Birdwatchingwatching Read online

  And finally:

  • We could travel anywhere in the world to see our birds

  Birdwatchers often limit their Big Year to a local patch,7 be it their country, county or even their garden. Considering that I, a non-birder, lived in northwest London, while Duncton, a birder, had the whole of Sussex to roam around, I made the executive decision to remove border controls from the challenge. This, I thought, was a fairly canny move, given that my job as a stand-up comedian allows me (well, forces me) to travel extensively. I also knew that in August I would be attending the wedding of a friend of my wife’s in Caesarea, Israel, bang in the middle of the migratory route of birds flying south for the winter. I was thinking tactically. I wanted to win this thing.

  So that was that. We were ready. And on the morning of my first wedding anniversary I started birdwatching.

  1 LBJ is birders’ speak for ‘Little brown job’ – any small brown bush-dwelling species that inexplicably gets a birdwatcher’s juices flowing.

  2 OK, let’s deal with this now: Duncton is not a twitcher. A twitcher is someone whose sole birdwatching aim is to see as many different species of birds as possible in their lifetime. Duncton, as I’ve said, is a birder, someone interested in seeing the birds in his local area, year in year out, without chasing across the country to ‘get’ a new species. The term twitcher was coined by one of birdwatching’s great pioneers, Howard Medhurst, a.k.a. The Kid. Lacking his own transport, The Kid would often travel for miles on the back of his friend Bob Emmet’s motorbike to seek out a rumoured bird, and would frequently arrive so cold and excited that he would, literally, twitch. This happened with such regularity that the burgeoning birdwatching community soon adopted the term ‘twitching’ to represent the activity of chasing birds around the country.

  3 Birdwatching in the United States is now more of a sport than a hobby. On New Year’s Day each year, thousands of teams set off on an annual ‘Bird Race’: ‘In a good year the contest offers passion and deceit, fear and courage, a fundamental craving to see and conquer mixed with an unstoppable yearning for victory,’ writes Mark Obmascik in The Big Year.

  4 As it turned out there wasn’t an awful lot of hilarious banter It was mostly men sitting in silence, and that silence occasionally broken by someone saying, ‘Oh, there’s a skylark … Is it? No, it’s gone.’ But what little there was, I captured!

  5 Once, when I was explaining these rules to a friend, I said I would have to ‘make eye contact’ with the bird. That was not the case. It didn’t matter if the bird wasn’t watching me watching it.

  6 A not unusual example of a bird’s name also being a verb. See also duck, snipe and tern. Common too is the phenomenon of a birding term having some sort of sexual connotation. If you want to play Horne’s Birdwatching Euphemism Bingo feel free to do so. Simply underline any word or phrase you encounter that could in any way be construed to be rude, then cross it off the checklist at the back of the book and see if you can get all twenty.

  7 A birder’s patch is the area he visits most regularly. Whether daily, monthly or annually, this is his haunt and those are his birds.

  CHAPTER 1

  Fork in the Road

  ‘Like so many birders, and particularly those trying to compile large year lists, the first morning of January usually heralds the start of a maniacal rush towards the pursuit of filling the pages of one’s notebook.’

  – Adrian M Riley, Arrivals and Rivals: A Birding Oddity

  Alex:

  0 species

  Duncton:

  0 species

  1 January

  ONE GOOD THING about getting married on New Year’s Day is that you’ll never forget your wedding anniversary. Well, you shouldn’t forget your wedding anniversary. Right up there with the Fifth of November, it’s one of the easiest dates of the year to remember.

  One bad thing about getting married on New Year’s Day is that you will rarely celebrate your anniversary without at least a small hangover. This was definitely the case on our first such occasion, on the morning of which Rachel and I woke late in the sitting room of a friend’s house in Olympia. Only after a good couple of hours and eggs were we able to contemplate the day, let alone the year, ahead.

