On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  One of the things you learn if you spend a lifetime in journalism is that the truth is always a better story than anything you can make up. And so we now understand that the swallows arrive from a 7,000-mile journey, ready to eat plenty of insects and – this being the point of the journey – to make more swallows.

  Some species make even more stupendous journeys than swallows. Arctic terns are also Antarctic terns, flying from one end of the world to the other twice a year. Bar-headed geese have been recorded at 21,460 feet as they cross the Himalayas. But perhaps the stubby-winged willow warblers are the most astonishing travellers of them all. They’re not great fliers in the manner of swallows, which spend most of their waking lives on the wing. Now the willow warblers were back on the marsh, they wouldn’t move much at all for many weeks: foraging in the sallows for small bits of insect life and nesting on the ground in a cunningly made little purse of grass. And yet, when the moment is right, these birds and their new-fledged offspring would set off back over those 7,000 miles, with as little fuss as I catch the 10.30 from Norwich to Liverpool Street.

  How do they do it? Flying at night in flocks, keeping together by means of constantly repeated night-flight calls, using the stars and the earth’s magnetic field as well as mental maps possessed by the more experienced fliers. The urge to migrate is triggered by changes in the length of days and by a great release of hormones: in some ways the birds that make the journey are quite different from the birds that live the busy warbler life at either end of the journey.

  And here, even as I marvel, I must also worry. The climate is changing. Spring arrives earlier and earlier. The resident birds start singing earlier, the insects are seen on the wing much earlier. But mostly, the long-distance migrants arrive at the same time. Across the centuries their journeys have been timed to coincide with the peak abundance of food: the best possible time to feed themselves and a brood of chicks.

  So if they get their timing out of kilter with the insects, they will raise fewer young. Fewer birds will make it to Africa at the end of that long journey, and fewer still will be back on the breeding grounds. The numbers aren’t adding up in quite the same way. The great global equation is no longer balanced. There is a flaw in the system like a snag in your favourite woolly: and the more you pull it, the less woolly you will have.

  Always something to worry about on that damn marsh. The resilience and the weakness of the system are there to see, every single day, in one way or another.

  What a morning. The green woodpecker is laughing at his own joke.

  Molly was still too poorly to go out into the field, but the monotony of box-rest could be broken by taking her out in a head-collar and allowing her to graze in hand – ‘having a pick of grass’, horsey people say. Naturally, this was Eddie’s job.

  The two of us gave her a good old groom, getting rid of implausible quantities of loose hair. By the time we had finished there was a great drift of white fur on the yard and blowing off into the field. More than once we have found birds’ nests, sometimes from the many nesting boxes we have about the place: and these tend to be lined and sometimes part-constructed with Molly-hair. The idea that we are performing a service for the birds at the same time as doing one for Molly is rather pleasing.

  Afterwards, Eddie led Molly down to the bottom of the garden, where the best grass was to be found: so far that spring it had not been touched by a lawnmower. Molly dropped her head gratefully and set off on that dogged crop-crop, chew-chew rhythm of grazers. I sat on a tree root while Eddie did the proper job, both horse and boy I think enjoying their time together. He was giving his horse a treat, and that’s a treat that works both ways. Molly’s pleasure – if not her gratitude – was very obvious.

  It’s a nice thing, grazing a horse in hand. You have to keep your concentration – make sure the horse doesn’t step on the lead-rope, which can cause a moment of panic – but it’s mostly a meditative process. And Eddie fell into thoughtfulness.

  ‘Dad, how does a barn owl dob down?’

  A barn owl dobbing down is one of the features of the place, something he has seen on many occasions. You see them flying, slowly and silently, and then all at once they vanish. They dob down: either to catch or to miss the creature they were stalking from above.

  ‘You know what a parachute is, Eddie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When people jump out of aeroplanes—’

  ‘Yes!’

  He knew. Good. ‘So when a barn owl is flying over the marsh, he’s like the aeroplane.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But when he sees – or hears – something he wants to catch and eat, he has to drop down out of the sky. You can see that he lifts up his wings. Now he’s not like an aeroplane, he’s like a parachute. And he dobs down without hurting himself and without the vole hearing.’

  Munch, munch, munch. I had half an eye on Molly’s front feet: the lead-rope was well clear, Eddie was doing a good job.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What about vampire bats?’

  ‘What about vampire bats?’

  ‘Do they dob down?’

  Where had he got vampire bats from? David Attenborough? Me? A book? School? A comic? I later learned that they cropped up in a schoolbook he had been reading with Cindy. So I explained: yes, common vampires, the ones that prey on mammal blood, they’re very good indeed at dobbing down. They land close to the animal they’ve found. It might be a horse. And they scuttle across the ground to get to the horse’s legs. Then they bite the legs, injecting an anaesthetic and an anti-coagulant – I missed that bit out for Eddie – and they lap up the blood like a pussycat with a saucer of milk. I left that last bit in.

  ‘We don’t have vampire bats on the marsh.’

