How to be a Bad Birdwatcher

by Simon Barnes

But most birds disperse. Some species form big winter flocks, there being safety in numbers; often, too, there are large food resources that large numbers can exploit. Privacy is put away for another year. The idea of winter is to hold on for another go at breeding, so you need to go where the food is. Birds move across the country to various favoured places.

  And, of course, some birds leave altogether and fly elsewhere, to somewhere warmer, but not for the sake of the warmth. They go for the food. Meanwhile, birds from further north come south to stay with us for the winter: the estuaries are full of waders that have flown down from Scandinavia and elsewhere to use the rich resources that lie under the mud at the river-mouths. You can see them in mind-numbing numbers, like passengers waiting for a tube train, till a bird of prey makes a pass over them and puts them all into the air – so many, you can’t believe that they don’t keep bumping into each other and knocking each other out of the sky.

  Autumn brings all kinds of oddities: when migration goes wrong it can go disastrously so. Most perish in the sea and the wind, but the odd straggler makes it here from North America, from Siberia, from elsewhere, and these windblown vagrants bring joy to the twitchers. Autumn is their favourite season: a restless time of movement and regrouping; preparation for the long period of hanging on.

  And then the hanging on ends and overlaps with the beginning of the new spring. And as the spring progresses, the birds that left us in the autumn come back to fill our hearts with delight. For me, the first house martin that comes back to my house is like an airport meeting – that unbelieving first sight, that moment you knew was coming but hardly dared to believe in. Instead of the embrace by the abandoned luggage trolley, I tend to bellow and call for the family: Come out! Look! See who’s come home!

  And the martins will build their nests under the eaves, and, if it’s a dry spring, I will water the ground in front of the house so they can find enough mud to make their own little cup-shaped houses, and I will watch them spinning around the house in a dizzy carousel as they sort out who is going to live where. And then they mate and breed and fly around the house making their little farting calls to each other. And they will breed again, in a good year, and in an exceptional year once more: so that sometimes, when autumn is here, I see as many as 80 line up on the telegraph wire. Funny. There weren’t that many in April. And they chatter to each other, no doubt asking the way to Africa, and you notice that there are not quite as many as there were last week, and then one day you say: bloody hell, I haven’t seen a martin for more than a week. Spring is gone, autumn is here.

  I have been to Africa many times, and have seen the air full of swallows: European swallows, our swallows, swallows that might have nested in your garage. And African birdwatchers have the cheek to say that swallows are African birds that happen to breed in Europe. We say that they are European birds that happen to spend their winters in Africa.

  This migration thing is something to get your head round. I have a special love of swifts. They are among the last arrivals: they don’t come until spring is an accomplished fact. You know the season is at its height when the swifts are here, flying in on sickle-wings. They will breed here and the young will learn to fly, and eventually they leave their nests. They take to the air as fish to water. They feed on the wing, sleep on the wing, live and have their being on the wing. They are the most committedly aerial of all birds. They even copulate on the wing: body to body, tumbling over and over, through thousands of feet; a must for anybody’s reincarnation wish-list.

  In July, the young birds take to the air like hooligans, and fly about screaming hysterically at each other; in mad circles, in wild forays down the main streets of towns, in spirals so high you can scarcely tell if they are birds, let alone swifts, but all the same, you know them for what they are. Only swifts love the sky that much, and seem to be loved back by the sky in return.

  And after filling the air with the wild delight of being alive, they are gone, as suddenly and as dramatically as they had arrived. They live off the small creatures that fill the air: insects, parachuting spiders on lengths of silk, all the tiny beasts called aerial plankton. And you can’t find that sort of stuff in this country in the winter, so off they go: south, for warmth, company, food.

  And as they reach their homes in southern Africa, they bring joy of a different kind. They come surfing in on the weather fronts, high, high above, with a screaming you can hear but distantly, if at all: little familiar specks in an altogether unfamiliar sky of blue-black fury. It is as if they are towing the rains behind them: and Africans rejoice at the sight. The rainbirds are here, the rains are not far behind; blessed relief from the heat and the fierce flashbulb light is almost upon them. The end of what old hands call “the suicide months” is here and it will soon be the time of cool and comfort and growth. Wherever swifts arrive, they bring good news. The best.