  During the course of the previous night of the previous year, the thorny issue of resolutions had inevitably reared its ugly head. Several of our friends heroically wielded phrases like ‘get fit’, ‘stop smoking’ and ‘try to get a girlfriend or a foot on the property ladder or generally be less shambolic’ in an attempt to make that ugly head turn away. I, however, felt smugger than usual, with my simple promise to ‘go birdwatching’. This year I felt sure I’d keep my pledge longer than any of my friends.

  After the excitement and expense of the previous year’s wedding and honeymoon in Ireland and Costa Rica, we’d decided to spend the first few days of our second year of marriage a little closer to home. So, finally extracting ourselves from our hosts’ comfortable, comforting sofa, we set off on a leisurely drive down to Warwickshire where we’d booked a couple of nights in a modest bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere. As well as my Christmas jumper and spotless walking boots I’d packed a couple of new books. Along with Adrian Riley’s account of his Year, I’d nicked my older brother Mat’s old 1983 Collins Bird Guide, as recommended by both Duncton and the cover quote (‘Easily the most authoritative and best illustrated pocket bird book ever published’ Daily Express). I also had a hardy, pocket-sized writing pad called ‘The Alwych All Weather Notebook’. The Alwych website claims that their ‘flexible cover and durability’ make these books ideal for birdwatchers, policemen and milkmen,1 so I proudly shoved it into my back pocket, determined to fill its light cream pages with my many sightings over the next twelve months.

  Unfortunately, our hour-long, New Year’s Day journey out of London was as stressful as ever, and not helped by my attempts at spotting my first birds of the year. As we struggled to find our way to the A40, Rachel’s patience was tested for the first of what would be many times in 2006 by my proclamations of ‘That’s a seagull!’ which should really have been ‘That’s definitely the right way to Warwickshire!’

  In the driver’s seat, I was becoming frustrated with both road and bird signs. It was dawning on me that actually this ‘birdwatching lark2’ might not necessarily be as easy as I’d thought. In the first few hours of the year I’d seen several birds, but not one I could definitively identify. A couple of small brownish ones had flitted past me so quickly they might well have been leaves or Snickers wrappers, one so high up it might have been a plane. And then there was this seagull. It definitely was a seagull. But I knew this wouldn’t be enough for Duncton. There are several types of seagull. Which one was this? It was white. Ish. Size-wise it was big. Ish. But then I couldn’t really tell how far away it was. It might have been miles away and massive. Or the other way round. And I only had a second or two to glimpse it before taking the wrong exit from that roundabout. Things weren’t going well. Even the inevitable pigeon I saw on Shepherd’s Bush Green would be entered in my notebook with a question mark later that afternoon. Again, I knew it was a pigeon. Everyone knows what pigeons look like. But what sort of a pigeon? My bird guide listed no fewer than four varieties, as well as about fourteen doves that all looked pretty much the same. It was probably a feral pigeon, but if I was going to commit him to my book I’d have to be completely sure. Any reasonable doubt and I couldn’t send him down.

  My first official bird was a magpie. Again, everyone knows what a magpie looks like and unlike the pesky pigeon there were only two types of magpie in my guide (the common magpie and the azure-winged magpie). While I didn’t know exactly what colour ‘azure’ was, I was pretty sure this one wasn’t. This was definitely a common magpie. My first bird! Unluckily for me, according to British lore this particular bird seen without its mate foretold ‘sorrow’.

  Thankfully, many years earlier my mum had taught me how to deal with just this situation. I was able to ave
rt misery by saluting the magpie (swiftly and safely) and asking after his wife. That’s what my mum has taught me to do. I suppose that constitutes one very basic parenting lesson. My mum is not, incidentally, a birder. She likes birds and knows a lot more about them than me, but she is definitely not a birder. She knows the basic species and occasionally even dons binoculars, but she’s unquestionably not a birder. I’ve always assumed she likes the fact that Duncton is a birder – that he can tell us all what’s what on the bird feeder, in the sky or making that racket – but I know she’s happy not to share his obsession. Hers is a more measured interest, a natural curiosity rather than an immovable character trait.