  ‘We don’t. Which is good news for Molly. We have several different sorts of bats – at least, I think so – but they all catch flying insects.’

  ‘Echolocation.’

  ‘Yes indeedy – hey! Listen!’

  Above our heads in the big ash tree, its edges now fuzzy with bursting buds, there was a song. Rather a special song: this was a garden warbler, another long-distance migrant, one I’ve heard singing on the banks of the Luangwa River in Zambia.

  There is a special pleasure in picking out the song of a garden warbler. Not just because it’s a lovely song, but also because it’s not a blackcap. The two birds are notorious confusion species. The only way you can never be wrong is never to look; the two species look quite different. Both songs are musical and complex: the blackcap is more operatic, with big fruity notes and a taste for challenging modernist phrases. The garden warbler is more of a traditional folk-singer, like Bairbre in the pub: a song sweet and unhurried, rather rambling, and every time you think it’s going to end there’s another verse. And welcome it is too, but there’s something gently comic about the garden warbler’s reluctance to bring his work to an end.

  Garden warblers drop by most years: I radioed up a message that this one was welcome to stay and breed. I hope he got the message as he looked down at a boy and his horse, and a full-grown human with half his mind on the warbler, a quarter of his mind on the lead-rope and another quarter of it thinking about life and song. One new arrival was followed by another: every day a new song ringing out around the marsh.

  Who’s next?

  Morning ride. Swallows gallop past me on the racetrack of the sky.

  There’s a phenomenon among birders that you might refer to as wishful seeing. A group of hard-core birders can stare at the same distant bird and engage in a form of group hallucination, each convincing the others that certain plumage patterns really are discernible – and surely make the bird not a dunlin but a pectoral sandpiper.

  Wishful hearing is probably less common – but equally thrilling for as long as it lasts. Right in the middle of the marsh, loud, clear and – unmistakable? – I heard a grasshopper warbler. This is a rare breeding bird for this country and so finding one on the marsh wa
s something of a coup. I did a pointer-dog freeze and waited for the bird to strike up again. It’s called a grasshopper warbler for the excellent reason that it sounds like a grasshopper. The song is generally described as ‘reeling’, not as in a dance tune but as in an angler hauling in a fish.

  And then the hidden bird began to sing again: not reeling at all, but throwing in a stunning series of variations. I felt disappointment and delight at the same time: familiar bedfellows for most of us in many different contexts. This was no gropper but a sedge warbler: a bird you hear as a matter of routine in wet places in Britain. It’s a fabulous singer: not terribly melodic, but with an endless capacity for variation: it’s been suggested that a sedge warbler never sings the same song twice, as if for a male sedge warbler the whole spring was one song.

  Every year we’ve been here, sedge warblers have sung out hard from cover. They’ve presumably bred, though I haven’t got to the length of disturbing them while they’re at it. They like the place and their songs are part of the great chorus of the marsh. A gropper – birders’ slang for grasshopper warbler – would have been nice, but it’s not about niceness. It’s much more important than that.

  This business of birdsong is an essential part of enjoying the marsh, enjoying the wild world. Or at least, it is to me. Learning birdsong changed my understanding of the world and its possibilities: it’s not too much to say that.

  It’s not just that I can tell one species from another without needing to set eyes on them. That’s not about niceness either. Rather, it’s the sense of connection. It’s like being an insider. C. S. Lewis wrote about the lure of the Inner Ring: how we long to be one of the cool people, a member of the in-crowd, part of the group that gets things done, gets looked up to, gets admired, gets copied. ‘I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.’

  The learning of birdsong makes you a member of the Inner Ring. But it’s not an Inner Ring of birders. It’s more like being admitted to the Inner Ring of nature. The sedge warbler sings: you not only listen but, to some extent, you understand. An ambitious person rejoices when he comes to understand the running jokes of the Inner Ring at work. He is no longer an observer, he’s a participant. The same process can happen with you and nature: and for me at least, understanding birdsong is at the heart of it.

  King Solomon was said to possess a seal or ring that allowed him to command demons, and to understand the language of animals. It’s one of the many ring-of-power legends, of the sort that Tolkien tapped into. Konrad Lorenz, pioneer of the study of animal behaviour, called his first book King Solomon’s Ring. It was published in 1949 and it’s still worth reading.

  And sometimes when you listen to a fragment of birdsong, you feel for an instant that you have borrowed that great ring. You know the name of the bird and you know why he is singing. You can tell how committed he is to song, and sometimes how strong a performer he is. You have penetrated the babble and found an understanding.

  There are many great poems about birdsong: Keats’s nightingale and Shelley’s skylark perhaps the most famous. But both of these poems are not about birds or even about nature, but about the state of the poetic heart, the poetic soul. And that’s nice.

  But as I mentioned earlier, nature is a lot more than nice.

  Come down, house martins, come down! My house is your house!

  Sedge warblers are gently declining. That doesn’t allow them to stand out in the crowd, alas. That evening I heard the loud hoot of a tawny owl, and that’s a call most of us can relate to. Once a tawny has established itself as half of a pair with a good territory for food and shelter, its plan is to stop there for the rest of its life.