  Time matters. Go to Minsmere in spring to see the birds breeding, defending territories. See the fluffy chicks – is there anything quite as charming as a new avocet, with its tiny retroussé beak? The Scrape, the most famous part of the reserve – the place where you find the avocets – is teeming, teeming with food, teeming with birds eating it and using it as fuel to breed. Go back in autumn and the avocets are gone, and other odds and sods drop by, some for a long stay, others to refuel on their way elsewhere. And in winter, there are times when the Scrape is untenanted: once I saw nothing but a crow on this, the most famous bit of habitat in British birdwatching. But in the spring, the wet meadows known as the Minsmere Levels are pretty quiet; in winter, they are crowded with gulls and geese, thousands of them. If you go looking for birds, you need to understand about place and about time.

  And as you begin to understand time, you begin to understand the rhythm of the year as the birds understand it – as the birds live it. Understanding time is not just the key to seeing more birds. If you understand the year as a bird does, you have taken a step outside the human narrowness of vision. As you understand a bird’s vision of time, you find you have begun to understand how the earth itself lives and breathes.

  17. I spy with my little ear

  Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

  The Tempest

  My father rang me the other day. “Teacher!” he said. “Teacher, teacher, teacher!” And I was filled with a complex delight: pleasure in his pleasure, pleasure in the sharing, joy in the coming spring, and the special joy that comes from a teacher-pupil relationship.

  But he was not addressing me as teacher. He was imitating the spring song of the great tit. When winter sends a day of unexpected brightness, of unseasonable warmth, then a great tit finds his juices stirring, and instead of giving his usual contact calls and alarm calls, he will burst into a song. It is not a great song, as these things go, but it is bright, strident and optimistic; and it comes wonderfully early in the year. It is winter’s death-knell: and though winter takes a long time in dying, its fate is sealed from the moment the great tit sings.

  The call is brassy, disyllabic and clear – a strong stress on the first syllable: teacher, teacher, teacher! Great tits have a huge range of song and call; one of the important rules of birdwatching is that, if you ever hear a bird-sound you have never heard before, it’s a great tit. But that teacher-teacher song is utterly characteristic and quite unmistakable.

  They sing teacher-teacher because it is spring, but that is not the precise reason why they sing. They sing because spring is the time for breeding. And many birds hold the belief that the best way to breed is to claim a territory, woo a mate and defend both against allcomers. And many of these birds believe that the best way to do so is in song.

  Sing out! It is a challenge, a plea, a bit of showing off, a bit of passion, a bit of lust, a bit of joy, a bit of fear. And note this: each species sings in its own way. They do this for the same reason that (most) birds look quite different: to tell each other apart. A great
tit is not trying to chase away a blue tit; they are not competing for the same things. Still less is it trying to woo a blue tit. A blue tit’s song is distinctive – thin and rather hurried. A great tit’s song is big and noisy beside it, and many great tits have a number of variations. There is evidence to suggest that the more variations you have, the sexier you are: that a male with a fine repertoire will get the female he wants, the territory he wants.

  It follows, then, that humans, whose lives are dominated by ears and eyes, rather than nose, will be able to listen and come to some kind of an understanding of all this. And it is true. You can tell one bird from another with your ears. So let me tell you about a young entomologist lying in a tent in the middle of Africa wondering what the hell was keeping him awake. He had to know. Nobody could help him, for all that he was part of a scientific party. And so, haunted as never before, he resolved to find out. It was some years before he was able to put a name to the sound that started his lifelong pilgrimage. And it wasn’t a bird at all. It was a tree hyrax: a mammal, a thing a bit like a guinea pig, except that it is confusingly related to elephants. And it makes the most ungodly screaming sound that rises in pitch and intensity and speed until it reaches a wild rhythmic climax. I know; I have heard recordings that the said entomologist made, and I have heard the hyraxes for myself on the rim of the Ngorongoro crater. It was wacky enough for me, knowing where this mad sound came from; as a nameless sound of the night, it filled a young entomologist’s entire soul.

