On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  As the days begin to get longer, so the chinking chorus becomes more pronounced. Every day as the light fades, the chinking strikes up: an insistent monosyllabic rhythm. That’s another advantage you get from looking after livestock: as you go about your evening chores, so you are perpetually tuned into the routines of the world going to rest.

  I remembered a pub in St Albans. It was a Thursday: apparently it was the custom for Irish musicians to turn up at this place with fiddles and guitars and a bodhrán – Irish drum – or two. So I drank Guinness and sang along with ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ and ‘Black Ribbon Band’ and very jolly it was too. Eventually, the songs were sung: closing time was nigh. Bairbre, who had taken us to this place, was speaking to some of the musicians. The show was over, they were putting instruments back into cases and restoring ravaged throats with a final sluicing of the good black. All around was the lively conversation of 11 o’clock. Then suddenly – and oh, my brothers, it was like some great bird had flown into the bar – a single voice rose in song, high and pure and marvellously sweet. No instrument offered support: just a single human voice, singing in Gaelic. It was Bairbre – of course it was Bairbre – and all around, the voices faded into the silence and the song rose and fell and died away.

  It was like that as I put the horses away that evening. Late winter, early spring: and from the clatter of the chinking chorus a lone voice rose up and sang: not a chinking but a full glorious song, as much like the chinking as Bairbre’s song was to normal conversation as she gave us ‘The Green Fields of Gweedore’. The first blackbird song of the year: you might think it was an appropriate moment for cheering and shouting, but I did nothing of the kind. For a start, it’s unwise to make sudden noises when you’re leading a horse, and for a second, some pleasures go too deep for shouting.

  I have been to sporting events that have been so marvellous I had no desire to cheer at their conclusion. I wished only to sit and marvel at the moment of marvellousness. Again, it’s like religious awe, even though it is nothing of the kind: a moment to savour things deeper and more marvellous than anything I could ever be myself.

  Bairbre is now Eddie’s godmother – his God-mammy, we jest. Oh, and the line about ‘oh my brothers’ is from A Clockwork Orange: the moment near the beginning when a voice rises above the din of the Korova Milk Bar to sing a few bars from Beethoven’s Ninth.

  Alle Menschen werden Brüder

  Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

  All men become brothers under your tender wing.

  The blackbird’s sweet song briefly filled the night. Let the hostilities and rivalries of spring begin. Blackbirds can be brothers again come the autumn.

  How young am I this sunlit morning? I can still hear the goldcrest.

  Never make promises to Eddie. He remembers them. So we were out there again: late afternoon, the snack – slices of the excellent banana bread we had made over the weekend – as promised.

  As the light faded, a barn owl headed straight for us, that white heart-shaped face staring us down, the owl curving off as he realised he had company on the marsh that evening. Silent, always silent. Then a wise thrush, singing each song twice over: still early enough in the year to be a thrilling novelty.

  And then for the first time that year, the sudden shout of a Cetti’s warbler. For me there was an ocean of relief in that buoyant cry, and something almost comic in its assertiveness. One of the things I love about Cettis is that you never see them. Hardly a glimpse. They are massively talented at keeping out of sight, and at the same time massively talented at making sure you can’t miss them – when they don’t want to be missed. Cettis! Sometimes it sounds like onomatopoeia. I have a favoured mnemonic for the call:

  Me? Cettis? If-you-don’t-like-it-fuck-off!

  That gets the rhythm across, along with the essential message, so far as other male Cettis are concerned.

  It has always seemed to me to be the voice of the marsh: the identity of the place contained in those cheery life-demanding notes.

  ‘Do you remember that one, Eddie?’

  He wanted to, but the name had gone. ‘Ch . . .’ I offered. ‘Ch . . .’

  ‘Cettis!’

  ‘Brilliant boy!’

  Spring was here all right.

  9

  NOT DYING

  Doris has had her magical way with the marsh. Two willows . . . whomped.

