How to be a Bad Birdwatcher

by Simon Barnes

  There are two separate errors here. The first is that some birds can be good and some can be evil. Birds are not humans. They no doubt have strict moral codes of a kind between themselves. Certain standards of behaviour are expected between members of a species – without them, the species wouldn’t be able to get on, understand each other, mate, raise young. But you simply cannot impose human morals on to non-humans.

  You can teach a dog not to lie on the sofa, but he won’t see that as a moral prohibition. Being a dog and smart, he will work out pretty quickly that it is a bad idea to get caught, that sofas lead to telling-offs. And he will learn either to avoid sofas, or to get off them whenever he hears a footfall. It is a practical, rather than a moral, problem for a dog.

  Magpies scavenge. Of course they do. They are very clever opportunists. They are not squeamish in any human understanding of the term. I have seen them peck open rubbish bags in a hunt for food; our stomach-turning leavings are Michelin three-star for a magpie. They feed on roadside corpses, taking the eyes first as a special treat. They will beak through dog droppings for undigested edible bits.

  All right, yuck. But they are not trying to be humans; they are succeeding very well at being magpies. And yes, they will take eggs and chicks. It is not their exclusive diet; they are omnivores. They take what they can get when they can get it. And yes, I drop this stance of lofty scientific detachment when I see a magpie going for a mistle-thrush nest and when the mistle thrushes, filling the air with a sound like a football rattle waved at the scoring of the greatest goal in history, turn on the magpie in parental fury. “Go on!” I find myself shouting. “Give it to the bastard!”

  But then I am human, after all. The thing we humans find hard to believe is that nature is not there to please us. We are not, after all, lords of nature; we are just a part of nature. One more species, if a rather rum one. Nature is not organised for our special delectation. Much of nature is glorious – that is to say, profoundly pleasing to humans. But plenty of it is – or would be, if we were talking about human morality – pretty horrible.

  But nature is not horrible. Nature is not wonderful. Nature is not cruel. Nature is not beautiful. Nature only is. And it is not our job to change it.

  I saw a sparrowhawk the other day. It came into the garden flying fast and hard at zero feet, turned hard left into the bird-feeder, put the lot to flight, missed everything, and vanished. Wonderful bird; a wonderful moment.

  It makes its living by eating other birds. It likes nut-feeders very much, because these are honeypots for the little birds it likes to eat. You put out your peanuts to help blue tits, and they help sparrowhawks to kill blue tits. Should that weigh heavy on your conscience? Should you stop doing it? Won’t it help the blue tits to get wiped out?

  No, no and no. The blue tits are perfectly capable of making their own decision about the pluses of food-gathering and the minuses of mortal danger. Life is always dangerous for blue tits. They must get food somehow, and it is a fact that bad winters and starvation kill far more blue tits than any sparrowhawk. Or, for that matter, magpie. Or, for that matter, domestic cats: and they, well-fed and pampered, are only killing for the sport.

  Certainly, a sparrowhawk killing can be a distressing sight: a dying bird is a pitiful thing. If you don’t find it heart-rending, you don’t have a heart. I have had many a sad letter from gentle-souled people who have witnessed such sights at their beloved bird-table, and are deeply distressed by the existence of sparrowhawks and the amora-lity of nature. It’s a hard life; most wild lives are pretty hard. But all the same, I’d sooner be a blue tit in a sparrowhawk-filled (and magpie-filled) wood than a chicken in a battery farm. Now that’s what I call cruelty, but I won’t turn your stomach here with tales of cannibalism and the de-beaking machine. Wild birds live a difficult and dangerous life, and that is precisely what they are good at.

  Sparrowhawks are there to be admired, accepted, revelled in for their speed, agility and cunning. Nothing in nature is as good at moving fast through dense thickets, dodging, weaving, tucking in a wing here and turning on a dime there.

