‘Manda Brooks’, the computer obediently displayed, followed by my address. And a list, for 11 a.m. on Sunday: Blackbird, two, male and female (male with single white tail feather). Wren. Great tit. Coal tits, three. Blue tits, two. Mistle thrush. House sparrows, five, two males. Robin. Collared doves, pair. Wood pigeons, pair. Feral pigeons (overhead). Pied wagtail. Magpies, three, mobbed by sparrows. Crow (overhead). Starlings, five plus. Chaffinch, male.
It was an unremarkable list. One I could have made on almost any day in winter in my garden, or any other. But it wasn’t my list – I’d been at Tom’s at the time, had done my list earlier. And besides, at the end there was a final observation. ‘Dunnock, three. Female entertaining two males, the little tart.’
At the time, I dismissed the posting as a joke. I replaced the list with my own, which wasn’t much different, and made a note to investigate it when I had a chance, then went to bed and slept the dreamless sleep of exhaustion.
The next morning I woke with the feeling of having been snatched awake by something – a noise, a disturbance – but, listening, could hear nothing but my own breathing and then, as my ears tuned in, the sound of birdsong. It was early but I got up, pulled on some clothes and went to put out the bird seed which had been sitting reproaching me on the kitchen counter all week. I was still dazed from my abrupt awakening and not paying attention as I pushed my feet into my shoes and unlocked the kitchen door, not even looking out of the window as I went. I was greeted by an uprush of feathery panic, the whole garden suddenly alive with birds fleeing from my approach. I stopped and stared. Bird feeders hung everywhere: from all the hooks and nails, from every tree branch and even the washing line, some still swinging from the birds’ abrupt departure.
Only the blackbird remained, and I could see now he had a single white tail feather, shining translucent in the early morning sun. I crouched down on the step and scattered some of the seed; waited until, after a pause, he ran forward with his hunched and scuttling gait and took it.
‘Who’s been watching you, then?’ I asked, quietly and evenly so that he wouldn’t take flight. He simply ignored me, and around him the other birds began to filter back into the edges of the garden, torn between feeding and fear. ‘Who’s been in here?’ I asked them, but there was no answer.
STARLING
Sturnus vulgaris, family ‘Sturnidae’
‘Do you ever ask yourself why we do this?’
‘Constantly.’ Jenny eased herself between two strands of barbed wire as she spoke. ‘Especially when – eurgh – I have one hand in some sort of a puddle and one knee in what looks like a very fresh cowpat.’
‘So why do we do it?’ I persisted as I followed Jenny through the fence, feeling the sharp barbs catch and tug at my hair. ‘Any ideas?’
‘Nope, I’m drawing a blank here.’ Jenny shouldered her scope and thrust her hands into her pockets, hunching her coat up around her ears. I wondered if my nose was as red as hers. ‘No idea at all.’
Four or five other figures were trudging through the mud ahead of us, and there was a queue of at least three waiting their turn to scramble through the fence. Standing on the verge, surrounded by the haphazardly parked cars that stretched along the lane in either direction, stood the owner of the field, a shabbily dressed farmer who was getting a crash-course introduction into the logistics of a medium-size twitch. He’d long since stopped trying to prevent the steady stream of birders from getting onto his land and was reduced to scratching his head in bewilderment.
‘What did you say it was?’ he asked.
‘A hoopoe,’ said Jenny, always ready to take a novice under her wing. ‘It’s like a – well, it’s about the same size as a pigeon, but sort of pink – it’s got a crest
‘Right,’ said the farmer slowly. ‘A pink pigeon. You’ve all come to look at a pink pigeon.’ He shook his head, surveyed the muddy wreckage of his field. ‘You know what?’ he asked, mainly addressing Jenny and me, but encompassing the whole scene with a wave of his hand. ‘You lot are all absolutely bloody cuckoo.’
Jenny gave up on him and turned to face the hill. ‘Shall we?’ she asked, indicating upwards.
