On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  It’s movement that attracts the eye. You are more likely to escape notice if you keep still: and throughout nature this valuable piece of information is shared by both hunter and hunted, as we’ve already seen in these pages. And from the tail of my eye – peripheral vision again – I was aware of movement on the trunk. I turned and looked and there was as charming a piece of magic as you can see in Britain or anywhere else for that matter.

  On the trunk, two treecreepers. I had seen treecreepers at our place several times, always and only on that tree. Once I was with Eddie, and he was delighted by this odd and special bird: a bird doing its damnedest to become a mouse as it crawled in purposeful darts across the acreage of bark. In the first weeks after we had moved in, I heard treecreepers out of sight, lost high in the deep foliage of the ash. Now I had them in sight again: round and round they went, each performing a spiral ascent of the trunk, using those thin, curved beaks to find tiny fragments of life in the bark. They are not vastly rare, but they’re hard to see, being mostly birds of the canopy. That sweet, thin, high voice is normally the only clue: sometimes a jumbled collection of notes as a song, more often as a single sustained note that’s used for contact and alarm.

  I watched them for a good five minutes. Then they vanished, heading back up to the canopy, perhaps to work their way down again. And I remembered that I hadn’t marked the waxwing on our Official Bird List. So I got it out from my desk drawer and turned through all the names of all those British birds. Many of them I would never see on the marsh: Egyptian vulture, Hudsonian godwit, ancient murrelet, dark-eyed junco, magnolia warbler. I wondered how many species on the list had visited the marsh without my being aware of them: birds a crash-hot birder like my friend Carl would have rejoiced in.

  As I was scanning the list for waxwing, my eye passed over treecreeper. And I found, to my surprise, that it had not received its highlighting with the green highlighter. I performed this task, and then did the same for waxwing. Then I counted, and recounted. Yes: 101. I had been on 100 birds for the past year or more without noticing. So there’s a parable: what you seek is often already achieved, already all around you, if you only had the wit to realise it.

  It was also confirmation, if it were needed, that I really am truly appalling when it comes to figures. But that meant we were overdue a celebration. A bottle of Co-op champagne, perhaps. I thought it would be inelegant to inform my email correspondent – he of the muddied narrative – of the fact.

  The champagne was not bitter.

  Jake regards himself, not without pride, as the black sheep of his family. The family in question is called Fiennes; his brothers and sisters are all involved in acting and films and music and being famous. Jake is the creative one. Certainly he is as brilliant and as creative as any of his siblings, but his medium is different. Jake works in land.

  He is manager of the Raveningham Estate that runs not quite next door to our place. The place is owned by Sir Nicholas Bacon, a member of the landed gentry. But not in the diehard old-fashioned sense: he employs Jake, and Jake runs the land for wildlife as well as for profit. The crops are surrounded by high and hairy field margins, full of wildflowers in season – and therefore full of pollinating insects. These generous spaces are surrounded by lofty hedges. Their trimming is timed to produce the maximum crop of berries and other food for overwintering birds and at the same time to provide maximum protection for the springtime nesting. Woodland areas are in season deafening with song.

  Jake and I were bouncing across the marshes of the estate. Jake’s Land Rover was doing the hard work; I was just holding on. Jake was talking about his time as a jackaroo on an Australian cattle station, and how he had to shoe his own horses. Get it wrong and the horse goes lame and you don’t work.

  We parked on a high ridge – a bund – in the middle of the marsh. We were the loftiest things for many miles around. The light was fading fast, but I could still pick out the lapwings that had come to rest for the night: white faces and white flanks allowing them to stand out in the increasing dark. Occasionally one would take off and make a brisk, floppy-winged flight over the others to look for a slightly better, slightly safer place. The occasional reedy call.

  I may not be the best at accountancy, as the treecreepers will tell you, but I like to count birds. Especially, I like to count birds in numbers. Count to ten: then count in blocks of ten. And in this case, when you reach a hundred, count in blocks of a hundred. That made around a thousand lapwings.

