On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  Now, back to the marsh. It’s divided and boundaried by dykes, most of them unjumpably wide and fairly deep, especially when it’s been raining. The far boundary is maybe a couple of hundred yards – sorry, about a furlong – from the river. The left-hand side of the marsh is wet, very wet in winter, with soggy glades of sallow where the deer like to lurk. It gets drier and more open as you proceed to the right. The dyke on the furthest boundary runs approximately northwest to south-east. Another big dyke runs straight though the middle, passing through a culvert at the crossing. This is the point at which the tractor-driver needs to keep a good track.

  Morning ride. A weasel crosses our path: what luck! If not for the rabbit.

  A pheasant has two ploys for evading predators – for saving its own life, if you like. The first is to lie doggo: to keep very still and quiet and hope to avoid being noticed. But if the predator gets close, the pheasant brings in the second ploy: it leaps into the air with a loud clatter of wings while yelling at the top of its voice. This makes you jump: it’s supposed to. It startles you for about half a second, maybe even longer, and that gives the pheasant time to get clear. They are ground-dwelling birds, but they take to the wing to avoid the creatures that can attack them on the ground.

  A driven shoot is designed to disable both those defensive ploys. A line of beaters walks across the land, blowing whistles, waving flags that make a great whirring noise and hollering: a deliberately fearsome prospect. The pheasants are unable to lie still in such circumstances: they must take to the air. Once they have run the gamut of their defensive options the guns start to speak.

  Every fortnight throughout the season, the local shoot do their stuff on the land adjoining ours. It’s very close and very loud: such is their right. So long as they remember to give us notice (there have been a couple of unfortunate and dangerous lapses), we can keep the horses in their stables for the morning, but it’s still a pretty exacting experience for them.

  Eddie knows what to do on shooting days: he’s up and ready and as soon as the guns begin, he’s out there to talk to Molly. Molly found trust – at least trust of male humans – a difficult matter until she met Eddie a few years ago. Something in Eddie’s uncomplicated affection for her; perhaps also something also in his vulnerability. Horses read human body language better than humans can; it’s their primary means of communication, after all. Eddie had spent a lot of time with her, doing work with her on the ground, and riding her till she got too old and stiff for ridden work. His affection for her has continued uninterrupted.

  So on a shooting morning, Eddie is at Molly’s stable door, a calming presence, saying kind words: ‘It’s all right, Molly, don’t worry. They’ll stop soon.’ And Molly comes to the door – a pony who once found it hard to give tokens of affection – and nudges him with her big nose.

  Fact: they release 40 million pheasants in the countryside every year. Pheasants are introduced birds; in natural circumstances they would be no closer to us than the Black Sea.

  There was a sustained hammering of gunfire just behind the stables. I saw a cock bird fly across the horse meadow in a great bustle of wings: a bark from a gun and the bird continued at right angles to his chosen path: straight down. Is that the charm of this strange activity, then? Making a horizontal line into a vertical: at one moment flying as eagles and angels do, the next moment, falling like a pudding, or Lucifer? Perhaps the pleasure of shooting lies in this geometry: in the intersection of one line with another.

  Was that the whistle? The whistle that marks the end of the drive? Let’s hope so. The cock pheasant was cooling in our meadow.

  The figures were in view now, the dogs working the ground with mad enthusiasm. Yes, that was the whistle all right: all over.

  Shouldn’t there be an element of risk in a blood sport? In any sport worth doing?

  But hush.

  ‘Morning!’

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘All right if I—’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  And the black Lab, fit and busy but still well upholstered as a Labrador should be, entered our field and snuffled about madly for a moment till he found his bird, mouthed it and scampered off towards a great hand full of praise and love.

  ‘You all done now?’

  ‘We’ll shoot the other side of the farm after lunch.’

  ‘Have a great rest of day.’

  Eddie and I turned the horses out. The season’s first shoot was over.

  ‘Well done, Molly. Good girl.’ And he undid her head collar, a trick he had recently mastered, and off she went to graze.

  ‘She’s a brave girl too, Eddie.’

  ‘I know that.’

  The other half of that partnership is not without its brave moments.

  There it was again.

  Dapper, glidey, more slender than a buzzard.

  Stay in view, stay in view!

  A half-turn, now cruising at right angles to its former track, caching the sun with a hint of glowing coal, the embers of a fire not quite gone. And the tail, sure enough: deeply forked.

  End of mystery.

  Assuming it was the same bird, of course, but I bet it was. It was a red kite. The bird was once extinct as a breeding bird in England, pushed back to a diehard population in Wales. Then came a reintroduction programme that began in 1989, and it has been so phenomenally successful that a counterblast has taken place: too many, numbers out of control, reckless project, fostering of glamour species, conservation gone mad, etc etc. Ecologists talk about the carrying capacity of the land: the ability of an environment to sustain a population. More recently, people have begun to talk about the cultural carrying capacity: the number that can live in a place before people turn against them. That backlash has happened, at least to an extent, around the Chilterns, which have become England’s red kite heartland.