  My old friend Darrell was talking about his knee replacement, an operation required after years of tennis. I countered with my right shoulder damaged by years of keeping wicket and goal. ‘You realise,’ said Darrell, ‘that we’ll be having this conversation for the next 30 years.’

  ‘Only if we’re lucky.’

  Ageing is a form of living, not of dying. Limping has its drawbacks, but it’s a form of Not Dying. And that always has something to commend it. But my right knee was getting worse. This would occasionally cast me into fits of gloom: had the best of it, now for the endgame, bits dropping off, never be the same again.

  There’s life in such grumbling. I would limp round the marsh, increasingly vexed, sit laboriously, swear a bit. I was feeling Vulnerable, or perhaps Near Threatened – two of the categories for endangered species used by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, as it happens. Still not Critically Endangered, not yet. And the place itself, threatened yes, by the forces that surround it, but it still had marsh harriers flying over it.

  Winter was fading fast, as spring advanced and retreated, advanced and retreated. A day of fierce chill made the blackbird’s glorious solo seem like a false memory: a deluded fancy of some poor and inaccurate observer. But these cold days were not about dying. They were vigorous days. Full of life.

  I was reminded of David Hockney’s quartet, ‘Three Trees Near Thixendale’: the same view in four seasons. In the winter one the trees are bare all right, but the picture is beaming and gleaming with colour: blue, orange, green. Winter is full of life. It lacks the making-babies urgency of spring, but it’s thrillingly vivid in its simple determination to survive.

  Woody Allen famously said that he didn’t want to achieve immortality through his works, he wanted to achieve immortality by Not Dying. ‘I don’t want to live on in the hearts of men, I want to live on in my apartment.’

  Winter on the marsh is a bit like that. Soon enough the place would be bursting and booming with new life, insects everywhere, butterflies, reptiles, bats. But right now it was still mostly engrossed in the task of Not Dying: and that negative makes a glorious positive. Sure, many individuals had already died in the cold, and more would die yet, but that’s expected. The natural mechanism of life takes death in its stride: that’s how it works; that’s how it’s always worked.

  Spring always seems more distant as it gets closer: its setbacks are sometimes almost unbearable. But if you look at wildlife a lot, you dwell on the fact that every landscape continues to live: that it’s operating its strategy for not dying. The fieldfares that came here for the winter were not dying of cold in Scandinavia. The bats that were hibernating out of sight were not dying of starvation on the marsh. The torpid reptiles, the insects in diapause: they had drastically slowed down the processes of life in order to get on with the job of Not Dying. The kestrels hovering and hunting over the marsh – the part we bought from Barry is especially important to them – were finding enough food to maintain their high-energy lives.

  Winter is a time of death. Like all the other seasons. And like all the other seasons, it’s also a time of life.

  Far away, on the grazing marsh beyond our boundary, I could see two swans. A storm of white wings. They copulate on water, but right now they were displaying: assuming heraldic postures and thundering their wings at each other. For them spring was here: they’d got through the winter, they’d already done the Not Dying bit. The marsh, the landscape and the swans themselves were moving on.

  Every day it changes, sometimes clearly progressing, sometimes appearing to fall back. I, greatly cheered,
limped back to the house, grumbling and swearing.

  Morning ride and the skies are full of song. Such larks!

  The first butterfly of the year is always a good moment. More than any other creature, a butterfly is light and warmth. The life force of winter is all very well, but you forget about such notions the instant the first butterfly flutters by. The other day I correctly identified a sparrowhawk without seeing it – at least, not in any demanding two-eyed sense of the term – or hearing it. It was more like awareness: something in the patterns of life beyond and slightly behind me, and my mind instantly made the connection with sparrowhawk. They’re sudden birds, more often seen from the tail of your eye than with the full pomp of stereoscopic vision: your brain stores that pattern and when you encounter it again, it interprets scanty information in a meaningful way and . . . well, bam! You’ve seen a sparrowhawk.

