Birdwatchingwatching Read online

  We arrived back hours late. I missed my train. I got on another train. I was fined a further £100 for being on a slightly later train than my ticket suggested. I didn’t sleep for thirty-six hours. But throughout this ordeal I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life. Everyone was that happy. We hadn’t been allowed to drink alcohol in the stadium or been able to afford it at the airport, but no one stopped singing, joking and laughing during that night, the following day, indeed for the next weeks, months and years. Fans still chant nostalgically about that night. I can still make myself smile and send shivers down my spine today by recalling Gerrard’s header, Smicer’s shot, Alonso’s penalty and Dudek’s saves. That’s priceless.

  It was also a one-off. I’m pretty sure I won’t get to witness anything as miraculous on a football pitch ever again. But could birdwatching provide comparable highs? Can a birdwatching season ever be that exciting? Has Duncton had an ornithological Istanbul?

  Watching football for free, on the other hand, is always an excellent and rewarding thing to do. Whether spent supporting your local Sunday league team or, one day, your son’s school eleven, that’s ninety minutes entirely unwasted. Could this park in Leeds be the birdwatching equivalent?

  In the area between car park and birds I found a whiteboard full of the names of the birds seen at the reserve so far in 2006; countless exotic-sounding species, nearly all of which I’d never heard of. I turned away, not wanting to get too scared too early. Stepping out on to a makeshift walkway, I noticed for the first time that it was really quite cold. A grey, wet winter’s day, and I was wearing the same shoes and trousers I’d be performing in later that night. I still had a lot to learn.

  Nevertheless, without anything resembling a plan, I trudged off in the vague direction of a lake and found myself surrounded by bushes filled with birdsong. I began to understand why it was called a bird reserve. This was a land reserved for birds. No dastardly moggies here. Countless birds flitted and twittered above and in front of me. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a clue what any of them were and was too cold and wet to get out my bird guide. I couldn’t work out if I was having fun yet. Seeing a sign for the ‘Bob Dickens Hide’ ahead of me, I put my head down, ignored the UFOs and marched towards shelter.

  Some of you may not know what a hide is (I find it hard to know what’s common knowledge and what’s knowledge you presume everyone has because your dad is a birder), but a hide is a wooden hut where birdwatchers hide.7 Birdwatching is essentially an enormous game of hide and seek, in which you do the hiding and the seeking and the birds have no idea they’re involved in a game. I marched towards this particular one with the aim of getting warm and taking stock.

  Before I could achieve either, I was joined by four jarringly cheerful Yorkshiremen who bustled noisily onto the uncomfortable stools. At first they ignored me and I ignored them, content instead to gaze out through the slit-like windows at a misty pond. I was embarrassed by my appearance – yellow shoes, jeans, red shirt, my usual stage outfit – compared to their more practical clothes. They had hats! I didn’t have a hat. They also had homemade sandwiches wrapped in kitchen foil while I had pains au chocolat stolen from the hotel and bound in serviettes. I didn’t dare reveal them. I pretended to be utterly absorbed by the view.

  Inevitably, though, I found myself far more drawn to their convivial middle-aged chat rather than the birds that may or may not have been outside. These men were, essentially, dads. These were the men I wanted to be. At ease in each other’s company, they talked, at times competitive, at others kind, often funny and always, surprisingly, interesting.

  They discussed their respective New Year’s Eve experiences. One announced that he’d gone to bed, grumpy, at 8.30 p.m., only to be woken at midnight by his wife and mother-in-law doing the hokey-cokey in the living room. The others mainly complained about the garish Christmas lights on neighbours’ houses. When one of them grumbled that no one knew the words to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ any more I saw my chance to join in the conversation.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t either,’ I said, with what I hoped was an apologetic smile. ‘I don’t even know what Auld Lang Syne means …’

  More than happy to share their wisdom, they took it upon themselves to educate me. They argued about the words to the song, each insisting they were right. I told them about my Big Year. Through a combination of showing off and instruction (more fatherly traits) they competed to help me identify as many birds as they could.

  ‘That’s a goldeneye,’ said one and I dutifully scribbled it down.

