by Simon Barnes
The hour was up. Time for a late lunch. It was Sunday: when it was dark I would make a feast with four different curries.
Morning chores and a solo from the red-headed drummer. Is that the great Ginger Baker or a great spotted woodpecker?
A couple of days later, January was over. As I walked the marsh, the pheasants gloated before my idle steps: they’d got away with it, then. As the year advances, so more and more of the pheasants scared by the beaters make a sharp right turn the instant they are airborne. As the shooting season develops they get better and better at it. They go hammering at right angles to the guns, heading straight for the marsh. Is this a learned response? Either way, the last shoot of the year on the farmland behind us is usually a brief affair. By the time it’s finished it must be standing room only down on the marsh. The pheasant-shooting season ends on the last day of January: so now the surviving pheasants had the world to themselves again.
It’s the same over on the flood. When I hear the whistling of wigeon in February I can allow myself a small smile. These are wild birds that the wildfowlers failed to get, for their shooting season is also over. The people who shoot the flood on the far side of the river are unappeasable: there is scant pleasure in hearing the whistling of wigeon during the shooting season, because you know their likely fate. But in February I can give a nod of congratulation to the ones that got away.
There were now eight months of peace available to pheasants and partridges and ducks and geese. And me . . . well, I’ve always preferred life without the sound of gunfire. But it seems that if you choose to live in a place full of nature – full of life – you find yourself living in a place full of death. Some of it is part of the natural cycle. Not all.
Chores on a frosty morning. The stock dove is amazed at the world’s whiteness. Coo-er! Coo-er!
Today we were at the still point of the turning world. Like all other days, really. But on some days the stillness and the turning are more obvious than others. Sometimes the turning of winter into spring seems like a motorist trying to change direction in a lane only a fraction wider than his vehicle is long. To get out facing the right direction he must go forwards and backwards again and again: the multi-point turn they don’t teach you at driving school but which all drivers have to master or at least bluff their way through at some point.
This was still unambiguously winter, but with sledgehammer hints of spring thrown in. That’s a chaffinch in full song, and his song goes: ‘Nudge nudge, know what I mean, say no more!’ That’s the ancient Monty Python sketch of the man in the pub asking his neighbour if his wife is a sport, if she – know what I mean? – goes. Looking out at the marsh as the year starts to get on with its multi-point turn is very much like that sketch. It’s as if someone is asking the marsh: do you go? Do you do . . . life? Know what I mean? Are those chaffinches going to make lots more chaffinches? Are those plants going to sprout and flower and fruit and seed? I bet they are – I bet they are! Say . . . no . . . more!
And so I heard a song thrush singing out loud and clear. It didn’t sing the following day, but it was a start, and spring is all about starts. Every advance is followed by a retreat, but the retreat is never quite as long as the advance. When a song thrush sings, it fills the valley: a phrase repeated two or three times, and then discarded in favour of another.
Another day, from the wood beyond the marsh on the right-hand – south-east – side, antiphonal drum solos from two great spotted woodpeckers: perhaps a territorial dispute, perhaps no more than a discussion about precise demarcation. But these two Ginger Bakers were each staking a claim to be the best drummer in the wood. Great spotted woodpeckers will thwock into a branch to excavate the invertebrates that live in the wood: but they will also make the violent far-carrying drumming, not for foraging but to make a noise. It’s the same for them as singing is for a song thrush: but they are percussionists rather than vocalists. They choose a good resonant dead branch for maximum carrying-power. I have seen them – and heard them – doing so on the metal fittings of telegraph poles: a fiendish din that must frighten every rival for miles.
A flock of fieldfares, about 20 of them, was heading north, waving black tails in farewell. These winter thrushes – that’s how we think of them in this country – were now heading to the spring-lands: to Scandinavia and northern Europe. With their triple quacks they had brought us winter – or had perhaps softened the blow of winter – but now their blood was stirring within them and it was time to start thinking about making more fieldfares. The winter thrushes were turning into spring thrushes.
And where were all those cock blackbirds? Where had the shiny black apple-eaters gone? Gone to hen-birds, every one – or most of them. Our resident birds had stayed behind, but the great gatherings beneath the apple trees or out on the Broadland meadow were now part of the past, and no doubt of the future. For now they had gone: seeking the spring.
I also heard a mistle thrush: and that’s a song I have special love for. It’s always seemed to me especially wild: as if calling the world to disorder. With the first mistle thrush of the year, I always feel that something has been accomplished: that the early skirmishes have been won; that it’s time to regroup and make a proper assault on winter’s fastness.
And to put some life back into the land: get that marsh humming and buzzing and tingling and vibrating and copulating again. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink – say no more!
Morning walk and a song thrush. Hate to repeat myself but song thrush! Song thrush! Song thrush!
