Birdwatchingwatching Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introductions

  1. Fork in the Road

  2. Home and Away

  3. Big Brother

  4. Wingman

  5. Oddie Language

  6. Football Crazy

  7. Penalties

  8. Beyond the Fringe

  9. Hornes of Africa

  10. Soggy Fish and Chips

  11. Lucky Dip

  12. Countdown

  Epilogue – Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

  Appendix

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ONE MAN AND HIS DAD: A COMICAL TALE OF COMPETITIVE TWITCHING

  Comedian Alex Horne’s dad has always been an avid birdwatcher, a fact Alex could never quite come to terms with. But faced with the prospect of becoming a father himself one day, Alex resolved to get to know his own dad better and finally understand why (and how) he does what he does. The best way to bond, he decided, would be some father-versus-son competitive birdwatching. Over the course of one year, they would each attempt to see as many species of bird as possible governed by three basic rules: the birds had to be wild, free and alive; they had to actually see the birds; and they could travel anywhere in the world to do it. From Barnet to Bahrain, taking in a twitchy stag-weekend in Wales and an unfortunately birdless trip to the Alps, this is a hilarious and dramatic true story of obsessive behaviour, friendship and fatherhood.

  About the Author

  Alex Horne’s first ever comedy gig came after winning a Christmas Cracker joke-writing competition. Since that inauspicious beginning he has managed to establish a remarkable reputation among critics, comics and audiences as a gifted gagsmith, prolific writer and one of the most creative solo performers at work today. He was nominated for the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003, and in 2004 he won the Chortle award for Best Breakthrough Act. He is married, has met Ken Dodd three times and the Pope once. This is his first book.

  For Rachel, Beyoncé and Shakira

  Introductions

  My dad is a birdwatcher.

  That’s a sentence I’ve struggled with for the last twenty years. My dad watches birds, often for hours at a time. Why?

  Before I attempt to come up with an answer, there’s one thing I need to get sorted right away. This is a book about me and my dad. But it’s also about me hypothetically becoming a dad, so I don’t really want to refer to my dad as ‘dad’. That wouldn’t do at all.

  I also don’t want to call my dad ‘Hugh’. That is his name (well, it’s his middle name, but for some long forgotten reason everyone calls him Hugh rather than the James his parents intended), but I just can’t call my dad by his real name. I’m sorry, but I can’t write a book about Hugh when Hugh is actually my dad. And for those of you who are thinking ahead, yes, Hugh Horne is quite a funny name. He’s a GP, and so his full title is Dr Hugh Horne, perilously close to Dr Huge Horne, a nickname few of his patients were able to resist. (I should add that I didn’t discover that my surname was a euphemism until I was fifteen years old, when a teacher – who was also a priest – got the giggles while reading out the register.)

  Thankfully, my dad (that’s one of the last times I’ll refer to him thus, so enjoy) managed to rename himself without even trying. Like all dads, he’s useless with modern technology. He can’t text, for example. He tries, but consistently ends up sending messages filled with twenty-first century Freudian slips, devoid of punctuation, and more often than not using ‘in’ instead of ‘go’ and ‘of’ instead of ‘me’, which isn’t helpful when the text is meant to be about ‘me’ ‘going’ somewhere.

  One particular text sent to my brother Chip (we won’t go into his name just yet) was unsurpassed in its ‘dadness’. In capital letters of course, and unintentionally aggressive in tone, but with virtually no mistakes until the final three words:

  LOVE FROM DUNCTON

  Chip understood what he meant, but this was too good an opportunity to miss. He immediately forwarded the message to his brothers, one of whom (me) phoned up our father and asked why he had signed off his text ‘DUNCTON’?

  ‘I was trying to write dad,’ he offered apologetically. ‘It must be this new predictive texting.’

  ‘It doesn’t predict that you’re going to use a word that doesn’t exist,’ I countered logically, if a little harshly. ‘That wouldn’t be a helpful system at all.’