  ‘That’s a male,’ chimed in another. ‘You can tell by its black and white chest.’

  ‘And that’s a wigeon, over there. Sounds like a pigeon but looks like a painted duck,’ said the third. ‘And there are some long-tailed tits on the tree to your right. Very nice.’

  ‘Ruddy duck!’ shouted the last. I thought at first that he was just sick of the sight of ducks, but that too was another first species for my list.

  The highlight of the morning was one of those minuscule goldcrests, the Kylie of the bird world, a bright yellow nugget of petite fun. Unfortunately the loudest of the Yorkshiremen missed it because he was trying to peel an orange all in one go. He took it well though, just grunting the word ‘gutted’, before wolfing down his fruit in one go too.

  By lunchtime I’d had my fill. I’d enjoyed my first lesson but was now freezing cold and soaking wet. On the way back to my car I passed the first person under the age of fifty I’d seen all day. A boy aged eleven or twelve, with his dad. He too looked damp and just a little bit miserable.

  8 January

  Despite the four-hour drive back from Leeds on the Saturday night I woke early on the Sunday morning. At first I couldn’t work out why I was so excited. I was pleased to be back home with my wife, but this was a different sort of excitement. I was looking forward to something … a Liverpool game? No, they’d flukily scraped past Luton 5–3 in the FA Cup the day before. Sleeping in? No, I’d already ruined that for both of us. Birds? Yes! The bird feeders! I was genuinely excited about the bird feeders! Leaping out of bed, I fixed myself a cup of tea, took up my position on the sofa and waited.

  Half an hour later a solitary robin dropped silently onto the Defender II for his Sunday breakfast. I blinked, not quite believing what I was seeing; to most people an entirely unimpressive occurrence, to me a major breakthrough in my adult life. A robin in my garden, enticed by my own hand! A brave robin! The bravest of birds. He took his time, plucked three seeds (kibble, I think), then left. And that was the end of the morning rush.

  In the triumphant afterglow left by my red-breasted visitor, I decided that garden watching was a very sensible introduction to the hobby. I’d started far too quickly. I’d foolishly tried to run before I could walk. I might easily have hurt myself. Watching birds in your garden is much warmer than leaving the house. You can have the TV on and glance up occasionally when you notice movement out of the corner of your eye. You don’t have to trudge around a lake in the rain. And if you do see something, it’s nice and easy to reach for your bird guide and see what it is. To anyone contemplating giving birdwatching a go – and I do, of course, heartily recommend it – start by looking in your garden. If you don’t have a garden, start by looking out of your window. If you don’t have a window, move to somewhere with a window. Most places have windows nowadays.

  Ten days into my Big Year I had seen fourteen species. Duncton was on forty, including, he told me, bramblings. Bramblings? This sounded like a bush, not a bird. He was disappointed not to have got a great spotted woodpecker or a golden plover8 yet. But what he was most thrilled by so far was a rat that had climbed up on to his bird table.

  He’s like that, Duncton, interested in anything to do with nature, no matter how dull or repulsive it might seem to other, normal people. Since retiring he’s been volunteering for the RSPB, helping out at different sites with various projects at least once a week, rebuilding fences, protecting trees, lighting fi
res. Manly things. Recently he’s spent a lot of his time at Pulborough Brooks on the Sussex coast, where the warden set him and his fellow volunteers their toughest challenge yet: to find and count the eggs of the brown hairstreak butterfly. The eggs, they were told, look like tiny white pinheads and are usually found on the underside of blackthorn leaves. So, with three other similarly aged men, Duncton spent several hours studiously tramping round the large reserve in search of miniscule dots on the wrong side of leaves in an extreme version of the traditional Easter egg hunt. The first day they were overjoyed to find thirty-nine of the tiny ova, a record for the reserve. The next day, after a four-hour search, they discovered just two. So to summarise, Duncton – a man who has now retired from work and could spend all day doing whatever he fancies – spent a whole morning searching for two tiny eggs.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Duncton with Zen-like calm. ‘It’s just as useful to not find something. We now know a lot more about the butterflies.’ Adrian Riley would be proud. I was confused. I hoped by the end of the year to get my head round birdwatching but surely insectwatching would always be utterly unfathomable. There are ten times more butterflies and moths than birds in the world, all of which are ten times smaller than their more feathery friends.9 I have told my mum to beware of any more butterfly-related activities on Duncton’s part.