Jenny had dropped round one evening a few days before with a couple of maps that we had lent them for a trip and had stayed for a drink once I’d rounded up a couple of clean glasses and some wine. Alan was looking after the children and she confessed she was in no particular rush to get back.
‘This is civilized,’ she had said, leaning back against the kitchen counter, ignoring the chaos of takeaways and unwashed plates. ‘Nobody’s asked me to do anything for, ooh, twenty minutes, now. And listen to that.’
I listened, and heard nothing. ‘What?’
‘The silence. No radio, no TV, nobody yelling for their clean socks. Nothing.’
I swirled the wine in my glass and watched it ripple and settle. ‘Sometimes I turn the TV on in the next room, just so it doesn’t feel so creepy at night.’
‘You should come over to us.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, knowing she didn’t really mean it.
‘Or come out with us. God, I haven’t been birding for ages, not properly. The kids won’t. Or not for longer than twenty minutes, and then they’re cold, they’re bored, they want sweets, they need a wee.’
‘Leave them behind. Let Alan look after them.’
‘You’re right, I should,’ she said, sighing and closing her eyes as though I had suggested some unpleasant duty. ‘It’s his turn after all.’
Two days later Jenny had emailed me to say there was a hoopoe in a field outside Cookham Dean, that Alan had seen it already, that it was still around and did I want to come and see it with her? She picked me up, bubbling with her usual enthusiasm, like a child released from school. I felt some of the deadening exhaustion of the week lift as I shut the front door behind me and scrambled into the car.
‘Haven’t been on a good twitch for ages,’ she said. ‘This one’s not exactly your semi-palmated sandpiper, but a twitch is a twitch, after all.’
Following what was by now a fairly well-defined path, we walked up the rise to a ridge where a few trees sheltered a semi-circular hollow. Finding the bird is never a problem in situations like this. Around a dozen people were all staring fixedly in its direction. A few of them looked round at our approach, greeted us with a nod. Most of the rest continued to look through the telescopes which were trained on the bird. The hoopoe itself stood largely unconcerned about twenty yards away, probing the ground occasionally with its bill. Every so often it would look up and raise its crest a couple of times as though displaying for its audience. A sigh would pass through the crowd, an undertone of muttering. Every minute or so another person, or couple or group would join the cluster, shuffling round to find a gap so that a loose, evenly spaced circle of birders was formed around the bird.
‘Fantastic,’ breathed Jenny.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It depresses me, sometimes, this sort of thing. A lost bird that’s been blown too far north too early in the year. Which might, just, if it’s lucky, survive the winter only to die a lonely death because there are no other hoopoes about for it to mate with.’
‘It’s a first for Berkshire in February,’ Jenny said, having got her scope set up and peering down the eyepiece, ‘and – wow, look at that.’ The bird raised its crest again, hopped up with a loose flutter of its black-and-white wings, before settling down again to probe in the mud with its bill.
‘Come on, though. If you were on holiday in France, you wouldn’t even get out of bed for a hoopoe.’
One of the more devout-looking couples, bent reverently over their matching tripods, turned crossly to look at me.
‘You’re missing the point.’
For Jenny, I supposed, this was the point. Not the bird. The twitch itself. She was already looking beyond the hoopoe at the crowd, smiling at people she recognized, passing a few muttered comments to me as I peered through my binoculars at the doomed bird. Its cheerful
feathers looked wrong against the prevailing colours of an English winter. It had hunched them up against the cold and its lowered crest feathers blew loosely in the wind, giving it a cockeyed look. It was probably young, a first-year bird, too inexperienced to navigate its way back to the warmer lands where it belonged.
‘Hey, Manda, don’t look now, but it looks like you’ve got a secret admirer.’
‘Where?’
‘Got him in the scope for you. Handsome, too, if you like them tall and dark and a bit Mr Darcy.’
I groaned but, unable to resist, looked to see David staring intently across the field to where we stood. His Leicas were slung loosely round his neck and he was just staring, pausing occasionally to make a note. Jenny kept up her running commentary as I watched.