No, it wasn’t a marsh harrier. It was too slim, a little too elegant – though of course equally magnificent – and when it turned away, I saw that it had a white patch high on the tail. It was a hen harrier: to be more accurate, a ringtail. That is to say, either a young male or a female. Males that are not up to taking on a grown-up, experienced male and holding a territory of their own make this stance quite clear by looking like females. No threat, no rivalry: I come in peace.
The ringtails can look pretty similar – at least from a bad view – to female marsh harriers, and they fly in much the same way: the same dihedral, the same mastery of low-speed flight. They can turn up anywhere in winter, and quite often overlap with marsh harriers. But the two species are divided in their choice of breeding lands: where the marsh harriers prefer the wet country their name suggests, hen harriers move onto the uplands. Not marsh harriers but harriers of the hill.
Once they reach these uplands they often find trouble. They have been relentlessly, obsessively and illegally killed by the grouse-shooting industry. I have had my share of grief from making what has been called a ‘controversial stand’ in favour of the hen harriers: the controversy revolves around the question of whether or not rich people are subject to the same laws as the rest of us. Let me just point out that, according to Defra, there is space for 300 pairs of hen harriers in England; the previous year there had been three.
So I watched the ringtail make his way across the marsh and smiled a little grimly in his direction. It was like hearing the wigeons in early January. Good luck, bird. You’re going to need it.
Morning chores. Three curlews piping overhead . . . flying in the direction of spring.
If you tune into the wild world in the 21st century, you’re going to take on anxiety. I had heard and seen herons making for the wood on the left-hand – north-west – side of the marsh, just beyond our boundary. I had heard the early sounds of herons establishing their presence there: for the wood holds a thriving heronry. I had heaved a sigh of relief when the shooting season ended – and as soon as it did, they started shooting up the heronry. For pigeons: some birds never go out of season. They shot hard for two successive Saturdays and I was left – not for the first time – wondering if this year they’d done it. Would the herons really be up to a return after their places of resort had been so uncompromisingly shot?
The fragility, the vulnerability of the wild world is inescapable. There are times when I can savour the rural idyll
of living by this stretch of marsh: but there are plenty of other times when anxiety and worse overwhelm me.
So let’s get something clear. The marsh’s function is not to give me pleasure, even though it frequently does. Its success is not to be measured by counting the number of good moments I have had there, counter-balanced by the moments of anxiety and disappointment. The marsh’s function is to live: to bring forth more life: to feed and shelter wild creatures and to allow them to survive and to breed and to become ancestors.
It’s like sport, and that’s a subject I have spent a long time thinking about. Sport is not entertainment. The job of the athlete is not to give me a good time: it is to win in the most expeditious way possible. David Gower or Johan Cruyff weren’t trying to bring pleasure to me or to anyone else when they did their finest work. They were trying to win. I could find my heart’s desire or find despair in what they did: it was all one to them.
So when I look out on the marsh, I do so in the way that I watch sport. I accept that it’s not about my gratification. Rather it’s about the victories and defeats that take place out there. The ringtail, passing through, was a fine sight: perhaps he went on to found a dynasty, perhaps he was shot the following week. The shortage of herons made me fret: well then, fret. The marsh harriers were filling the marsh not only with themselves but also with promise: nothing wrong in enjoying that, but my enjoyment is not the point. It’s a bonus, an acceptable bonus: but it’s not about me. It’s about marsh harriers.
Evening walk and a ghostly shadow vanishing in the churchyard. The deer departed . . .
Then, for the first time in many months, there was a male marsh harrier harrying the marsh. Apart from that dihedral, you might wonder if male and female are the same species. The male is slighter than the female, smaller by a third, and as a result the flight is more buoyant and airy. And then, as he turns and catches the light, he is glowing in three colours: a warm chestnut picked out with the heraldic colours of sable and argent.
Such ease on the wing, such mastery of the air: and I was lost in wonder because this might have been the most handsome marsh harrier I had ever seen: strikingly pale, the silver dominating. I had seen him before, I think, this pale old male, for I was pretty sure he was in business around these parts the previous year. Perhaps he was already well on his way to becoming an ancestor; certainly I was inclined to think so. Did he know that three females had turned up here just the other day? And that two of them were certainly still around?
I had been fretting a little about his return – he, or some other male. Where had he been all winter? Had he travelled south, in the time-honoured manner of his kind? Or had he merely been roaming, perhaps part of that winter roost at Hickling? All I could do was guess, and welcome him back.
Morning chores. A jackdaw tries to stop a marsh harrier doing his.
There is a barn-owl box in the bottom meadow: a nice little triangular house kindly put up by the Hawk and Owl Trust. Once again it was going to be occupied. I could see the two birds on the ledge outside, looking rather smug and proprietorial. They were jackdaws. Good luck to them. Not as sexy as barn owls, it has to be said, but birds of great intelligence and improvisational skill. I had to salute them and wish them luck.