  Or a peacock. A peacock butterfly, for that’s surely what it was. Could I really count that earlier occasion, the briefly seen possible or probable peacock? There was something about the size and the boldness of its flight, and perhaps its darkness as well. And of course, a little knowledge. I knew that peacocks overwinter as adults (rather than eggs or caterpillars or pupae) and so when the triggers of warmth and light come, it can get on with business right away.

  It took me a while to start noticing butterflies. Amazing that there can be so many beautiful things flaunting themselves in front of you, and you just say ‘oh-ah’ and carry on. I remember looking at a peacock supping from a buddleia and wondering if this wasn’t some fabulous rare creature, something I was specially privileged to see. Well, I was half right, I suppose. It was a classic example of blindness to the commonplace: you see something so often you never actually see it at all.

  They do have an exotic vibe to them: four great eyes staring back at you. We have all seen incredible, damn-near-impossible examples of mimicry in the rainforest, most of them shown to us by the great David Attenborough: well, here’s one just as good, and it’s in your back garden and along the railway line. A peacock, when seen upside down, turns itself into the face of a small but very cross-looking owl: little points in the trailing edge of the wings look like ear-tufts, the body of the insect looks like a beak, and the great staring eyes do the rest.

  Underneath, the wings are black: the colour of the dark crevices a peacock will lie up in. But when it’s discovered by a mouse or a blue tit, the peacock will open its wings and present the predator with the mad face of an owl, at the same time rubbing its wings together to produce a hissing sound that’s just like an irritated owl. It’s as if your Sunday lunch shape-shifted into a psychopath with fixed bayonet.

  There’s always good news and bad news with every early sign of spring, especially one as fragile as a butterfly. Was this a reckless pioneer brilliantly stealing a march on the rest of his kind? Intra-species competition and all that? Or was it a doomed individual, finding a tryst with no one and nothing but cold death? One more of those stories with the last page missing: an eternal part of all involvement in wildlife. So I feared the worst and hoped for the best.

  Perhaps the butterfly felt the same thing.

  The goldfinch’s song sounds like a fruit machine paying out. Jackpot! Spring!

  Just across the dyke that forms the boundary on the far edge of our bit of marsh, there’s a grazing meadow with a short sward. It’s an exposed spot; a person unused to East Anglia may even call it bleak. And it had become a great favourite of curlews and lapwings, who often feed and roost there, as the marsh harriers know. It was a fine thing to see a flight of 40 curlews, with their long and stylish decurved beaks. They take their scientific name from this: Numenius arquata. The first part means new moon, for the crescent of that bill, and the second is archer, for the bill’s longbow shape: so here were the archers of the new moon, dropping down in the distant field all together in a flock, rather in the manner of water going down the plughole.

  It’s the call that gets to you: they say their own name with a strong stress on the second syllable. It’s a call that fills the sky – and there’s a lot of sky to fill round our place. The sound is wild and far-carrying, and in human terms it seems at the same time wonderfully sad and gloriously defiant. They are a perfect example of the liveliness of winter: that inspirational call encourages us all to keep buggering on. They spend the winter mostly on coastal wetlands, where they can forage, and in the warm weather they go to the uplands to breed: the lowest of all birds or one of the highest.

  They are Britain’s most sharply declining bird species, and the competition for that accolade is pretty intense. They went down 46 per cent between 1994 and 2010. There’s a suite of possible reasons for this, still being investigated: these include changes in agriculture and forestry on the breeding grounds. So when you see curlews in decent numbers it’s another classic good-news-bad-news moment: good to see them, bad to be reminded of their decline.

  And for me, there’s also a personal thing going on.

  The curlew group – 13 species, the Numeniini, or new-mooners – is rapidly declining across the world. One reason for this is the destruction and degradation of coastal wetlands. They are one of the most threatened groups, though again, this is a hotly contested title. The Eskimo curlew was last seen in 1963 and is more or less certainly extinct. What tends to happen, in these increasingly familiar events, is that populations cease to be viable and the species no longer functions as a continuing part of our planet, but one or two individuals hang on – sometimes referred to by scientists as the Living Dead.

