for the same reason that you won’t see many humans in the middle of the Antarctic. There’s no reason to go there: nothing to eat, nowhere to be comfortable. Intensive farmland is often and aptly called green desert, and it is no more capable of supporting a nice population of good fat birds than the Sahara. A great deal of the countryside is not nearly as good for birds as your local park, or, for that matter, your back garden.
But go to the right places, and a kind of explosion takes place before your eyes. It is as if all the world turns to birds. I remember the astonishing moment when I first opened the viewing flap of a hide at the RSPB reserve at Minsmere: birds and birds and birds. Many avocets, that’s what Minsmere is famous for, but many others as well. I have seen the common and the uncommon and the ludicrous at Minsmere. On a recent visit, a pair of spoonbill dropped in. Once I saw a flamingo. It was a Chilean flamingo, and it probably hadn’t flown in all the way from Chile; there is a collection of Chilean flamingos not too far away and it was more or less certainly an escapee. But it came to Minsmere; that’s where the grub is. Some places are honeypots, and birds positively swarm there.
All right, Minsmere is a bird reserve, and it is managed specifically so that birds will like it. But it was taken over by the RSPB because the avocets went there of their own accord; it was already a great place and conservation work has just made it better. And there are plenty of other places that birds come to, not because they are managed, but because they just happen to be good places to make a living in.
That is how nature works. An avocet is designed specifically to make a living in brackish lagoons – sieving and slashing through water for small beasts is exactly what its crazy upturned beak was designed for. Make a nice lagoon and if there are avocets within easy commuting distance, they’ll come. The more such places, the more avocets there will be in the world, because they will breed more and their population will expand to fill the resources available.
Honeypots come in a diversity almost as astonishing as that of the birds that fill them. I’ve already mentioned Staines reservoir. Rubbish tips and landfill sites are also honeypots: you see gulls in fantastic numbers; one thing that always stirs the heart is lots and lots of birds. The sight fills you with the feeling that humans haven’t, after all, buggered up the entire planet quite yet. And if you can feel that sort of emotion at a rubbish-tip, what might you feel at a seabird nesting colony? Or a winter gathering of lapwing? Or a high tide at an estuary when it is standing-room-only to huddling thousands of waders?
At such sights, it is hard to worry about identification and specific numbers. These are legitimate scientific concerns for a good birdwatcher. But what thrills birdwatchers good and bad is birds and birds and birds, and what great numbers say about the magic of place. The sacredness of place, if you prefer.
These days you don’t just get field guides to the birds; you can get field guides to the fields as well. There are all sorts of where-to-watch-birds books. Some of these deal with the great sites across the country, or in other countries; others with the sites in a single county. There are some that are just about the birdy places, others tell you about general wildlife sites – places where you can look for nightingale, red deer, clouded yellow butterflies and southern marsh orchids. Get one, get several, make the visits; these books are yet another form of Alice’s key, and will take you through magic doors into sacred places to meet extraordinary beings, often in incomprehensible numbers. Don’t worry about why you never see a barn owl in your city park; make a pleasant journey to a pleasant place where you have read that barn owls can be seen.
Look hard for them, but don’t be too single-minded. Remember the law of the Ganges dolphin. And if you go to a place that’s right for one fine beast, the chances are that it will be pretty good for others as well. Or, for that matter, instead. You’re there to revel in nature, not to hunt for scalps, after all.
Place is mere common sense. If you want to see vast flocks of humans, it is better to go to New York than to East Coker or Little Gidding. If you want to see Romans, the best place to go is probably Rome. People have more chance of making a living and finding shelter in a big city; a better chance of breeding, too. So, if you want to see humans in good numbers, New York isn’t a bad place to start. If you want to see plenty of birds, then Minsmere is a better bet.
The great thing about Minsmere is that it has an awful lot of different places in the one place. Different habitats, to be more technical: saline lagoon, reedbed, sea coast, river, water meadows, heathland, deciduous woodland. You won’t get a spoonbill in the oak trees or a blue tit in the reedbeds; but with a mixture of different places like this, you will get a very high number of species. And people have counted more than 100 in a day; me, best I’ve done is 80-odd in a morning.