‘He was looking right at you. Oh, no, now he’s on the move – working his way round towards us . . . nope, he’s stopped behind those people – taken something out – can’t quite make it out, a book?’
‘His notebook.’ I was following his progress with the scope, nudging it round with my free hand as he moved. Around us, a couple of people were following the direction of our gaze, thinking we’d seen something interesting.
‘Who is he? He looks familiar.’
‘Oh, God, Jenny, he’s . . .’ I struggled to put it into words. My garden still hung with bird feeders and the sight left me uneasy every morning. I found myself looking over my shoulder at odd times, pausing in the doorway of the house to see if the coast was clear. I hid behind my answering machine, the tape every evening filling up with clicks and sighs and silences. At work, the knots of students I saw passing across the campus or coalescing around the various computer rooms and labs had become something to steer well around. Whenever I saw him, when he grinned broadly at me, or waved, or winked as he passed, I found myself cringing, accelerating away as fast as I could. But it was when I didn’t see him that I really worried, sure that he was watching me from some hidden vantage point, planning his next move. In his presence I could dismiss him as a clown, a buffoon, irritating but not dangerous. But when he wasn’t there, the thought of his persistence worried me, the single-minded determination of his pursuit. And now he was here, not allowing me even the simple pleasure of this bird, ruining everything.
‘You could do worse.’ Jenny was still scanning the crowd, oblivious, not registering my lack of response. ‘Where has he gone to now . . . behind – God, is that Emily? I should go and say hello.’
‘Please, don’t do that – don’t leave me.’ But Jenny was gone, threading her way through the clumps of people, leaving me defenceless. David was on the move again, slipping behind people, a ripple of disturbance marking his passage. I thought about moving too, but I was damned if I was going to run from him, be driven away by his persistence. A blast of wind left us all hunched miserably against the cold, and a thin and seeping rain had begun to drift down. Some starlings, driven to the top of the nearest trees by the disturbance, set up a metallic chorus of complaint. The crowd turned up their collars and leaned back down towards their scopes and resumed staring at the lost hoopoe. I leaned back down too, standing my ground, waiting for his approach.
I was fifteen when I first encountered a big twitch – a really big one, this time – on a school trip to the Dorset coast. We all piled out of the coach while the teacher tried to marshal us into groups, handing out clipboards. We were supposed to be examining rock strata. Sixteen girls in a state of suppressed hormonal turmoil. And me. Seventeen girls didn’t divide up neatly into twos, wouldn’t divide up neatly into any combination, as the teacher quickly worked out. The rest of the class had sorted themselves out already, pairs of glossy blonde and brunette and auburn heads, bent over their worksheets, plotting their quick getaway into the nearest cafe, and hopefully male company. How to explain to any one of them that I was actually interested in rock strata? The teacher looked uncomfortably at me. She didn’t want to pair up with me either. She wanted to head behind the coach for a cigarette.
‘Manda, why don’t you go as a three with Becky and Rachel?’
Becky and Rachel rolled their eyes. ‘Aw, miss . . .’
‘Samantha? Holly?’ They all did a good impression of not hearing. ‘Miss’ looked at me helplessly. She was the sort of teacher who preferred to be popular, saw herself as our friend. Foisting me on any one of this lot wasn’t going to help her. Unfortunately the only girl less popular than me, Fat Phoebe, my normal pair on these sorts of occasions, had got out of the whole humiliating experience by sticking her fingers down her throat after breakfast and throwing up on the house mistress’s shoes, instead of discreetly down the toilet like she normally did.
‘I’m fine on my own.’ I picked up the one remaining clipboard. The teacher gave me a weak and grateful smile. I trailed after the other girls, who were racing through their questions with barely a glance at the rocks we’d come to see. I didn’t mind being on my own. I felt relieved not to have Phoebe stumping along in my wake, complaining about her feet, her weight, and the fact that everyone hated her. It must have been early March, but I remember it being almost warm, and sunny, and I could hear the shrill cries of Becky and Holly and Rachel and the others as they rolled down their school socks and hitched up their skirts with their sashes. They reached the cliffs and turned left, towards civilization and boys. I checked my watch, looked round to see that the teacher was safely flirting with the coach driver, and turned right.
