by Simon Barnes
The Cetti’s warbler is particularly keen on this: a sudden exclamation to the darkness, reminding others of his kind that he’s still there and in control. I heard the first Cetti’s shout as I opened the gate to the marsh and walked towards the benches and the low table. I poured tea: hot, milkless and sugarless Rooibos tea, a habit I had picked up in Africa. It seemed to act as a link between the wild world and my half-woken self, reminding me that I was supposed to be enjoying myself. The Cetti’s helped: every time I have done this dawn vigil – every May since we have lived here – the Cetti’s has called me to order, reminding me why I had abandoned sleep and embraced mild discomfort.
I had the world to myself. Or rather, the opportunity to share the world with warblers. There was no sound of the busyness of the farm next door, no urgent anxiety calls from reversing tractors, no sound of engines. Occasionally, from the road, I could hear an early-morning – or late-night – vehicle, but that only emphasised the isolation: the thrilling loneliness of night.
A sedge warbler started up: at first tentatively, but he soon found his stride and dropped into the pattern of endless unenigmatic variations. I heard the splashing of a female mallard swimming down the dyke: sighting me – the light was already getting better – she took the wing with a quack of alarm. There was stirring in the heronry: I could hear the sound of movement, wing-flapping and bill-clattering. No singing for herons, the only territory they need to defend is a beak’s length from the nest: but an urgent day of fishing and feeding the young lay ahead.
Then, oddly, I heard the voice of a peacock. There are plenty of feral peacocks in Britain: when I lived in Suffolk they were regular visitors to our place, and their voices echoed round the village. But they don’t move about a lot: they’re not great fliers and they generally find a way of foraging – and getting fed by humans – wherever they happen to be. But here, perhaps for the first time, I heard a peacock: not actually on the marsh but away towards the farm. And I never heard him again.
One of the strange things that happen in the course of this annual dawn vigil is that sight becomes secondary: and that’s a rare thing for us humans. It seemed that every noise I made myself was the most terrible din: the ring of the flask as I poured myself another cup and banged it clumsily against the table; the rustle of my waterproof as I reached for my cup and sipped.
A bird cleared its throat and I instantly knew it was a blackbird. A second or so later it went into full song. A little later exactly the same thing happened with a cuckoo: I knew the birds even before they had revealed themselves through song. I had recognised them when I couldn’t see them and when I couldn’t properly hear them either. There was a deeply satisfying sense, partly of my own brilliance but far more of being in tune: of being at one with the birds and with the place in which they had their being. I, silent, felt perfectly in tune: a member of the Inner Ring.
It was then that the single most electrifying moment of the spring took place. Perhaps of the year. A new voice joined the chorus: an insistent, drilling, insect-like call. But no insect. Might you call that reeling? Surely I had a grasshopper warbler here, surely this one wasn’t going to turn into a sedge warbler: the song was too persistent, too committed, showing no sign whatsoever of breaking into the thousand variations. It sang again and then again, and I listened with a smile of delighted incredulity. Was it really a gropper, though? It sounded a little light, insufficiently persistent. Doesn’t that make it a . . .
Then a willow warbler struck up from the clump of sallows, and a wren, from right behind me, drowned out everything else out with a startlingly loud and explosive burst of song, with a trill so fulsome you’d have thought he’d burst his small body in half.
After that (was this irony?) I saw something – actually saw something using my eyes rather than my ears – and it was a bird you always hear and hardly ever see. It was a tawny owl, crossing the open ground between the heronry wood and the wood beyond the edge of the marsh, where I believed the buzzards were nesting. Almost everything else in the course of the vigil came from hearing: but here was a notoriously invisible bird in plain sight.
I sat there for an hour and a half, by which time it was light and the early-morning singing had died down, though the reeling bird was still reeling. The whitethroats waited till I was on the move before they began: slugaroosts. There was a chiffchaff and a chaffinch singing in the garden.
It was like my dream of plenty, but the images were all in sound. Not a vision of beauty: and being such sight-crazy creatures we don’t really have a word widely used for a thing heard. All the same, it really was an audition of beauty. The power-ballad of the earth.
Morning ride. Do the young hares flee for fear of the horse or for the joy of running?
Not a gropper. I looked it up before going to bed that morning, listened to a recording. It was a Savi’s warbler, beyond any possibility of doubt. And that was a pretty extraordinary thing. There aren’t many of them around in this country. This is the extreme northerly tip of their range: in any one year, you may get a pair or two breeding in Britain. Seldom more. Some have predicted that will be the next Cetti’s: marching forwards confidently, northwards into the climate-changing world. But it’s been a long threatening and still there are no more of them. Perhaps they are climate-change sceptics: Trump’s warbler. (Paolo Savi was professor of Natural Sciences at Pisa in the 19th century.)
I contacted Carl, my own personal rarities committee, and he gave the bird a cheery thumbs-up. That same week, he told me, Savi’s warblers had also turned up at Titchwell and at Minsmere. These two are the top two names in wetland nature reserves: not bad company to be keeping. It was as if a great musician had decided on a British tour: Covent Garden, the Royal Albert Hall – and our back garden.