  Lapwings do things to my heart. They lift it and they break it more or less at the same time. I remember seeing lapwings in thousands as a boy and thinking nothing of it: oh yes, peewits, jolly good, anything more interesting out there? Now, like most birds that have anything to do with farmland, they have declined horrifically. But here they were present in decent numbers, and that made me happy on a relatively deep level. It seemed to me that there was hope and despair side by side in front of us: and as the lapwing called, it even seemed permissible to hope for victory.

  We sat on into the dark. Jake is not a birder in any conventional sense of the term. He is more of a lander, I suppose. Good numbers of good birds on his land are proof that he’s getting the land right.

  I seem to have spent quite a lot of time sitting in the darkness with Jake in his unheated Land Rover with the windows open, and generally a serious bit of wind blowing in from the Urals. We talked, we were silent, we talked again. And then—

  ‘I can hear them.’

  A moment later so could I: a honking that was gentle and conversational rather than strident and klaxonish. And then, at once, the blank page of the sky was inscribed with the most perfect calligraphy: great abstract swashes and arabesques, lines that zigged and zagged in a series of shallow vees, and with variations on a theme of vee.

  Pink-footed geese. Pinkfeet.

  They come in to join us from Greenland and Iceland, and they choose the bleakest places on our own island to overwinter. Once here, their daily routine is to fly from their feeding places to their communal roost; they’re usually the last of the daytime birds to go to bed. There they were, in their chattering straggles, filling the sky with noise and their own staggering visual presence.

  That’s ten. That’s a hundred, a hundred, a hundred . . . Once again I counted a thousand as they settled into the marsh and disappeared into the darkness, still audibly discussing the salient points of their journey and the merits of their overnighting spot.

  By this time we could barely see the bonnet of the Land Rover and my fingers had been welded onto the binoculars by the wind.

  ‘Do you think it’s time for a beer?’

  As a matter of fact, I did.

  Neck cracking, head turning at wagtail alarm call. Sparrowhawk! Two half-decent birdwatchers, then.

  We still called then cigarette cards – more often fag-cards – but by the late 1950s they were more likely to have come from packets of tea. With a quarter-pound of Brooke Bond tea – loose tea, none of that teabag nonsense – you got a fag-card. It would have diminished their power to call them tea-cards. Mostly they were coloured pictures of wild creatures. They were things to be treasured.

  The playground of Sunnyhill School would every so often become a gambling den, the Las Vegas of SW16. During these times when the craze was running hot and strong, every boy – girls did not take part – was mad for fag-cards. And while there was a fair amount of swapping and general trading, the tone was set by gambling. You set a card up against the wall as a target: any player might flick a card at it, and if he knocked the target card over, he kept it. If he missed, the stallholder kept the card in question. The odds were substantially in favour of the stallholder: here was a Marxist sermon, or perhaps one from the other side. The stallholder had even more of an advantage with Bombsies, in which skill was largely factored out of the game. You dropped a fag-card from a height and hoped it would land on top of a card laid on the ground. Sometimes the dropped cards were pierced with a hole punch in a
n effort to increase accuracy; these were often refused by the stallholder, as being a crooked practice. (There were occasional attempts to rig the flicking game by sticking together two identical cards, thus creating a more formidable missile.)

  I seldom if ever took part in these games, for they went against my temperament. But I loved the cards themselves. I succeeded – rare thing – in persuading my mother to alter her habits: she agreed to purchase Brooke Bond tea. I never had the full set of British Wildlife – though I eventually gathered all 50 Tropical Birds – but I got most of them.

  And what a revelation they were. All those mammals I had never seen. I was able to accept the idea of pine marten and wildcat because they came from Scotland and that might just as well have been the plains of Africa or the surface of the moon. But the creature that truly baffled me was the stoat.

  I knew about stoats because I had read The Wind in the Willows many times over, and I was familiar with the illustrations of heavily armed stoats by the great E.H. Shepard. But the suggestion, embodied in these fag-cards, that stoats were creatures that ordinary people might actually set eyes on . . . well, that was absurd. Preposterous.