  And sparrowhawks are rarer than blue tits, have you noticed? In fact, that is the most significant thing about them. In the same way, blue tits are rarer than caterpillars. In any bit of woodland, there will be far, far more caterpillars than blue tits. Blue tits eat caterpillars – blue tits, if you like, are cruel to caterpillars. They eat an awful lot of caterpillars, and yet there are still more that somehow survive. That is why there are butterflies as well as blue tits.

  So in this wood, with its many many caterpillars, there are many blue tits. But there is only one pair of sparrowhawks, and that’s if you’re lucky. That’s if the wood is big enough. That’s if the wood is big enough to hold enough caterpillars to hold enough blue tits to support the high and rarefied life of the top predator. The caterpillar can manage on just a branch. The blue tit can cope with just a few trees. But a pair of sparrowhawks need a whole wood if they are to survive and raise little sparrowhawks.

  Suppose you have a decent-sized wood, with its many many caterpillars and its many blue tits and its one pair of sparrowhawks. And someone chops down half the wood to build some houses. Well, there will still be many many caterpillars and there will still be many blue tits. But there will be no sparrowhawks. The wood is now too small and there is not a big enough population of blue tits to keep them going.

  Suppose you want to wipe out the caterpillars. Say it has been decided they are a health risk. And this is a big job, because there are so many; but you are at least half successful. So well done, you have killed half the caterpillars. As a result, you will find, to your sadness, that you have inadvertently killed half the blue tits. But you haven’t finished here. You have killed off all the sparrowhawks as well. Every one. Quite by accident. It’s the top predators who are the most vulnerable. The lives of those who eat are more precarious than the lives of those who are eaten.

  It seems obvious that the predators control the population of prey animals; that the sparrowhawk controls the numbers of blue tits, the lion controls the number of wildebeest. But the exact opposite is true. I know it is counterintuitive, but it is the way things are. The number of lions is controlled by the number of wildebeest; the number of sparrowhawks is controlled by the number of blue tits. The vulnerable species in the wood is not the caterpillar, and not the blue tit, but the sparrowhawk. The bigger and fiercer you are, the rarer you are. The more vulnerable you are.

  Which brings us back to magpies. For the same rule applies to them. I don’t know where this myth about “all the songbirds are gone” has come from. When I lived in Barnet, there was a nice little patch of scrub behind our house. In and around it, there were plenty of magpies. There were also, in May, six different species of warbler. This was because it was a nice stretch of scrub with plenty of food and cover for the songbirds. Magpies or no magpies, they flourished, and the magpies flourished with them. The people who said there were no songbirds just didn’t listen. They weren’t even bad birdwatchers; they were just parroting a suburban myth. The place was absolutely heaving with songbirds, and it heaved with magpies as well.

  There are places where songbirds really are in decline: but suburbia isn’t one of them. It is out in the farmland that the problem lies, and it all comes down to changes in farming practice. There’s not so much food lying around, so there are fewer skylarks and fewer song thrushes. And, partly as a result, fewer magpies.

  If you go to a place where there are lots of magpies, it is highly likely that there will be lots of songbirds. If there were no songbirds, there would be no magpies. An animal doesn’t survive for generation after generation by eating up the entire food supply (as the human species is coming to realise). If magpies had really killed all the songbirds, they would also have killed all the magpies. They would have made life impossible for themselves. But there are still magpies, and there are still songbirds.

  Life is no more cruel than it is benign.
Igor Stravinsky once said: “Music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.” In the same way, life is not there to teach us moral tales, or to uplift us with its beauty or to appal us with its cruelties. Life is.

  But, if the non-human world is not always beautiful, and is frequently difficult and distressing, then why do we turn to it? Why are we so keen on its beauties, so enthralled by its diversity? We humans are part of nature, and part of us responds very strongly indeed to the natural world. We are a species that is constantly reaching out to the world beyond ourselves.

  Humans have a very strong affinity to other forms of life. This is not New Age stuff; let me say this once again. It is a matter of hard scientific fact. The phenomenon has been called “biophilia” by Edward Wilson, the scientist I mentioned before when I was going on about biodiversity.