I never heard the bird again, so he didn’t stay and breed. That would have been a coup. His brief presence was a thrill, perhaps even a validation. But there are more important things in life – in wildlife – than thrills. The fact is that other less glamorous species were actually breeding out there on the marsh. Species in decline, species to worry about: and they were hard at it all around us. That new entry, that new tick on the Marsh List was all very fine and dandy, but the willow warblers were actually out there making more willow warblers, and that’s what it’s all about.
Glamour is all very well. But what matters more: the famous person you know slightly and sometimes have a pleasant evening with, or the lifetime friend who’d drop everything the moment you asked?
Sundowner, slow, very slow. Over the marsh, swift. Very swift.
Apple juice for Eddie. Beer for me. And a flask of coffee for Cindy: she was coming with us, so hurrah. Cheese and tomato sandwich, hot baked beans in a jar, yoghurt and fruit in another jar. So let’s go.
There are times when it seems that the earth itself is in a good temper. There seemed to be nothing to worry about: not where the next bit of work was coming from, not what Eddie would do next year and every year after, not the declining numbers of cuckoos and willow warblers, not the changing climate, not the ecological holocaust. Everything seemed suspended. It was a bit like the interval in one of those absolutely enormous plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream or King Lear; I’m not sure if we’re taking part in a tragedy or a comedy – no doubt both – but it was a pause in the action, a moment when you could have a beer and a small joke and an affectionate word before going back to the terrible questions and the still more terrifying certainties of the main action.
It was a benign world. For half an hour at least.
So we sat and we talked and we sat and we listened and we sat and we watched: over there, between the benches and the lone oak, the one that stands a couple of hundred yards beyond the boundary dyke, I saw the pale male marsh harrier drop down. I waited for him to rise again, and here’s a thing: he didn’t. There’s more than one possible explanation for this, of course – but one is that there might be a nest there. And the air was full of seed: trees – was i
t the sallows? – had vented thousands upon thousands of these tiny weightless fluffy seeds, one of which might land and sprout and become a tree and produce such seeds in its turn. Everything you saw or heard was fecund.
I had a sudden memory of my fourth term at university. It wasn’t spring, it was autumn of course: but in student terms that’s a time of new beginnings. And it was as if the whole world – or at least every single person I knew at the time – had gone mad. It was as if the air was full of seeds and songs. Everybody who was partnered up became unpartnered and more or less immediately repartnered. Those who had slept alone for a year were now half of a pair. Virgins became as rare as Savi’s warblers. People you’d never suspect of such enormities had girlfriends and boyfriends, and then busily set about being unfaithful to them. ‘Imagine taking an X-ray photograph of this place at midnight,’ said my own new girlfriend as we lay together in her hall of residence. ‘Every single room in the entire place, there’s people hard at it.’
‘Lovely copulation bliss on bliss,’ I replied, for I was reading Blake at the time.
The marsh was like that: like all of student Clifton in October 1971. The difference was that here, after the partnering, there would be babies.
I gave a sudden shout and a point, and two more heads turned and we all of us saw, low to the water and moving with immense purpose, a perfect vision – not an audition – of electric blue.
‘Kingfisher!’ said Eddie.
One of the lost words, as it happens. But not here.
And down the dyke a little way, at the end of a small, surprisingly deep tunnel, was there perhaps a collection of tiny white eggs, or little fluffy not-yet-blue kingfisherettes?
It seemed then that the wave of spring had reached its maximum height up the beach. What was left was the living, the rearing, the hard yards of the wild year. The bits we missed out in Clifton.
The year was turning.
Again.
13
I AM NOT A NUMBER
Morning ride. Overnight rain has turned the lane into a green tunnel.
I have an awful lot of field guides. Mostly birds, of course, but the inadvertent collection covers a good few other taxa as well. They all help a reader – or rather a looker, a peruser, a thumber-through – to work out what species have been seen. They are – necessarily – so intent on this often difficult and complex task that you’d think species was the end of the matter. Once you’ve diagnosed the species: well, job done, all questions answered. But when you spend a lot of time looking – and listening – in a single place, you begin to realise that species is the beginning, not the end. It’s the answer to question one, that’s all: and there are a million more. Just about every field guide I possess reads as if every bird of the same species looks the same, sounds the same, acts the same, thinks the same, is the same. Sometimes the males and females look different, sometimes the immatures look different, but crack the code and you’ve finished the job. You can’t blame the field guides for this: they’re only doing their job. It’s up to the peruser to take the next step.
Pale and Dusky were so dissimilar you might almost think they were different species. And yet they were both male marsh harriers, both using the marsh, though at different times. I had already seen them many times, and rejoiced in the fact that I was able to tell them apart. Not a marsh harrier but that marsh harrier. I remembered The Prisoner, the mad thriller series of the 1960s, in which every week Patrick McGoohan resisted the latest attempt to destroy his individuality. ‘I am number two. You are number six.’
‘I am not a number! I’m a free man!’