  I spent most of the rest of the week at my post, the sofa, and while I do advocate garden watching, I should add that it’s probably best suited to those with a fair amount of free time. My rewards were sporadic but cherished, like a couple of wickets on a day’s test cricket:

  At 2 p.m. on the Tuesday my robin returned. It was, I decided, my current favourite bird, even if it wasn’t yet displaying any signs of increased energy levels.

  Just after noon the following day, something blue landed on the seed shack, only to flit away again as soon as its feet touched down. Clearly this was not as brave a bird as the fearless robin, but still an exhilarating sight. I didn’t take my eyes off the feeder for the next half an hour. Nothing. I contemplated setting up a webcam.

  At 3 p.m. on Thursday I noticed my robin on next door’s bird feeder, which looked to my jealous eyes like a superior model even to my Defender II – surely the Defender III wasn’t yet on the streets? I became less trustful of my fickle robin.

  That evening I noticed Rachel had bought what appeared to be bird food for our breakfast. I was tempted to switch it for the hi-energy energetic energy food.

  14 January

  Birdwatching in the privacy of one’s own home was one thing, openly watching birds with my friends quite another. Up in Yorkshire, I was about 200 miles away from most people I know, but even then it did cross my mind that if I happened to bump into a friend or acquaintance, I’d have rather a lot of explaining to do. I planned to come out at least to my close friends during the spring. But that very weekend, fate conspired to force my hand.

  I got married when I was twenty-six years old, an age that seemed young to me but old to most of Duncton’s generation. I was the first of my group of friends to wed, but was soon joined by others, including Mark, a fellow comedian, whose wedding was to take place in February, with the stag do a month before.

  Most of my friends, inevitably perhaps, are quite like me. Very few of them have much manliness about them. We couldn’t even be described as laddish. So instead of a drunken crawl around Bristol, Brighton or Barcelona, twelve of us drove Mark out to a village called Michaelchurch Escley in Herefordshire for a weekend in a rustic cottage. As well as curry and a stew, someone had the presence of mind to cook sprouts and broccoli. It was that sort of stag. Yes, we drank a lot and got up to some mischief – Phill (my friend from Luddington) played table tennis outside wearing only boxer shorts, Lloyd went to bed at dawn, Key threw a trashy romantic novel on the fire – but we didn’t get involved in fights with bigger men or have anything to do with naughty women like strippers or prostitutes or hens.

  The first item on our sensible stag agenda was a walk up Skirrid Fawr, a magnificent spur of a hill from whose banks stretch England to the east and Wales to the west. The view was stunning. There must be birds here! I thought. And so, during the silly slippery ascent, I decided I had to tell the group that I was experimenting with birdwatching. I’d brought my binoculars along just in case and chose that moment to brandish them, with a flourish, from within my coat.

  My admission instantly drove a wedge within the group. Some were fine with it, others even pleased for me, but more than half made their disapproval wholly manifest. Battle lines were drawn up as cries of ‘Who brings binoculars on a stag?’, ‘You’re boring me to death’ and ‘Thanks for taking over the stag weekend and making it all about birds’ echoed around the mountain. But just as I’d started defending my decision to bring binoculars rather than drugs or pornography along, Lloyd, one of my allies, spotted a bird of prey hovering just over the Welsh side of the border. Suddenly, my binoculars became a prized possession, as at least three other people showed interest in the bird.

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Lloyd.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied, confidently. Whatever it was, it was floating impressively a matter of yards away from the group. We all agreed it was blue-ish.

  ‘I think it looks like a woodpigeon,’ said the stag.

  ‘No, you mean it looks like a pigeon would,’ said Tim. I ignored his joke.

  ‘It’s definitely not a woodpigeon,’ I grumbled. ‘It’s some sort of bird of prey.’