  Before Duncton and I embarked upon our Big Year, I think Mum and I were each fairly sure I was more like her than him – I was also definitely not a birder – so she could watch our birdwatching with amusement as well as her customary encouragement; I was going to discover exactly how it does feel to spend time with a natural born birder. And although I was at first concerned about devoting myself to Duncton and ignoring Mum for a year (a worry that I’m sure I wouldn’t have entertained before the prospect of fatherhood appeared on the horizon), as the months passed I found it increasingly reassuring to talk to her about anything other than birds. If I’m at home, it’s not the bird table I gravitate towards, it’s Countdown, The Times crossword or Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; things that don’t necessarily make me ‘cool’ or ‘hard’ (no need for the word ‘necessarily’ there) but that Mum and I have always enjoyed and, I’m sure, always will. I don’t really need to spend a year trying to understand her interests, since I share many of them.

  I suppose a superstition like saluting magpies comes under that category. And if you quickly have a look in your own reference books you’ll see that other ways of forestalling lonesome-magpie-inspired distress include blowing kisses in his direction, asking him the whereabouts of his brother, and keeping your eyes on him until he’s out of sight – not a sensible option when driving (a memorable pigeon-obsessed comedian by the name of Phil Zimmerman also suggests carrying round a spare magpie in a plastic bag which one can flourish whenever necessary).

  On the occasion of my first bird sighting, my mother’s simple method seemed to work. Before long we found our way onto the A40 and sped off towards my birdwatching future.

  As we soared through the valley between Junctions 5 and 6 of the M40 – probably my favourite two junctions on any motorway, including the Birmingham Toll Road at night – where Berkshire and Buckinghamshire stretch their legs and you can finally breathe a sigh of relief at having left the city well behind you, my eyes were drawn to what I could only describe as an enormous bloody bird wheeling around above us. I could only describe it thus because at that height, on a clear winter’s day, with the sun at its back and to my naked eye, it was little more than a silhouette. A pretty bloody big one at that.

  Despite this lack of clarity, and much to my surprise, the words ‘That’s a red kite!’ instantly slipped from my mouth. I was shocked. Rachel told me to concentrate on the road. I glanced up again. It was definitely a red kite. ‘Look, you can see its forked tail!’ I muttered. Once more Rachel encouraged me to look ahead rather than up. Something terrifying was happening. Within a matter of hours, I was becoming a birdwatcher.

  When we finally arrived in the village of Luddington, I reached straight for my bird guide and looked up red kite. There it was – the forked tail. That must have been my bird!

  I phoned Duncton.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Chip!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Alex!’

  ‘Yes. Second time lucky. Not bad. Happy New Year.’

  ‘Yes, Happy New Year. We’re all well here. Had a very nice evening last night with the Reynolds. Marion was there, and Pam and Adrian – the usual lot, you know. The Phillips came along. John was there too because he’s back from Exeter …’

  I didn’t have time for this.

  ‘Duncton – I don’t have time for this. I saw a bird.’

  ‘Ah! Well done! Whereabouts? What did it look like? What was it?’

  Now I had his undivided attention.

  ‘Yes, well, it was on the M40 …’

  ‘Red kite.’

  ‘Quite big …’

  ‘Red kite.’

  ‘Forked tail …’

  ‘Red kite.’

  ‘I was thinking it might be a … Oh yes, a red kite. Well that’s that then. Thanks Duncton. Have you had any luck?’

  ‘Well, not really. I think I’m up to about sixteen.’

  Later that evening, I contemplated my own grand total of two species. On the one hand, I wasn’t doing very well. I couldn’t even confidently identify a pigeon. On the other, acting on instinct, I had managed to spot a red kite in a split second from a long way away. And in the moments that followed I’d thought to myself, I can do this! I’m a birdwatcher! This is easy!

  As I drifted off to sleep, I realised this probably wasn’t a birdwatching miracle. Recollections of other long ago journeys west drifted by, and Duncton’s familiar voice shouting, ‘Forked tail! Red kite!’ The image of that kite had been stamped on my brain a long time ago. Duncton’s birdwatching habits had made some impression on me. But how ingrained was it? What would come flooding back when I got out in the field? Was birdwatching like riding a bike? Or was it like flying a plane, training for several years, then sitting a vast array of tests, and even then taking continual examinations to maintain the required level of skill and knowledge?