  Few children think things out to their logical conclusion. It seemed to me then that stoats were at the same time fictional and non-fictional creatures. They had an existence in the eyes of certain specially qualified people, but not for me. They were beyond my scope. For me at least, they weren’t quite real. They were like unicorns.

  I granted stoats a sort of shadow-reality. I accepted that they weren’t purely imaginary, like dragons, but I knew they weren’t creatures you actually saw – not like the pigeons and blackbirds and the occasional cuckoo that, back in those days, could still be found in the woods at the top of Streatham Common.

  I suspect many of us accept the same kind of limbo and bring it into adulthood. There are creatures that aren’t obviously mythical, in the manner of griffins and hippogriffs and harpies, but which are nonetheless beyond our scope. It was much later in life that I discovered that you can summon many of these creatures from limbo and revel in their presence – and it was the great discovery of my life. Just about every line I have ever written about wildlife is written in the light of that discovery: so that you, dear reader, might also learn how to bring these semi-mythical creatures out of limbo and have them leap and dance and sing before your own living eyes.

  For I have seen stoats many times. Never without surprise and delight, always with that slight sense of seeing a mythical beast come to life. And then, on the marsh, came the most miraculous stoat sighting. I had her in view – not sure that it was a female, but I’m not happy about using ‘it’ for so confiding a creature – for several minutes. I then made a note: whoreson mad stoat. The gravedigger in Hamlet referred to Yorrick as ‘a whoreson mad fellow’: well, this stoat looked madder.

  She danced for me, this improbable creature. Stoats and weasels are long and slinky and snaky: if they have a black tip to their tails they are stoats; if not, weasels. Both are fierce predators that bite well above their weight: they can not only kill a rabbit but they can pull the corpse into cover as well, which is a bit like a human doing the same thing to a cow.

  There is something compelling about a stoat: the bright intelligence that shines from the eyes tells us at once that we are watching a fellow mammal at work. Fellow feeling is part of any meaningful encounter with a stoat. They cross the ground – when not hurrying – in a manner that reminds me of one of the exercises I did when I was trying to learn italic writing: nnnnn.

  And then the stoat stood up on her hind legs, making herself about six times taller than she was on all fours, stoats being low to the ground. Once she had attained this dizzy altitude, she did something utterly bewildering: she threw herself on her back, writhed like a man drying his back with a towel, and then jumped onto all fours again, whereupon she leapt into the air, twisted, and again landed on her back. The whole thing was shockingly unexpected. The dance continued for maybe three minutes: she looked like a furry snake, like the great python in The Jungle Book that fascinates the monkey-people with The Dance of the Hunger of Kaa.

  Then she stopped abruptly and looked all round, no doubt scanning for potential predators, but with the air of an overstressed passenger at an airport who would welcome a row at the least opportunity.

  And then she was gone: as if she had just willed herself into the landscape, or the landscape of the marsh had chosen to wake up and swallow this tempting little morsel.

  What the hell was going on? There seem to be two theories. One is that the stoat was dancing to ‘fascinate’ a rabbit: to dazzle potential prey and reduce it to a state when it doesn’t know how to react. The fact that there was no rabbit doesn’t entirely negate that theory: it may have been practising, just as a pet dog will pretend to hunt a rabbit.

  There is another theory, one with rather less charm, which is that the stoat is suffering from parasite called Skrjabingylus that lodges in the brain. It was a grim thought: but parasites too are part of the vast, tottering, improbable structure of life. Without them our world would have turned out very differently: it’s reckoned that parasites are one of the most potent drivers of evolution. We can speculate that stoats would not be stoats and humans would not be humans without parasites. We should celebrate these creatures that live in guts and brains and blood and eyeballs: and do so because they know no other way to live.

  Twelve blackbirds foraging in the field. Half a pie.