  Let’s go back to New York. If you want an example of the cities’ city, it’s New York; more especially, Manhattan, with its glorious canyoned streets and avenues. And what is the most desirable, the most sought-after, the most expensive address in New York? Answer: Central Park. People flock to that cities’ city, and, if they are rich enough, they live by the only bit of green they’ve got.

  In carefully prepared psychological tests, people, when offered a choice of views of woodland, jungle, urban environments, cityscapes and so forth, have demonstrated a distinct – statistically inevitable – preference for park-like habitat: for wooded savannah, in fact, most especially if there is a nice bit of water. This is precisely the landscape in which humankind first walked upright.

  Humans like to be on a prominence, with a nice view, where they can see the country and feel safe from danger, looking down on the nicely spaced trees and the patch of water below. Landscape architects appreciate this, and the more they can construct a landscape that resembles this ideal, the more the property-men can sell for. People recover better from surgery if they have a window; better still if the window has a nice view of trees and open water.

  In the United States, more people visit zoos than attend sporting events. In our language and our thoughts, we make the sharpest possible distinction between living and non-living; between blue tits and cherts. Children learn to speak with animal stories and animal sounds. The greatest leisure activity in this country is walking in the country; the most popular sporting activities are fishing and horseriding. Britain is a nation of gardeners. We love to reach out beyond our own species; anyone who has patted a dog, stroked a cat, given or received a rose knows that. In fact, I wish hotels would wake up to this idea. When checking in somewhere in the middle of a long trip, I would like to be asked: “Smoking or non?”

  “Non, please.”

  “Cat or non?”

  “Cat please.”

  Just imagine. A long day out there doing my stuff, and back to the hotel: a book, the duty free and, best of all, a cat to scratch behind the ears. It would bring the day back into focus; I would be earthed. It may be possible to construct a world without other creatures to share it, but I’m damned if I’d want to live in it.

  This last couple of hundred years are the first in which humans have seriously considered themselves capable of living apart from nature. The more this notion is pursued, the more hungrily we seek nature. Birdwatching is not a hobby, not a form of trainspotting. It is nothing less than a way of reclaiming our own. Wilson says: “Signals abound that the loss of life’s diversity endangers not just the body but the spirit. If that much is true, the changes occurring now will visit harm on all the generations that follow.”

  A hefty conclusion to reach from the starting point of a packet of peanuts. But an inescapable one.

  16. The right time

  And greenfoot slow

  She moved among

  The sea—ea—ea-sons.

  Robin Williams/The Incredible String Band

  My understanding of birds and their sense of place was enhanced by a year I spent at Minsmere: how could it not? It was one of the great cumulative birdwatching experiences. I was researching a book about a year in the life of the old place (published a decade and more back as Flying in the Face of Nature). I hope the book was all right. I can tell you without false modesty that the research was quite brilliant. It put me on terms of intimacy with exceptional birds, exceptional bird-people and a quite exceptional place. If SSSIs are the cathedrals of the natural world, then Minsmere is York Minster.

  People have often asked what I like best about my year in Minsmere, and I always answer “Tuesday”. The reserve is closed to the public on Tuesdays, to allow the staff and volunteers to get on with more in-your-face conservation activities than is appropriate when there are visitors about. But, very generously, I was allowed to come on Tuesdays, and I thrilled to the pleasures of having the place to myself. And the birds, of course.

  The warden at the time was Jeremy Sorensen, a fellow not without his eccentricities. He is a man with a clever and perverse mind and a great gift for thinking bird: for seeing bird, understanding what birds need and working out how to give it to them. He had an odd relationship with visitors, too. Minsmere these days is a honeypot for people as well as birds; and you can enter a hide and find it full to bursting in the high season. Someone wrote a letter of complaint: there were people in the hide, he said, who didn’t even have binoculars.