  But Duncton does exist. It’s a place in Sussex that my dad (that’s the last time) occasionally frequents (you’ve guessed it) for birdwatching purposes. It turned out that he’d typed the word ‘Duncton’ more often than the word ‘dad’, which didn’t make us brothers feel all that good. Still, Duncton he wrote, and so Duncton he became. And from now on, I will refer to him as Duncton, both here, at home, to friends, to family and especially in texts.

  So, Duncton is a birdwatcher …

  But Duncton was never a particularly fanatical birdwatcher. He didn’t watch birds with any regularity, or belong to any clubs. He didn’t go on birdwatching holidays, attend birdwatching lectures or charter a plane to the Isles of Scilly to catch a glimpse of the UK’s first recorded great blue heron. He was simply an everyday birdwatcher. More accurately, he’s a birder. The word ‘birdwatcher’ sounds too deliberate. It suggests that he only watched birds when on a ‘birdwatching trip’. Of course he did go on many such outings, but Duncton didn’t devote specific time to birds, he was just constantly aware of them.

  So, Duncton is a birder …

  I ought to introduce myself properly here too. I’m a comedian. And that’s a sentence I’ve struggled with too, for the last seven years. As soon as you tell someone you’re a comedian they ask you one of three things. Have I heard of you? Are you funny? Can you tell me a joke? Only the first of these has a simple answer, and that is no. Unless you have heard of me, in which case the answer is yes. Am I funny? On stage, yes. That’s why I’m a comedian. But I’m not funny all the time. That wouldn’t be funny. And can I tell you a joke? I could. But I’d prefer to tell you about Duncton.

  During my childhood, his hobby manifested itself in small but persistent ways. The tedium of a long journey would be broken by Duncton suddenly squawking, jerking his head round and shouting ‘Kestrel! Kestrel!’ Kestrels aren’t especially rare, but he’d be so excited by the sight of one hovering above the motorway (‘It’s as though it’s dangling on the end of a piece of string!’ he’d cry) that he couldn’t help but share it with his family, thereby putting us at risk with his erratic driving. On walks over the Downs near our home in West Sussex he would stride far ahead, clutching his binoculars like a child might a cherished bear. We would only catch him up when a particularly indistinct LBJ1 caught his attention, causing him to stop and stare at what looked to the rest of us like an ordinary bush. Mealtimes at home would be interrupted not by a programme on TV, but by a goldfinch on the bird table.

  My ‘Writing Book’ May 1984 aged 5¾.

  I didn’t think Duncton’s behaviour abnormal, until my tenth New Year’s Eve party, and a brief moment my parents have probably long forgotten. Perhaps unusually, new year festivities have often been momentous for me. Before I was trusted to go out by myself, they involved a party at one of our friends’ houses in Midhurst, where we lived. Conveniently, every family we knew seemed to have three similarly aged boys, all of whom would spend the evening upstairs, playing games and then fighting, while the adults did what adults did at parties in the late eighties (probably playing games and fighting too) downstairs. I should make
it clear that mine wasn’t a scandalous childhood. This is no confessional memoir. The word ‘fighting’ in the previous sentence should really be ‘squabbling’. But there are a couple of confessions I’d like to get off my chest as the story unfolds, and which I’ve never made before. The first is that it was at one of these New Year’s Eve parties that I first got drunk (as opposed to not really liking the taste of alcohol and pretending to be dizzy).

  As the gap between the eldest children and youngest adults mysteriously narrowed, the generational groups began to mix more at these get-togethers, so that on one occasion I found myself in the kitchen, fetching my friend Ben’s dad Mike a snack. Seeing an open bottle of red wine on the table, and carried away by the occasion, I glugged down a few hearty gulps before returning with a plate of mini cheddars. I then continued to generously offer to distribute food while steadily getting merrier in the kitchen.

  There is no dramatic ending to the story. I wasn’t sick in front of everyone. I might have had a sore head the next morning, but no more than anyone else. It was probably quite a safe way to experiment with alcohol, and thinking back, my parents almost certainly knew I was getting quietly sozzled and were happy and amused to keep an eye on my progress. At the time, of course, I thought I was being both mature and naughty.