  As autumn moves towards winter the blackbirds start appearing in the garden and in the bottom meadow. The garden holds about a dozen apple trees, not a fruit I have much enthusiasm for. Cindy, as is her nature, has a boom-and-bust relationship with them: sometimes gathering them up and giving Eddie powerful breakfasts of porridge with hot stewed apples; at other times, when there are more pressing concerns, leaving them on the ground. That’s what the blackbirds prefer.

  At any time during this season of fallen fruits, there will be half a dozen blackbirds feeding on them energetically. And here’s an odd thing: every one of them a cock. There they are, sleek, glossy and banana-billed, pecking fiercely at the fruit in a great overflowing of male solidarity. You see an occasional female, dark matt brown and with a dark beak, holding her own and getting her fair share of fruit – there’s plenty to go round – but mostly these are all boys together, as if they were at a particularly seedy pub. Perhaps they even get a little drunk on the fermenting fruit.

  When they’re not under the apple trees they’ll be ground-feeding on the meadow, operating in that on-again, off-again style of blackbirds: a long pause to listen, perfect stillness, then a few rapid hops to a new position – and every now and then a moment of triumph, digging that yellow bill into the soft earth in a wriggling moment of achievement. I saw them most mornings when I was feeding the horses, and usually made a count. And it was 20. It was almost always 20: a gentlemen’s club with a fixed membership – got to keep it exclusive. That tends to be the way with any limited resource. The far corners of the meadow, and in the middle along the fenceline: these seem to be the favoured areas.

  I usually remembered to bring the binoculars for this morning ritual, and usually cast an eye over the blackbirds, partly for the counting, and also to see if one of them might turn out to be a ring ouzel. These are blackbirds with clerical collars: same genus and all that, but birds associated with high country. They turn up every now and then in East Anglia all the same: but never here, not in our time. But here’s a thing: the checking itself is a part of the pleasure – pleasures of awareness, of involvement with this patch of land. The tiny disappointment at the shortage of ring ouzels is no disappointment at all: it’s a way of letting the ring ouzels know that if they ever turn up, I’ll be ready.

  Back in the house, cup of tea, morning paper, wincing at the impacted clichés of the sports pages (bitter? Me?) and noting that the blackbirds are hard at it beneath the apple trees. They’re not all cocks by mere chance.
This is part of a fiercely calculated survival strategy. Because it’s not just about staying alive: what’s the point in staying alive a little longer if you leave no descendants? Most of these blackbirds are not British: like the fieldfares they have travelled from Scandinavia and continental Europe to take advantage of our mild winters. You can’t go digging for worms when there’s a hard frost: and when the frost is winter-long, to tarry is to starve. So these blackbirds take the time-honoured avian tactic of coping with crisis by being somewhere else when it happens. It’s called migration.

  Most of the blackbirds that breed in Britain stay put for the winter, but that doesn’t mean all the blackbirds in the world follow the same plan. You mustn’t think of a species as a single entity: identical birds all doing identical things. In different places, different birds of the same species act in quite different ways. When I lived in Asia, on an island outside Hong Kong, the sparrows that played and chirruped around my house – I had the ground floor and the ‘garden’ – were not house sparrows, as they would have been in Britain, but tree sparrows, which in Britain are entirely country birds.

  Most of the blackbirds at our place in the autumn were migrants: transients, as opposed to residents. But why all male? What happens to the females? They turn their beaks up at the things our climate has to offer, and carry on, wintering in southern Europe where the food resources and the climate are more reliable. So why don’t the cocks go there as well?

  They want to be nearer home. As soon as the breeding grounds have unfrozen themselves, the cock birds want to be back there staking their claim. They want to be set up and singing, fully established in a fine territory of their own, by the time the females get back from their extended winter break. And while it’s true that in theory a really effective and experienced male should be able to turn up at any time and help himself to whatever territory he chooses, the fact is that a male defending a home territory has all the advantages over an interloper. Home advantage is a potent force in the struggle to become an ancestor – a truth that is re-enacted every Saturday of the football season.