Then – no more than a flash and a flutter in my peripheral vision – and my head turned at once, responding to things half-glimpsed and not quite seen in the usual fashion. And damn it, it was a butterfly: gallant, reckless almost absurd, but heroically leading the charge towards spring. It was, so far as I could tell from an experience that lasted less than half a second, a peacock – butterflies that hibernate in adult form and aim to make a bold early start of the real business of spring.
The real business, eh? Just like that male marsh harrier. Do they go? Know what I mean?
8
EVERYONE SUDDENLY BURST OUT SINGING
There’s always a day – one day – when it seems that the year has committed itself once and for all. The ponderous vehicle of time is now facing towards spring, the multi-point turn has been completed and—
Everyone suddenly burst out singing.
A fragment of verse that came unbidden to my mind on this morning of commitment. The world was singing. Everyone was singing. Suddenly. Where yesterday there had been soloists, now there was a chorus. It was short of complexity, as you’d expect at this time of year, but it was marked by a sudden raw enthusiasm. There was no longer a pioneer great tit singing teacher-teacher; there were now three or four or more singing competitively, provoking each other to louder and better music. With them the dunnocks were singing out: not a great song, but sung with immense passion, a jumble of notes hurled at the turning year as if the frenzied reiterations would force the year to turn still faster. Behind them the robins are still hard at it: they’ve been singing all winter but now their songs are not just about territories for feeding, they’re also about territories for . . . well, know what I mean?
It’s when the fourth species joined in that I realised we had reached this crucial point in the year: when goldfinches were jangling and fizzing and buzzing. The year had reached critical mass. How strange it must be: most of these birds had not sung in this fine way for nine or ten months, and the young birds never, but now they were all singing as if they’d always been singing, as if there had never been a pause, as if there had been no winter, no times of privation, no period when safety and happiness lay in the flock rather than in the grand aspirations of territory and becoming half of a pair. They had not just changed habits: they had become completely different creatures.
Everyone suddenly burst out singing.
Siegfried Sassoon, of course, and though the poem is usually interpreted as a response to soldiers singing in the trenches – perhaps Welsh soldiers singing hymns in harmony – its two stanzas, its ten lines are full of birds.
. . . and horror
Drifted away . . .
There had been a couple of days with snow on the ground and cloud ceiling a couple of feet above my head: a Chicken Licken sky. Not horror, certainly not horror as Sassoon knew horror. But as the birds – as everyone – sang, I was lighter in my heart. All at once I remembered my father explaining that some fashionable friend had her hair cut by Siegfried Sassoon and, realising his error, he started to laugh and did so as if he would never stop: he does a very nice cut and blow-dry but he doesn’t half go on about the First World War. The story still comes up every now and then: and always with the same laughter, as if the joke was new-made at each remembering.
Here’s what I would do for everyone who ever suffered from a moment’s depression. That’s a company that includes me: though, thank God, it’s never got a life-throttling grip on me. I know what it is to have the blues: but I also know that the blues, when they come, will pass. And that makes all the difference. And here’s my suggestion: learn birdsong. That’s not a glib notion, any more than it’s a cure. But I believe, profoundly, that a smattering of birdsong will help anyone who has been at home when the Dementors come to visit.
There was a time when everyone knew a bit of birdsong, as well as the words to a few hymns: it was in the nature of the times. Robert Browning has that throwaway line in ‘Home-Thoughts, From Abroad’ about the wise thrush who sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
As a neat summary of the song thrush’s love for repetition, it could hardly be beaten: but it’s interesting to note that the words assume a certain familiarity with the song of the song thrush. He writes as if his readers are probably aware that song thrushes repeat themselves. And yes, I could now hear a song thrush throwing his voice into the chorus: careless rapture endlessly recaptured.
It’s not enough to know that there is singing going on and that it’s a pretty noise and that it’s a bird doing the singing. You need to put a name to the singer. Once you can identify the species doing the singing – and it’s not a hard trick t
o master – you move to a better, happier world. Have you ever been to a forbidding party where you know no one and no one has the slightest interest in you? And have you ever arrived at a gathering full of friends and family and all your best beloveds, every one of them competing to welcome you with bigger and better hugs? Learning birdsong is like exchanging the first kind of party for the second: a gathering where you feel at home and full of love and good cheer. Learning birdsong is not just about loving nature, it’s about living with nature on terms of intimacy. Being at home. The opposite of being alienated.
I had been through a few days in which I felt increasingly ancient. I was limping with increasing heaviness: something amiss with my right knee. I was thoroughly out of sorts with myself and with the world. This was not horror, neither was it despair – but when I reached the day when everyone suddenly burst out singing . . . well, it was all rather noticeably better.
Spring on the marsh, spring in my soul.
O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
All that, and so good at cutting hair as well! Laughing again at my father’s slip, laughing at the memory of his laughter as he sobbed into his pinot grigio, I got on with the day. Should I sing myself, do you think?