As you get to watch birds more, you will get to learn about the places they like. Alas, you can’t rely on birds entirely for their good taste: rubbish tips, as we have seen, are a favourite. So are sewage farms and nuclear power stations. It’s true: the water used for cooling is released out at sea; this comes out a fair bit warmer than the surrounding sea, and so naturally the fish like it. Equally naturally, the fish-eaters like it. Nuclear power stations are great places for seeing seabirds.
Some bird places take a bit of getting used to. It’s hard to get people excited about mud, but the mud of river estuaries is packed with food, and therefore packed with birds – thrilling numbers of long-legged bodies frantically busy trying to feed between tides, or crowded together at high water waiting for the cafeteria to reopen.
But in the main, all bird places are fabulous. The birds make them so. And just as there are thrilling moments in birdwatching, and there are times of quietly rewarding ordinariness, so there are ordinary places and there are extra-special places. Many of these extra-special places are called Sites of Special Scientific Interest. They are referred to by the hissing term of SSSIs. They are actually cathedrals: the most important and treasured part of our heritage. I have visited some that have been damaged beyond repair, I have visited others that are glorious and in their prime. SSSIs are not just for birds; some receive this designation because of their important plant communities, mammals, reptiles, butterflies. SSSIs are there – supposedly – to safeguard our natural wonders that are the heritage of us all.
These, then, are the cathedrals, but there are thousands more places of ordinary everyday loveliness. There are little corners of scruffiness in a disciplined desert of farmland, for example. Everywhere, there are small places that teem with birds of the ordinary and everyday kind. Start, if you like, with the little spinney behind my house. Or the pond on the common, or the scrubby bit of hawthorn on the railway line. Call these places the parish churches, hermitages, wayside shrines, chapels, oratories. Each one is jolly nice on its own, but it is the totality of these places that counts. They are ordinary and they are many, and, without them, there would be no birds and no life worth living for humans, either.
These places are not valuable because birdwatching is a nice hobby. They are important because birds indicate life in its richness and its diversity, and without places where birds are, we would have a deeply impoverished planet. Without such places we are cut off from what makes us part of nature, and therefore we are cut off from what makes us truly alive.
Yes, places matter, and we should visit them as pilgrims and savour the richness they bring to our lives. And also we must revel in the places that are ordinary and local and agreeable, and revel in their ordinary everyday birds: the stroll in the park, the dog-walk, the evening ramble in the lighter months of the year. And, with them, we must revel in the exceptional and the extraordinary. Pay a visit, pay a homage to one of the gre
at cathedrals, and you will feel the benefit of that visit for years to come. It’s a few years ago *now, but I still have that 1,000-strong flock of lapwing I saw on a trip down to Sussex – the air filled with the sound of their oboe-calls; the smart green sheen of their backs so nicely set off against the white; the little curly crests, and that acrobatic, flop-winged flight.
The birds need these special places. They need them almost as much as we do.
15. Bad birds
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Macbeth
But perhaps you have reservations about magpies. An awful lot of people do. Or sparrowhawks, for that matter, but magpies get more hate-mail than any other bird. The RSPB gets more enquiries about magpies than anything else, which is odd considering that we live in a world working up to an ecological holocaust. Magpies, it seems, are taking over the countryside, killing everything in their way. They are incontrovertible proof that the world has gone horribly and irretrievably wrong.
“Oh, there used to be lots of birds here,” people say. “Now we only have magpies.” The magpies are to blame for killing all the nice songbirds. And they don’t even eat the grown-up birds: being sneaky and cowardly and altogether loathsome, they eat the eggs and the babies. They are evil city-slicker child molesters, clad like a cad in correspondent shoes, cackling loudly and always with an air of being up to no good, like Private Walker in Dad’s Army.
Many bad birdwatchers are filled with this anti-magpie prejudice, and they think that something should be done. They think magpies are a bad thing: they are bad birds, and need to be punished.