I have ridden a lot of horses in my life: and every single time I sit on a horse for the first time, I am taken aback at the way this one is different from every other horse I have ever ridden. There are a thousand differences between every individual, sometimes subtle, sometimes very much not so. I ride Mia in a way I would not have ridden her predecessors because I know her as an individual. She has her idiosyncrasies of nature and I am accustomed to them, so without even thinking about the matter, I make small pre-emptive corrections before the error has been committed.
It had rained heavily in the night and as Mia and I set off down the lane, the tops of the hedge-trees had bowed over, creating a long green tunnel that was pleasant to ride through. I held the reins by the buckle, because I knew I could take such a liberty, and we set off in great good humour, coming back an hour later better pleased with the world than when we set off. And from the big oak just by our gate as I rode in, I heard a song that had me baffled for a moment. So we paused for a better listen: this song was impossibly rich and flowing and still I was struggling to put a name to it.
Then the song shifted gear. It was still loud and fulsome and exceptionally well phrased, but comparatively commonplace. And I knew it all right: it was a blackcap. But an especially good one. This is yet another species of warbler, sometimes called the northern nightingale: some claim the song is as good as a nightingale’s; and the blackcap’s range takes it deep into Scotland, while nightingales are restricted to Southern England and East Anglia.
It is a fabulous singer: and here was one with a different song. So perhaps the aim of everyone who watches birds, who looks at and listens to any form of wildlife, is to be able to recognise each individual, and celebrate not just its similarities with the rest of its species but also the things that make that individual animal unique. To get even slightly closer to that impossible ideal is a major change in perception.
I could hear the individuality in that song. It seemed to me a cut above normal blackcap song, which is lovely enough. But then I wondered how a female blackcap would take it. Did the song say to her: here is a super-blackcap, an übermönchsgrasmücke? Or did she say, this is wrong, this is an aberrant bird – a freak, yuck – and I wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole?
Either way, it’s her choice. The males sing the song of themselves and the females decide what is pleasing: what marks the sort of blackcap they choose to sire their next brood. It’s a notion called sexual selection: another form of competition within a species. It’s a competition that comes down to the individual. Darwin came up with the notion and the Victorians hated it. That’s because its basic premise was that the decision on what matters in a species is decided by the females. But it’s the right answer.
When I was writing a book about birdsong (Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed) the publishers were much taken with the idea of inventing a Shazam for birdsong: that is to say, an app on your phone that will listen to a bit of birdsong and at once tell you what species you’re listening to. I wasn’t a great help at the meeting. There was a lot of exciting talk about algorithms, but I kept saying that it wouldn’t work because it couldn’t work. Birds are not the same as records. They’re individuals and they vary. Sometimes considerably, as that blackcap showed. Your app is never going to be able to sample the full range of individuality that lies within a species. Alas, I was proved right, and the idea was dropped.
These days, there are products that make a decent fist of the job. The reviews I have read say that they can’t get the answer right every time, though they can sometimes be helpful. But I think that on the whole it’s better to learn the songs for yourself. Our brains are better than machines when it comes to coping with the notion of individuality.
Morning ride. I greet the Chinese water deer in my best Cantonese: Josun!
We can easily recognise animals as individuals, rather than representatives of a species, when we live with them. If you have two cats in the house, you know that one always sleeps on top of the fridge and merely tolerates human company while the other prefers the laundry basket and actively seeks people out. Recognising and understanding individuals is infinitely harder with free-living wild animals, and doing so has been the great achievement of many of the great ethologists – students of animal behaviour – of recent years: Cynthia Moss with elephants, Jane Goodall with chimpanzees, George Schaller with lions and
many others subsequently. People have done it with gorillas, bonobos, whales and dolphins, hyenas, wild dogs and many, many others. And it all begins with the identification of individuals.
So let us allow ourselves to be sidetracked by the magnanimous wolf; I read about him in Carl Safina’s Beyond Words. The wolf was called Twenty-one. (Some researchers give names; others think that’s frightfully unscientific.) Twenty-one had a personality that effortlessly disposed of all attempts to dehumanise – or delupinise – him.
Wolves fight. They fight seriously and bitterly and often to the death. But not Twenty-one. He was so great a fighter that he never once lost – and never once killed a defeated opponent. All right, let’s be careful of casual use of big words. Let’s just say that if Twenty-one had been a human, we would admire him for his magnanimity, for his mercy.
Safina took this a courageous step onwards: ‘When a human releases a vanquished opponent rather than killing them, in the eyes of onlookers the vanquished still loses status but the victor seems all the more impressive. You can’t be magnanimous unless you’ve won . . . And if you show mercy, your lack of fear shows tremendous confidence. Onlookers might feel it would be desirable to follow such a person, so strong yet inclined toward forbearance.’
The ability to recognise wild creatures as individuals is not restricted to people who fill days and years watching the same small group. If you regularly visit the same place, you add a deeper layer of satisfaction with the knowledge that you are often encountering an animal you’ve come across before, maybe many times. I didn’t know if the willow warbler singing in the sallows was the same one that had sung there last year: but I did know that it was more or less certainly the same bird I was hearing every day.