  2 January

  My first birdwatching outing of the year was a disaster. Not a full-scale disaster, but a personal debacle at the very least.

  Rachel and I like walking, so even without my birdwatching challenge we probably would have gone on a ‘good walk’ on the second day of our break. The only difference was that this time I was carrying a bird guide and some binoculars. Would this be a case of a ‘good walk’ ruined?

  During the first five or six years of my life, apparently, barely a day passed without me staring in wonder at something with wings. This seems odd to me now but I do remember thinking golden eagles were my absolute favourite bird. I’m sure I didn’t really know anything about them but they sounded tremendous so I liked them. A little bit like Liverpool and fish and chips.

  As we headed through Ilmington towards Meon Hill, the first bird we encountered was in the garden of a typically quaint Warwickshire cottage. Atop a pristine dovecote was a white dove. We admired it for a while, I scribbled its details down, and we carried on walking.

  A few doors later we came to a fairly posh allotment, run, it seemed, by various chickens. Lots of various chickens. Some brown, some black, some white – even an auburn one, according to my notes. Again I took down their particulars. This wasn’t so bad.

  Then, at the foot of the hill itself we found a pond, romantically called The Dingle. ‘Wow,’ I said, ‘look at all those birds.’ Rachel wasn’t necessarily impressed but we did indeed look at all those birds. ‘Ducks and a goose’ I wrote in my book, pretty pleased with myself. I even counted them. ‘About 200 of the former and just the one of the latter, running,’ I scrawled in what I thought was really quite scientific language. I should make it clear that the point of the Big Year was not to count individual birds but different species. There are, after all, an estimated 500 million birds in the UK, about eight for each person. I knew I didn’t need to say how many ducks and geese I’d seen, but I was getting into this observation thing.

  What I didn’t know just yet, however, was that not one of these birds would count on my list. When I took out my bird guide over a spot of lunch at the summit of Meon Hill, I was hugely disappointed and just a bit humiliated not to find any of the birds I’d seen listed in the index.

  White doves and chickens are captive birds, the first a pet, the second a meal, both contradicting rule number one of our birdwatching code. Most ducks aren’t captive, but I had still got it wrong. I hadn’t reali
sed that a duck was a type of bird, not a species. As we’d gazed down on The Dingle, Rachel had actually said, ‘Those are mallards,’ to which, regrettably, I’d snapped, ‘No, they’re ducks.’ Again, I am embarrassed now, but I hadn’t realised mallards were ducks. ‘Mallards’ would have counted. ‘Ducks’ didn’t.

  Finally, ‘a goose’. Again, not specific enough. It was, in fact, a Canada goose, but at this early stage of the year I didn’t know such detail was needed. In real life (well, human life – bird life is of course real, but at the same time, it’s not really real life …) I find it almost impossible to tell Canadians from Americans (usually the former are a bit quieter but even that’s not always the case). If I’d known I’d had to give the nationality of every bird as well as its species I might never have undertaken the mission so readily.

  On my despondent way down the hill I did see my first blackbird of the year, but even that was soon jeopardised by the sighting of another bird that was also black but definitely wasn’t a blackbird. I started to doubt that the first one had been a blackbird. Surely, if there’s more than one type of bird that is black, calling one a blackbird is unfair on the rest?3

  And this second ‘black bird’ was blacker than the blackbird! The blackbird’s beak was orange! This one’s was, yes, black! Ridiculous. To me this represented bad planning on the part of the original namer of birds. If there were only ten different species, each one a different colour, then it might have been reasonable to name each one by its colour and the word ‘bird’. But there aren’t. There are loads of different species of bird, and little variation in colour. I hastily sketched this black bird, and got in a bit of a huff. And the two flitting brown things that disappeared as soon as I raised my binoculars didn’t help that huff. ‘Two brownbirds’ I noted indignantly.