  ‘It could be a buzzard,’ suggested Owen quietly.

  ‘It’s a merlin,’10 said Tom.

  Before settling down to quite a complicated card game that evening, Tom and I sat on one of the cottage’s many beds and chatted about birds and dads. Tom’s childhood had been similarly bird themed (‘I once made a cardboard model of a merlin,’ he confessed) and it turned out his dad, Jamie (I found it difficult to accept ‘Jamie’ as a dad’s name but did my best to concentrate on the conversation anyway), is also a keen birder. Both glad to have found a kindred spirit (and by now, really quite drunk) we thumbed breathlessly through my bird guide and pored over the picture of a merlin.

  ‘Oh yes, it was definitely a merlin,’ I said.

  ‘It’s just like my cardboard model,’ agreed Tom.

  The following morning, hungover and giddy, I sat at the cottage’s bucolic kitchen table with Owen and admired the sunrise. Rummaging round the drawers for coffee, we came across all sorts of birding paraphernalia – two pairs of wellworn binoculars, numerous bird guides, a tattered old copy of A Fieldguide to Wildlife and Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong (not ornithology but to us a sign). Owen even managed to find an old bird feeder (an RSPB Classic Seed Feeder) in a cupboard under the stairs, which he hung up (with aplomb) just outside the window above the sink.

  Ten minutes later, as Radio 4 reported a suspected case of human bird flu in Belgium, three great tits gratefully tucked in and we had plenty of time to notice their blackish heads and stocky bodies. I couldn’t believe it. In London I’d had to wait a week for even a hint of a robin. As often happens when I’m out of the city (and hungover) I decided that the countryside was definitely the place to live – even the birds are friendlier! (Although this isn’t actually the case – there are more birds in the countryside, certainly, but there are also more trees and worms so they don’t need our bird feeders quite so much. City birds are probably more trusting of people on the whole. Could this be a neat analogy for human city-versus-country dwelling? Maybe, but only if it doesn’t offend either party too much.)

  Just before the others surfaced, a similarly sized bird with a rounder beak and stripey sides joined the great tits. We found its picture in the bird guide. It was a chaffinch. At the euphoric stage of our morning after, we toasted this beautiful little bird with the first beer of the day. I was tempted to call Duncton and share the sight of what, to me, was the most exotic bird in the world but I refrained, remembering that I was trying to grow up. Having a doctor for
a dad means it’s all too easy to phone home whenever you’ve got a sore throat, dodgy tummy or bizarrely swollen ears. Duncton will always be ready with some practical advice – gargle aspirin, drink water, don’t worry about it – but at some point I had to start looking after myself. I can’t phone Duncton every time I see a chaffinch or feel a bit odd. If I do ever become a dad, I’ll be the one taking those phone calls. I don’t want to be the middle man again.

  16 January

  Empowered by the stag successes, I embarked on my next trip with a much more flagrant approach to birdwatching.

  You can do stand-up comedy in almost every country in the world nowadays, with successful gigs running in Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Singapore and even Iraq. The often modest fees are made up for by the chance to see the world for free. My first such trip of the year was to the French Alps for three après-ski shows and a couple of days skiing, but I was more excited by the prospect of seeing foreign birds than sliding down a mountain on a pair of long wooden shoes. I’d flicked through my bird guide to see what I might find on the snowy slopes and was looking forward to ticking off some Alpine choughs, a snow goose, an eskimo curlew, a couple of Arctic redpolls, a South Polar skua and, with a bit of luck, a Siberian white crane.

  Unfortunately, despite my studious research, the week’s oiseaux-watching began disappointingly with magpies (and, bizarrely, llamas), the only thing on offer on the way from Geneva to the mountains. Something enormous flew past as we rounded Lake Annecy but once again my ignorance let me down. ‘Bird of prey, brown, fan tail, low flight,’ I wrote. ‘Probably a buzzard.’ But the descriptions in the books don’t help that much if all you saw was a blur. That’s a gap in the market, blurry identification pictures in bird guides, they’d be a lot more useful than conveniently posed models.