I thought I’d come across some Hollywood star or paparazzi shoot. Twenty or thirty men on a slight rise overlooking the shore, all peering through what I took to be cameras resting on tripods. But the spot on which they were all focused was apparently empty. They stood rapt, staring at nothing.
Intrigued, I sidled up to the nearest, younger than the rest, who didn’t have a tripod, just a pair of binoculars. Rock strata forgotten, I finally plucked up the courage to ask him what he was looking at. His companion, an older man, straightened up from his telescope and motioned me forward to have a look. Covering one eye, I peered through at a stocky little bird, brown and white and grey, that was moving slowly along the shore, probing occasionally with its beak.
‘See it?’ asked the younger lad.
‘I think so.’ I saw only a bird. ‘What’s so special about it?’
‘Semi-palmated sandpiper.’ He said it with reverence.
‘I’d have expected something fully palmated, the amount of fuss you’re making.’
He laughed, then stopped abruptly when the bird, startled, paused its probing of the muddy foreshore. I looked up and saw his hand clapped over his mouth.
‘Is it rare?’
The older man spoke. ‘Not in America, where it’s from. But they’re rare here. This is probably the first one in Dorset in a decade.’ He took up his position at the telescope again.
The lad handed me his binoculars and I struggled to find the bird again. ‘See its feet? How they’re a little bit webbed just up between the toes?’
‘Sort of,’ I said. I was looking at a bird, not entirely sure that it was the right one.
‘That’s what makes it a semi-palm. It’s the first time I’ve seen one.’
‘Me too.’ I was being sarcastic, but he nodded seriously, and when he smiled his thanks as I handed him back the binoculars I suddenly didn’t feel quite so clever. I wanted to take the binoculars again, see those almost webbed feet. I smiled back.
‘You on the lam from school?’
‘No. Field trip.’ I pulled the clipboard out from under my arm. ‘Rock strata.’
‘I remember them.’
I realized he wasn’t that much older than me. ‘So, are you on the lam yourself then?’
He grinned. ‘It’s educational, isn’t that right, Dad?’
His father stood up, began to pack up his kit. All around us others were doing the same as though responding to some signal I couldn’t hear while the bird probed on, unmoved by the loss of its audience. ‘Educational is right, Eddie. And n
ow I’m bloody gagging for a cup of tea.’
As, one by one, the birders moved along the beach towards the town, I simply joined their slipstream. Eddie took my clipboard from me, began filling in the answers.
‘We had this worksheet last year. The very same one.’
His dad bought me a cup of tea and we sat, squashed up around a small Formica table, as Eddie and his father reminisced about other trips they’d been on. There was a bantering intimacy between the pair of them and with the others queuing up at the counter who inched past the table. I sat and swung my legs and blew on the hot tea and let the warm flow of words wash over me. Half of it I didn’t even understand, but I laughed when Eddie laughed, and sometimes he’d explain something and I’d nod as though that helped.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Becky and Holly and Rachel, their shared pack of Silk Cut not too discreetly hidden in Becky’s blazer pocket.
‘Hey, remember Studland, last year, the yellow-browed warbler on the nudist beach?’
‘Trying to explain to the guy we really were trying to look at birds . . .’
‘. . . the feathered kind! And the look on Dels face when he realized he’d set his scope up looking straight at that woman.’
‘The one who thought he was a peeping Tom.’
‘I almost died.’
‘It was Del almost died when her husband showed up.’
Eddie was pointing out Del to me, but Becky and Rachel and Holly were making their way out the door. I looked at my watch, knowing it was time to go, time to tear myself away from the warm circle. I stood up.
‘Thanks for the tea.’
‘Bleeding hell, Ed, it’s almost dark out. See her back to the coach, why don’t you?’
We walked out into the dusk. As I turned towards the car park, Eddie took my elbow and stopped me.
‘Wait. I want to show you something. Look.’
Out of a Clear Sky Page 8