  The entomologist was Bob Stjernstedt, and as a result of the seed planted in his ear by the insane din of the tree hyrax, he has devoted his life to the sounds of African birds. He had to do it the hard way: hear a call, and then identify the bird by visual means. He has made tape recordings of species all over the continent, using a parabolic reflector he made himself. He specialised in Zambia, where he lives. And it was from Bob that I learned how to listen. Bob is said by some to be eccentric, but I would face a charging lion with him. In fact, I have already done so, but that must be a story for another day, preferably around a campfire with a bottle or two of Mosi beer. Far more frightening, I once faced a charging train with him on a single-track railway bridge over a river in Wales: not a good moment.

  But Bob gave me ears. What would you sooner be: blind or deaf? Discussion point in sixth-form common rooms across the land; but in a way, most of us are already both: nature-blind, nature-deaf. This book has an evangelical purpose as strident as a great tit’s song, and it is to hand you, dear reader, the chance to throw off this blindness, this deafness. I have written a lot about being bird-aware, about bringing birds into your life by acquiring the habit of looking. A small understanding of what you see goes a long way – telling one bird from another adds to their meaning and their beauty.

  It is the same with sound. In a sense, it is a whole new sense I am offering. Instead of hearing a pleasant din, I am offering you the chance to identify the instruments of the orchestra, come to terms with the themes and the leitmotifs they play, and to have a decent stab at understanding the mind of the composer.

  It is also the most wonderful conjuring trick, deeply satisfying to acquire. You walk beneath the canopy of a patch of wood in the spring. The birds, busy and involved, are all out of sight. But they sing: robin, you say, blue tit, great tit, song thrush, blackbird. They are as distinct as the voices of your nearest and dearest, people who do not need to say their names on the telephone. “Hello, it’s me,” says the song thrush.

  You thought that great-spotted woodpeckers were unusual; but, once you learn their pik-pik contact call, you know they are all around us, more or less wherever there are deciduous trees – high, busy, invisible. And by knowing the birds from their sounds, it is as if you had plucked them from your sleeves; as if, walking through a loud but empty wood, you had waved a wand and filled it with creatures of beauty and wonder, colour and perfection. You feel something beyond the pleasure of the magician; almost the pleasure of the creator, as if these birds that sing are somehow part of yourself.

  The chorus swells from January until it reaches its crescendo in mid-May. And in March, you will hear another disyllabic harbinger of spring: not teacher-teacher but chiffchaff, two syllables of equal weight: chiff… chaff… chiff… chaff… , a somewhat monotonous song, but a great one for all that, because it means that the first of the migrants is here; the first big traveller has landed and is ready to claim territory and breed. And soon the others are following thick and fast. One of the annual great moments is the first willow warbler, that gorgeous, sibilant descent down the scale. It has flown in from southern Africa: an awfully long way for an awfully small pair of wings.

  And yes, you may remember that I was talking earlier about the way in which willow warblers and chiffchaffs are almost impossible to distinguish; and that experts can be fooled, even when the willow-chiff is a bird in the hand. But hear them sing: they might as well be an eagle and a humming-bird, they are so different. And suddenly, all those identical-looking little browny-olivey birds can be told apart: the answer is not in your eyes but your ears. Cetti’s warbler: look it up – it seems far too hard a bird for a bad birdwatcher. But their song is wonderful, loud and utterly distinctive. Go to the right place at the right time, and the chances are you will find your Cetti. You will see him if you have a great deal of patience and/or luck, but you will almost certainly hear him.

  I was at a bird reserve in Cornwall with my father, and we were hunting for Cettis. A trousered lady with barbered hair addressed me pleasantly, if sternly: “I can’t remember what a Cetti’s warbler sounds like,” she said. “Can you help?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have a mnemonic. But it contains an obscene word.”