  But back to the incident of 31 December 1988. As midnight approached everyone gathered together in the biggest room. There was just time for one last party game before the year ticked over. Someone suggested charades. Someone else suggested a game of charades in which you pretended to be a person in the room. Everyone thought this was a tremendous idea. Like I said, this is not a drugs-hookers-binges memoir.

  One of my parents’ friends, almost certainly Mike again, spent the next few minutes pretending to be Duncton, to the delight of everyone present. It was the perfect portrayal of the stereotypical twitcher: sleeves rolled up way above the elbow, mimed binoculars repeatedly raised, head cocked, walk stealthy, and then the pièce de résistance – he almost exploded when he caught sight of a bird!2 Not, of course, one with wings, but one of my friends’ mums – one of the Midhurst birds. This almost took the roof off the place. ‘It’s Hugh!’ they all shouted and everyone laughed.

  And that was it. The moment was soon lost in the confused countdown to the final year of the decade and a rousing chorus of the few words of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ that everyone knew and repeated ad nauseum. But for me, this was a turning point, as pivotal as those first swigs of wine. It was my very first indication that there might be anything odd about being a ‘twitcher’, my first brush with the double meaning of ‘birds’ and the first time I saw that there was something amusing about birdwatching.

  From that moment Duncton’s hobby became the focus of my curiosity. As I grew more independent of my parents and did what my friends said was cool, I stopped watching birds and started watching football. But all the while, as Liverpool shrank, Man Utd grew, and I slowly realised I’d backed the wrong horse, Duncton remained a birder. As I lurched through puberty, my emotions towards this eternal paternal birdwatcher moved from shame and embarrassment in my early teens, to pride and amusement as I realised my ‘quirky’ family might make me seem more interesting to girls, then confusion and genuine disbelief as I left school and embarked on my own bird-free adult life. Why does Duncton watch birds? When I started making a living out of comedy, this question was always at the back of my mind. I was sure something funny lurked in the answer. If humour comes from incongruity, then birdwatching must be a rich source of material.

  Almost two decades after that party, I was twenty-seven years old and rapidly approaching the same age Duncton was when he had me. He would soon be twice as old as I am. That works mathematically. And it hasn’t always been the case – when I was five he wasn’t ten.

  On New Year’s Day 2005, I got married. Two days later my wife, Rachel, and I flew to Costa Rica for an unforgettable honeymoon in what seemed to us like paradise. Before we left, Duncton gave me a small wedding present, a compact pair of RSPB binoculars, nothing fancy, just a lightweight piece of birding equipment so I wouldn’t miss the sort of birds he knew I’d have the chance to see in this avian nirvana. By the end of the trip, I’d lost both lens caps, broken the strap and used them more than any other item in our suitcase. Surrounded by iridescent hummingbirds, ridiculous-looking toucans, pelicans diving for fun and fish and love-struck pairs of scarlet macaws, I stopped and looked at birds for the first time in twenty years. I got excited by feathers, my ears pricked involuntarily when I heard an unusual call; I even wrote a list of the species I’d seen, prompted by the sight of a rare bird in the heart of the cloud forest that our guide insisted was called a resplendent quetzal.

  Having outgrown the label of newly-wed, and aware that I was nearing the pertinent age discussed above, thoughts and conversations inevitably turned to fatherhood. Rachel and I weren’t in any particular rush to have kids but we knew we both wanted to start a family at some point. Naturally, I hope, I was scared. I knew nothing about babies. I had no idea about birth weights and what might be a good one, whether it’s ever OK to shake them, and at what age I should reasonably be alarmed if my offspring were not talking. But the one man I wanted to turn to for advice was spending more and more time typing the names of obscure birdwatching sites into his phone and less and less time communicating with his own sons. Recently retired, Duncton was now ‘out birding’ on an almost daily basis.

  There was only one thing for it – I would have to join him.

  My plan was simple. Not only would I spend time with Duncton, ask him about fatherhood while attempting to finally understand why he does what he does, but there was also the faint possibility I might ‘get into’ birdwatching. For, as well as worrying about my ignorance on the baby front, I was also beginning to fret about not knowing anything about anything. A dad, I thought, should be able to tell his children what things are. That’s what mine did for me.