  “Good!” said Jeremy. “That’s who we want. We don’t want you, we’ve already got you. People without binoculars are the people we are looking for.” In other words, the future for birds lies with bad birdwatchers. That’s something to bear in mind as we march towards our conclusion.

  Jeremy used to get fed up with the po-faced seriousness of good birdwatchers, whispering speculative identifications to each other at the back of a hide. People always whisper in a hide, not because they don’t want to disturb the birds or the birdwatchers, but because they don’t want to be overheard misidentifying a bird.

  “Look!” Jeremy would say in a sudden booming voice, making everybody jump, “A seagull!”

  But perhaps Jeremy’s favourite tease was to ask his August visitors: “How are you enjoying your autumn holidays?” They would respond in necessary bafflement, and Jeremy would explain that so far as the birds were concerned, spring was over and autumn had begun. In Jeremy’s calendar, summer’s lease hath no date at all. It was his thesis that there were only three seasons: spring, when birds meet, mate and breed; autumn, when they shift from these activities to those of movement and regrouping, essentially a period of transition; and winter. Endless winter in which the birds hang on in the hope of breeding again come the spring.

  As a simplification it is very useful, and the combination of this Sorensenism and the fact that I spent a full year visiting Minsmere on a more or less weekly basis led to a discovery every bit as important as the discovery of place. It was nothing less than the discovery of time.

  Birds do not spend their lives hanging about hoping to be spotted by bad birdwatchers. They have urgent priorities of their own. And at the top of the list is breeding. The aim of every living thing is to become an ancestor; that is what evolution means. If you have bred beings that will survive and breed in their turn, you have made your mark. Your genes carry on. That is why there is joy unconfined for every human who becomes a grandparent. Everything a bird does is centred around the same urge. And so they sing, gather food, fly in great flocks, huddle together on bitter days. All these are methods of getting ready for breeding: steps towards the great goal of becoming an ancestor. If a bird – any living thing – leaves a single breeding descendant then, in evolutionary terms, that life has not been in vain. And it is that urge that dictates all these other matters of place and time.

  When do you breed? First, when there is enough food to feed yourself, for you need to be on the very top of your form to win a mate, hold a territory, build a nest, lay eggs, feed chicks. And second, when there is enough food for your young. So, naturally, you attempt to coincide your breeding wit
h the time of the greatest abundance of food. The blue tits nest when there are most caterpillars, the sparrowhawk when there are most blue tits. For both of them, that has to be spring, and that makes spring the most thrilling time of the year – and it begins far earlier than you dare imagine. If it is a mite depressing to be told that August is the middle of autumn, it is positively exhilarating to detect unambiguous signs of spring in early January: a hard, clear, cold morning after a frosty night and there, singing his spring song with all his heart, is a mistle thrush. The wild song, the courage and defiance of this bird, brings us one of the great moments of the year. January is the season of death – in the midst of it this, the mistle thrush carol of life and hope. I once heard woodlark sing on December 20: now that is a seriously early call for spring.

  The ever-lighter days of the passing winter are filled with increasing signs of spring. “One by one the chorus swells, till it’s a mighty sound,” sing the Incredible String Band in a song about birdsong, and that is what happens in slow motion throughout the spring. It is a process that starts in January (December if you’re a crazy woodlark) and reaches its climax in May.

  When breeding is done – and some birds will go through two or even three broods – there comes the strange autumn time: the great diaspora. Birds don’t sing in order to fill us with joy – our joy is just a rather agreeable by-product – but to attract mates and defend territory. When breeding is done, most have no further need for song or territory, and so they fall silent and the family disperses. Robins are rare exceptions: they will defend feeding territories throughout the winter, and sing to warn off allcomers. That’s why, even in the darkest days, you hear the sweet lisping song of a robin. Remember that: listen in winter, and if you hear a bird singing, it’s almost certainly a robin. That’s the second birdsong you will learn, after cuckoo.