  The slender-billed curlew was last seen in 1995. A few years earlier, I made a trip to Morocco with my old friend Martin Davies, then of the RSPB, known in the birding community as one of the co-founders of the annual British Birdwatching Fair at Rutland Water. It was an excellent trip: good birds and good craic. One morning we got up at dawn to look for curlews. We found a dozen or so: the Eurasian curlews that I see on the marsh back at home, and among them an oddity: quite different in build, in what birders call ‘jizz’, the vibe or feel of a bird, something that comes from its shape and especially its movements. This was a slender-billed curlew. Now almost certainly extinct. That bird Martin and I saw was a member of the Living Dead.

  So I have seen an extinct bird.

  That’s not something to take pride in. I wish there were hundreds of slender-bills out there, thousands. I wish they were on every birder’s list. I wish that slender-billed curlews were so common that no one even bothered to boast about them – might as well boast about seeing a sparrow. As it is, I have the melancholy distinction of having seen a bird that we’ve managed to wipe out.

  And that’s a haunting thought. I can still see that neat, elegant bird picking its way fastidiously through the wild flowering cresses of this soggy piece of land, feeding contentedly as if the world held nothing that could ever be a worry. So when the curlews drop in and pay us a visit at home on the marsh, I am reminded of that lone bird, one of the last of his kind, walking among the pastel colours of the cresses as if living an idyll: a lovely gentle world in which nothing could possibly go wrong.

  As I complete the morning chores the dunnock continues his. UDS: Unilateral Declaration of Spring.

  Father Francesco Cetti was an Italian Jesuit. He was also a naturalist and a mathematician. He was born in 1726 and wrote Storia Naturale di Sardegna, The Natural History of Sardinia. I got these facts from Whose Bird?, which lists all people who have had birds named after them, and supplies a brief spot of biography. You can read about Bewick, of Bewick’s swan, who was the great print-maker and ornithologist; and about Montagu, of Montagu’s harrier, the 18th-century British naturalist: both British birds, and both birds I would love to see on the marsh.

  British birds are a little light on birds named for humans: we have been aware of them too long and their folk-names have become part of our language. But if you travel, you find many more birds named for half- or completely forgotten men, and a few women too:
there’s a Mrs Moreau’s warbler, an African species that was described by Mr Moreau. It was rediscovered by my old friend Bob. He communicated his findings to Mrs Moreau herself, who was by then a widow: a touching tale.

  I have seen Pel’s fishing owl and Heuglin’s robin and Arnot’s chat and Bonelli’s eagle and Böhm’s bee-eater. There’s a Bonaparte’s gull, named not for the emperor but his nephew, who was an ornithologist. Thrillingly, there’s Barnes’s wheatear, which is a subspecies of Finsch’s wheatear; this Barnes was a professional soldier who rose from the rank of private to become a commissioned officer; he was also an ornithologist. There’s also Barnes’s cat snake in Sri Lanka, and there’s a species a chiton – a kind of mollusc – called Radsia barnesii.

  My favourite of these name-bearing creatures is the lovely Narina trogon, which the French naturalist François Levaillant named for his Khoikhoi mistress. The word means ‘flower’ in the local language. It was not her given name, but it was what he called her: so we have a lovely bird that bears the love-name of a beloved lover.

  There are 18 species named for David Attenborough, which is all very right and proper. I hate it when the names of species are rationalised and reorganised for no very good reason save busybodying. These days I’m supposed to refer to Heuglin’s robin as a white-browed robin-chat: well, when I take clients into the bush in Zambia, they have to accept a few archaic names. Heuglin was a 19th-century German explorer and ornithologist, he has eight species of bird named for him, and I think it’s right to keep his memory going with the names of his birds. These names matter: they are part of the long and complex history of human interaction with birds.