  ‘That,’ Duncton would say, as a bright yellow bird fluttered up to the bird table, ‘is a grey wagtail.’

  ‘But it’s yellow!’ we would object.

  ‘Not as yellow as a yellow wagtail,’ the oracle would reply.

  Unfortunately, very little of that invaluable information sank in. I didn’t know the difference between a coot and a moorhen. I was useless. So I immersed myself in the birdwatching books I’d ignored for so long on Duncton’s shelves. From the calm journalism of Simon Barnes, Stephen Moss and Mark Cocker to the more impenetrable excitement of Bill Oddie, Dan Koeppel and Kenn Kaufman, I absorbed the history of the hobby, studied the main protagonists and gradually learned to speak the language. Soon, however, it became clear there was only one way I could really get under the skin of birdwatching: by birdwatching.

  Tentatively, I asked Duncton if I could join him on his outings. Aware both of the commitment needed to do his hobby justice and my own slightly impatient nature, Duncton suggested a trial period. And so, inspired by the more competitive world of birding in America,3 I agreed to join him on what would be a first for both of us: A Big Year. From 1 January to 31 December 2006 (exactly the same size as a normal year, only more exciting) we would each attempt to see as many species of bird as possible. The contest appealed to my sense of sport and scale, and while the formality was alien to Duncton’s relaxed approach to birding, he was so amazed and excited by his son’s new-found enthusiasm that he was more than happy to take part. It was agreed that I would use a small microphone to record what I hoped would be the hilarious banter bandied about in bird reserves up and down the country4. If I was going to spend a year watching birds, I reasoned, I’d have to get at least a couple of funny stories on the way.

  This, we agreed, was to be a proper contest, the winner being the man who saw the greatest number of species after twelve months. Several birders have committed their Big Year stories to paper. After an American Jack Kerouac-like figure by the name of Kenn Kaufman kicked things off with a hitchhiking trek across America,
immortalised in the great Kingbird Highway, bird writers like Mark Obmascik and Sean Dooley followed his footsteps with terrific international Big Year books. But after buying and reading just about every major book about British birdwatching (not about British birds – there are about as many books about birds as there are birds themselves), I hadn’t actually read the story of a British Big Year until Amazon took it upon itself to recommend one to me.

  I was supposed to be buying Christmas presents for my brothers, but Amazon had other ideas and suggested, quite convincingly, that I really ought to invest in Arrivals and Rivals: A Birding Oddity written by a birder (and moth expert, taxonomist and scientist) from Harpenden called Adrian M Riley. I’m easily persuaded – Amazon seems to know me very well – and when it arrived I wasn’t disappointed. This was exactly what I needed before setting off on my journey. With the subtitle ‘A Year of Competitive Twitching’, this book, written with raw enthusiasm by a fellow Big Year competitor, would be my reference point, pace setter, compass. Duncton was the man I was trying to both understand and defeat, and Adrian M Riley would show me how.

  The rules of our Big Year were simple. We were governed, of course, by the fundamental birdwatching covenant:

  •Birds seen must be wild, free and alive

  They can’t be pets, captives or dead. We couldn’t phone up the local Chinese takeaway, order a Peking Duck, and tick off another species. A bird in the hand was not worth two in the bush.

  We also added some rules of our own:

  •We had to actually see the birds

  This may sound obvious, but it is common practice for birdwatchers to tick off birds they can only hear. Such is the knowledge of an even half-decent birdwatcher that they can identify a bird hidden in a grove from its chirping alone. Not so for us. Possessing none of this awareness myself, I would have to actually clap eyes on the creatures for them to be ticked.5 We also, incidentally, banned the other senses. If one of us could feel and taste a bird, but not see it, that wouldn’t count. Clearly this would rarely be relevant, but if Duncton was to fall asleep in the garden and accidentally swallow6 a goldcrest, he would not be allowed to add that goldcrest to his list, unless he was able to first eject it unharmed, an ugly and unlikely scenario considering the delicacy of the bird (it’s the smallest in Europe).