  A tawny owl’s power – as I have explained to Eddie more than once – is his intimate knowledge of a very small space. He knows every hunting perch, every line of sight, every landing area. That gives him an edge. He can pick up anything unfamiliar that breaks the deeply known pattern: and whether that’s a potential meal or a potential enemy, he can react accordingly, much as my horse attempts to do on a morning ride.

  It follows that if you can get the wood right and keep it right, the tawny owl is in good shape. We don’t own the wood near us, but it’s in good shape, bar the prolonged February shooting.

  We’ve got the marsh in good shape for the sedge warbler. But alas, I can’t look after their wintering grounds south of the Sahara. I can’t look after the refuelling and resting-up places on the migration route. I can’t control the dangers of migration, I can’t control the weather. I can’t control the guns that lie in wait for many migrating birds. I can’t control the changes in climate that make birds get their timing wrong and miss the peak number of insects. I can’t control the chemicals we use to kill insects.

  Conservation starts on your own doorstep. But only starts.

  House martins in a shivering sky. What – is spring on rewind?

  The smooth progress of spring was interrupted by a sudden fall of snow. It was neither deep nor devastating: its beauties mildly inconvenient to us humans, but more serious to everything that lived out on the marsh. It never felt like a serious bit of weather, more like a bit of showing-off: see what I can do just when you least expect it. So with May almost upon us, life seemed to have been on a sort of live pause, the singing resuming with the return of the sun, even though the snow still lay on the ground.

  There were now two singing willow warblers: one on the marsh, the other in the thicket between our boundary and the more distant heronry. This was new: an encouraging thing indeed, for, yes, these birds are also declining.

  When any species of anything is declining, there is usually a complex suite of reasons. But usually at the top of the list there are two words: habitat destruction. We make changes to the landscape and so the species that made a living there can no longer do so. When there isn’t any more habitat to move onto – and there almost always isn’t – the birds fail to breed, or just die. Fact: there are 40 million fewer individual birds in Britain than there were in 1970. There is no longer the place for them, no longer space for them.

  It’s rather better than nice, then, to be responsible for an undestroyed bit of habitat.

  Sitting out on the marsh, I could hear the clatter and the chatter from within, as heron spoke to heron from the heronry. Herons will snap their bills at each other in warning displays to protect their nests; paired birds on a nest go in for prolonged quiet rattling to each other. That’s all about strengthening the pair-bond, in scientific terms: it’s the sort of affectionate banter that keeps a relationship going.

  I wondered, for the thousandth time, if there might be a pair or two of little egrets inside that colony: a mixed-species heronry is far from unusual. These colonial nesters are happy to have plenty of other nests around them, so long as their own site is not under threat.

  Two syllables, sweet, tentative and carrying far. You know, I really do believe that sumer is icumen in.

  When did you last hear a cuckoo? I remember hearing them on Streatham Common as a boy; more recently and more than once I have gone through an entire year without hearing one at all. Here’s yet another bird in steep decline.

  But they love the marsh. So we wait for the first cuckoo, and naturally fret a little until we hear it. And then, six days later than last year, two great syllables rolling out across the marsh. It’s a day of rejoicing: they come thick and fast at this time of year.

  It’s not an elaborate song, like the sedge warbler. A cuckoo isn’t seeking to impress by the extent of its repertoire: it’s trying to cover as much distance as possible. The way the cuckoo shouts out his presence – it’s the males that say their own name – is traditionally gratifying to humans.

  Sumer is icumen in!

  Lhude sing cuccu!

  But the cuckoo does it for far better reasons tha
n pleasing us. He’s trying to summon a female, and the further his song carries, the more likely he is to find one. As soon as he arrives he starts to sing: and all around the marsh we hear the song almost constantly for six weeks. We hear it at dawn, at dusk, in the middle of the day, and at night when there’s moonshine.

  It’s the sound of the springtime frenzy: a great clamouring for life, for the opportunity to make more life. Of course, a cuckoo’s success means failure for a pair of another species: their favourite hosts are meadow pipits, dunnocks and reed warblers, but it’s not a human job to impose human notions of morality onto the wild world. There is not a lot of point in preaching sexual restraint to the bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) or plain dealing to the chameleon or peaceful coexistence to the lion or feminism to the impala or parenting to the cuckoo. ‘What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature!’ Darwin wrote. The creators of Monty Python wrote:

  All things dull and ugly,

  All creatures short and squat,

  All things rude and nasty,

  The Lord God made the lot.

  It’s perfectly possible to rejoice in the cuckoo’s return and to feel distress for the dunnocks as they rear the huge bird that has already destroyed their own young. It’s not even a contradiction. It’s wild. It’s just life.

  Wildlife is not nice. Well, it is. But it’s an awful lot of other things as well. Mainly it’s wild. And living.

  And it’s doing all that out there on the marsh.