  The kites have spread from there because there’s food. That’s how ecosystems work. If you provide the right kind of food, the creatures that eat it will thrive. Our bit of marsh provides shrews: barn owls prosper. And kites thrive on death.

  There’s some artificial feeding going on. Some humans like to see kites and encourage them with butchers’ scraps. The Welsh population was artificially fed when it was down on its uppers: I remember years ago watching a dedicated lady hurl a series of grisly morsels to a waiting roost of kites – and then she took a collection from the assembled birders for the upkeep of the local church.

  Red kites used to be London birds, back when there was plenty to scavenge in the capital, including the heads of traitors on London Bridge. These days kites do best on roadkill. And as they spread out from their original reintroduction site, they discover that we don’t bother with tarmac in East Anglia. Instead we pave our roads with dead pheasants. Here is an opportunity, and the kites are coming in to take it. They have spread into North Norfolk, where they now breed. There is also a winter roosting site that attracts up to 30 birds at a time. There is pretty convincing evidence that they are breeding in Suffolk. And if they’re not already breeding round our part of Norfolk, they will be soon.

  Pheasants are reared in pens in vast numbers. They then get turned out into the countryside without a notion of how life is supposed to work, and with no parental example to follow. Pheasants have a great reputation for stupidity: but really they’re just naive. They haven’t been brought up proper. And they seldom get a chance to grow wiser: if the cars don’t get them, the guns will. Never mind: another 40 million will be released into the countryside the following year.

  Which is all very strange. Never has a bird profited so much from its ability to die. And now they are helping a long-lost bird to make its return to English life.

  There are pheasants nesting on the marsh. I suspect these are birds that have survived more than one season, birds that have acquired experience and wisdom, and so are able to make a good job of raising young without the help of a gamekeeper. All they have to do to keep going is to ke
ep on our side of the fence. There are plenty of pheasants on the far side to tempt that roving kite to stick around.

  The kite was not a new bird for the marsh. There had been two or three previous appearances. Which means that our list remained stuck on 99, where it’s been for a year or two. Not that I’m a great lister, for all that lists have their charm for us all, especially birders.

  I’ve recorded – seen or heard – 99 species of bird from our chunk of Norfolk. I count flyovers. There has been some fancy stuff, like the four cranes, and once a European white stork. And plenty of less pretentious species, some of which I’ve surely overlooked. I once wrote a book called How To Be a Bad Birdwatcher, and I continue to adhere to its principles. The Marsh List was into the 90s before I realised I hadn’t seen a common gull, which at least made me look at gulls with more energy. I reminded myself that common gulls have wings black-tipped with strong white patches on the black, which are sometimes called mirrors, and added the species to the list within a fortnight. Feeling somewhat embarrassed as I did so.

  Some birders only count birds they can see, which makes no sense to me. I’m better when I can’t see, to be frank: I don’t have a good memory for subtle and difficult visual patterns. I can recognise a reed warbler when it sings and when I see it in the reeds, but I doubt if I could recognise one if it turned up on a fencepost in the middle of a field. Respect (and envy) to those who can.

  A bird list represents three things in combination: the skill of the observer, the hours spent observing, and the richness and diversity of the habitat. As I write these words, I find myself making another vain effort to believe that I have heard a water rail from my window, when it was nothing of the kind. A young moorhen, for sure, but one of the things about a list is that it makes you listen and look. You’re never off-duty.

  And the list (shown in full in the appendix) does show something of the habitat’s nature. A half-decent birder would make a very reasonable picture of the marsh and its surroundings from a quick look at the list. Birds explain place to us, they define it. Like Eddie in contemplative mood, they are the landscape.

  Perhaps 99 is a bad number, but it’s also a thrilling one. It’s a number that asks perpetually: what happens next? That’s a question you never stop asking if you’re tuned in to the wild world. What bird will call next? What bird will fly over? What other treasure will turn up next? And what will happen to the world’s wildlife in these troubled times?

  There’s us and our few acres, anyway. Here we stand, God help us, we can do no other.

  All the same – what’s going to be the old hundredth?

  3

  THE MARVELLOUS NATURE OF ORDINARY THINGS

  Evening chores. From the Barnes’s barn a barn owl erupts.

  ‘Da-a-ad?’

  Three syllables, rising to a question mark.

  ‘Ye-e-es?’

  ‘What’s a barn owl’s power?’

  We were sitting on the marsh again, apple juice and beer. Eddie’s suggestion: you can’t quarrel with his idea of making the most of every last drop of sunshine.

  I had seen a barn owl the previous evening. Just like the time before, but slightly different. Well, not much different for the owl but almost shockingly different for me. Every now and then you see a familiar bird as if for the first time: a startling revelation of the marvellousness that is an ineluctable aspect of ordinary things. It is the sort of thing that Basho was able to capture in a few spare syllables. It is the sort of thing Joyce did with his epiphanies, and with everything he wrote. In Ulysses an ordinary day becomes a vast heroic epic and there is eternal significance in a cup of Epp’s Cocoa, a fragment of seedcake . . .