  She looked at me with a very faint smile: “I’m a medievalist.”

  I gave her a faint smile back. “Me? Cetti? If-you-don’t-like-it-fuck-off.” She thanked me. I had given her a mnemonic that gives the sense of the thing, along with the meaning and the rhythm and the tone.

  And all this I taught my father. I was his teacher-teacher. We walked around his Thames-side reservoir and I made it a new place for him: “Blackbird,” I would say. And he would listen, and nod. Got that one. “Reed warbler.”

  “How do you know it’s not a sedge warbler?”

  “Because reeds stand up straight, and sedge is more tangled. Reed warblers are much more rhythmic. Reed warblers sound more like reeds.” A bit of a tangled way of remembering, but it works. Got that one, too.

  How do you set about acquiring this knowledge? It is harder if you don’t have a guru. I had Bob to open my ears, but he taught me African bird sounds, not necessarily a help, since the incidence of trumpeter hornbill in East Anglia is small. Jeremy Sorensen at Minsmere was an inspiration and did an awful lot to help; but I did most if it myself.

  And it was easy enough. All it took was a bit of mild obsessiveness. I did it with tapes. I listened, replayed and replayed, and spent a lot of time at Minsmere and round about where I lived in Hertfordshire, and I listened. And, haltingly, I began to find my way.

  There are all kinds of resources available to get you started – and the whole thing is about getting started. Once you know half a dozen calls you are up and running. Naturally, the rules of time and place work for sound just as they do for sight; you’ll hear one sort of sound in a deciduous woodland in May, quite another on an estuary in January.

  But get started. I have supplied some contact details at the back of the book, where you can make a decision on what tape or CD to buy. Some of these are for reference: look up the species, hear the call. Others are “atmosphere recordings” which give you a soundscape of birdsong. You can also get things like tinkling waterfalls, crashing waves and songs of the whales, which are supposed to be frightfully calming. These can be pleasant enough: I occasionally listen to CDs of African bush sounds, which take me right back to my favourite places. But there are also instructional tapes and CDs, and this is what you want to start with: a begin
ner’s tape that will give you the commonest bird you will hear from your garden or the park.

  And I listened to tapes, and I walked and listened to birds, and got the garden birds clear in my mind and went on from there, and now my ears are always opened. Last night, a real old din from little owls; and I remembered one night, some years ago, opening the windows the better to hear the most extraordinary concert, one that involved at least three tawny owls, at least two barn owls and half a dozen or more little owls: all, for some reason, excited out of their minds and filling the air with the most wonderful cacophony.

  And today a song thrush, for spring is now upon us out there. The song thrush is in love with repetition: it finds a nice phrase, gives it to you two, three or four times, and then abandons it for something else. They love the familiar, they love the new, just like bad birdwatchers.

  The beginning of an understanding of song and call opens more Alice’s doors than anything else in birdwatching. I used to wait on Hadley Wood station and see how many birds I could identify before the train came, and had a personal best of 18. Almost all recognised on call. I have taken part in bird races, when you try and identify as many birds in a day as possible: and most of that you do with your ears.

  More importantly, in terms of actual science, I have identified birds by sound in the Northwest Province of Zambia, and, in the course of a few days, discovered 55 species that had never been recorded before in two adjoining 30 x 30 kilometre squares. It was a small but useful contribution to the ornithological atlas of Zambia. In a country as under-birdwatched as Zambia, even a bad birdwatcher is better than none.

  Of course, I was with Bob Stjernstedt. What about the time he drove off the pontoon into the Luangwa river because he saw a small brown wader on the opposite shore (that one’s not true, he always says)? What about the time he drove his friend’s new Land Cruiser into the Bangweulu swamp (that one really is true)? What about the time he climbed up a tree to see a nest, fell out and lay out in the bush all night, a place filled with wandering hyenas renowned for their ability to bite the face off a sleeping man, only to walk into a nearby camp the following day covered in blood and casually asking for a beer?