  It was just like that when I went to the brick barn to collect hay for the horses. As I stood in the same doorway the same barn owl shot like a silent bullet over my shoulder. He had been roosting in the barn during the day. Two things made this moment memorable. The first was that it was near dusk and I was looking up at the barn owl: the whiteness shone out from the surrounding grey as if the bird was lit from within. The second was silence. Even in this rapid escape-velocity flight, the wings made no noise.

  I stood for a moment beneath the flight path, feeling that thrilling touch of closeness: the wild world coming to you, being part of your routine, not as something sought, but as something inescapable and all around you, him getting on with his chores as I was getting on with mine. I disturbed him, sure, but only by a couple of minutes; he was already ready for hunting. They are – savour the fine word – crepuscular creatures, creatures of the margins between night and day. Half-light is their time, the pitchy-black and the stark daylight they swerve.

  To share your dusk with a barn owl: well, that was worth a moment’s pause. Then back down the hill – is the joke wearing off yet? – to put the hay in the boxes in the right portions for each horse.

  As I did so I could hear the soft shriek of barn owl calling to barn owl.

  Morning ride. Blackbird chuckling from the hedges. They don’t mean it nastily. Just good nature . . .

  In certain moods Eddie loves to ask me an unending series of impossible questions. I’ve never quite worked out whether he asks them for the sake of asking them or because he knows that if he asks such questions he’ll have my attention or because he really wants to know the answer. Bit of all three, I expect.

  ‘Dad – what’s a barn owl’s power?’

  ‘A barn owl’s power, Eddie, is silence.’

  I had his attention.

  A barn owl can fly without making any sound at all. The wings of most birds make a bit of a din when they’re in use; you can hear a swan’s wings from more than a half a mile away on a still morning. But a barn owl flies in complete silence. Two good things come from that silence. The first is that the voles can’t hear him coming. The second and greater good is that the owl can’t hear the sound of his own progress. There’s no noise pollution in his ears as he makes his gentle way along the edge of our dykes. That means he can hear the voles, and use the sounds he picks up to locate them with perfect precision. He can hear better than we can, partly because the great disc of his face picks up sounds and amplifies them. I got Eddie to cup his hands behind his ears so that he could hear more clearly the song of a nearby robin.

  ‘And that’s what it’s like to be a barn owl.’

  Sometimes Eddie will fake it when it gets too complicated or I otherwise ask too much of him. At other times the penny drops with an almost audible jingle. He could hear the robin better with his ears cupped: so obviously the barn owl can hear the voles better with his great dished face. I didn’t mention the fact that the ears are fitted asymmetrically, one higher than the other. This enables the owl to get a cross-bearing on the vole beneath and so aids the precision. It was complicated enough. Save that for another time.

  So we discussed the silent pounce, something Eddie has seen 100 times, the owl’s impossibly long white legs extended. ‘And what does he have on the end of those legs?’

  ‘Talons!’

  ‘Brilliant!’

  This is not the first time I have explained all this. The key to teaching a child with Down’s syndrome is repetition. Repetition and encouragement. It’s the same with all children, but it’s about ten times more important for children with Down’s syndrome. You can read that in books. The Down’s Syndrome Association will give you information that tells you all that and a good deal more. You can find it out for yourself by trying to teach Eddie anything, from the movement of the stars to the movements of his own body. I wondered why some of his teachers have consistently failed to grasp that principle.

  Morning ride. On the distant river I mistake a low flight of swans for a boat.

  The Broads is a National Park. But not in the way the Serengeti is a National Park. For a start, it’s not owned by the nation. My family, as said before, owns a few acres of it. Lots of other people own much bigger chunks of it. And it’s not run entirely for the benefit of wildlife: people grow crops
in it, graze cows and sheep, fish its rivers, shoot its skies, live in it, drive cars and boats through it and conduct businesses in it.

  The Park, such as it is, extends south across the Waveney into Suffolk, so the title Norfolk Broads is misleading and has been officially discarded. It became a National Park in 1989, since when it’s been run by the Broads Authority. This has a remit to look after the wildlife and culture of the place and to help the public to benefit from both. It also has the job of promoting ‘social well-being’. It must also labour for the good of the local economy. Not hard to see potential clashes, then.

  The Broads is the driest area of Britain in terms of rainfall, but paradoxically it provides Britain’s most watery landscape: 125 miles of navigable waterways, seven rivers, including the one not far from my back door, and more than 60 Broads, or areas of open water. Most of these are not natural but formed from medieval peat diggings. The biggest Broads are Hickling, Oulton and Barton. The area includes 28 Sites of Special Scientific Interest, which have cast-iron protection in law from any development or damage – so long as no one important wants to develop or damage them, of course.

  The Park extends into a city: the river Wensum flows through Norwich. It includes 2.7 miles of coast. It covers an area of 117 square miles, or 74,872.9 acres, including our few. There are 6,300 people who live inside the Park, including us; it is visited by eight million people a year, who bring in £568 million. It takes in two counties and six local councils. The highest point is Strumpshaw Hill, which stands a proud 125 feet above sea level; the word hill is woefully inadequate.