Birdwatchingwatching Read online

  Jon and Jason, my fellow comedic travellers, took the news of my birdwatching status in their stride. We discussed the embarrassment value of the hobby and agreed that if I was reading my bird guide on a train I should probably hide it in a Harry Potter book jacket to avoid humiliation. Jon came up with the term Hornithology, to my amusement (and envy – how could I not have thought of such an obvious and cheesy pun?). Jason told me about a dye factory in Salford where pigeons go in to nest and emerge in a rainbow of different colours. As I said, everyone’s got a bird story.

  When we arrived at our chalet I was delighted to find a couple of well-stocked bird feeders in the garden (a fairly straightforward Mayfield Rivendale Premium Oriental Lantern Peanut Feeder), covered with hungry great tits and blackbirds. Trying to sound knowledgeable, I asked the two ladies who owned the place what birds they’d seen recently. They couldn’t say for sure.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about birds,’ said one. ‘We went on a birdwatching trip to some Scottish island once, but we mainly got drunk on Pimms in a hide.’

  As we chatted, though, a more unusual bird appeared on one of the feeders, a small, light grey, friendly looking thing. ‘That’s a nuthatcher!’ pronounced the hitherto drunken birdwatching hostess. ‘They’re new!’

  ‘Oh, a nuthatch,’11 I corrected, trying but failing not to sound patronising. By now though, the girls were making a lot of jokes about birds and tits and breasts so I did my best to focus on bird number twenty-four of the year.

  I’m not great with jokes about sex, especially when it’s just me and two women. To be honest, I’m not that good at talking to girls about anything, but discussions involving innuendo make me particularly uncomfortable. Later in the year, I found myself in a particularly awkward situation when asked to identify two birds on a bird feeder owned by the mother of a friend. The birds in question were great tits but I couldn’t bring myself to say, ‘Those are great tits,’ or ‘You’ve got a pair of great tits,’ or even just, ‘Great tits.’ I contemplated scribbling it down on a piece of paper, but decided that handing someone’s mum a note with ‘great tits’ scrawled on it is probably even worse than saying it. In the end I panicked and said, ‘I think they’re sea eagles … Yes, you’re right, they are small; they’re probably juveniles.’12

  That one nuthatch was the birding highlight of the trip. Out on the slopes I found nothing. What’s worse, the shame I thought I’d recovered from returned as I shared chairlifts with some of the coolest people in the world, who stared pointedly at my binoculars and bird guide as if they’d never seen anything so absurd. Unfortunately, the complete lack of any sort of bird on the mountains seemed to justify their prejudice. I felt ridiculous.

  A marginally more successful French birdwatching trip to Brittany, August 1989, as described by Chip.

  21 January

  For the rest of the month I cowered in Kensal Green. Spending a bizarre amount of my time observing my tiny quadrant of outdoors, I tried to ignore the steadily rising layer of excrement lying on my beloved tiles and started to appreciate the birds themselves. On one occasion I became engrossed by a spindly worm wriggling its way across the patio. After about ten minutes it had made remarkable progress, nearing the halfway mark. Then, as it took a deserved rest, I noticed a blackbird paying similar attention from a perch on the wall just behind the worm’s field of vision. (Do they have eyes? They must have eyes.) A few minutes later, when the flowerbed was just coming into view (they must have eyes) the blackbird nonchalantly flew down and gobbled it up. My reaction? I cheered. Was that right? I don’t know, but I realised then that I was starting to enjoy the company of my birds.

  Bird lunch in the garden was usually from 1 p.m. to 1.30 p.m., with my robin always the first to arrive, eventually joined by the blackbird and its partner. The female blackbird, by the way, is brown. Again, it seems a silly name for a species only half of whom are black. They may as well be called blackorbrownbirds.

  Despite the fact that I’d still not seen a siskin, I enjoyed the return of those same birds each day and started to feel quite protective of my feathery little band. If the robin didn’t arrive I’d worry. Sometimes Nemesis Cat would sit smugly on the wall, and we’d have a lazy stand-off, each waiting for the other to leave before the hoped-for birds arrived. From time to time a hefty woodpigeon would saunter along and peck at both the seeds and the blackbirds. Larger than London’s famous feral pigeons, fuller breasted and with a distinguished white patch on his neck, he would strut about like Henry VIII before clambering up the wall and bearing down on his next snack. I was pretty sure he was the originator of most of the mess on the floor, but I didn’t mind.

  One lunchtime two tiny blue and yellow birds hopped onto the Defender II and buzzed around the garden like bees. ‘Hienergy blue tits!’ I murmured proudly from behind my binoculars before they were chased away by the robin.

  25 January

  Two big days marked the end of the month. The first was my TKDay. If you’re unfamiliar with this apparently modern concept, this was my ten-thousandth day on earth. I was about twenty-seven-and-a-third years old, but exactly ten thousand days. I had reached the five-figure mark and that was it. I would now be five figures for ever. My first, tenth, hundredth, thousandth and now ten-thousandth day landmarks were all behind me.

  Traditionally, of course, you’re considered an adult at the age of twenty-one (when you can become an MP, fly a helicopter and supervise a learner driver), eighteen (when you can donate blood, change your name and take your top off for a tabloid) or even sixteen (when you can sell scrap metal), but I know I didn’t feel anything like a grown-up on each of these birthdays. Yes, in the eyes of the law I could do anything I wanted when I was twenty-one, but in practice I couldn’t. On your TKDay, however, you should be able to do anything. At that age you should know how to change a tyre, a fuse or a mortgage. You should be able to name the birds in your garden. And you shouldn’t be terrified at what wasn’t even an imminent prospect of fatherhood.

  I celebrated this landmark in a pub called The Paradise By Way of Kensal Green with a few friends. Having been steeped in birds for the last four weeks, I could talk about little else. I told anyone who cared to listen that there were about 10,00013 species of birds in the world, one for every day I’d been alive. Imagine seeing a different species of bird every day of your life!

  A lady called Phoebe Snetsinger had just such a thought. According to the Guinness Book of Records she saw more species than anyone else in the world.14 This is remarkable partly because she was a woman and birdwatching is a generally male hobby (which, since I can’t really talk to women who aren’t my wife, comes as a massive relief) while bird chasing in particular, especially on this scale, seems to be exclusively a masculine urge. Not one of the other top twenty all-time world bird listers are female.

  But what’s even more amazing is that Phoebe Snetsinger didn’t start seriously birdwatching until 1981, when she was diagnosed with a terminal melanoma at the age of fifty. Given eighteen months to live, she resolved to spend her life doing something she loved – following birds. Staving off the disease by birding with remarkable determination and focus (she even missed her daughter’s wedding), she spent the next twenty years hurtling round the world, surviving shipwrecks and earthquakes as well as the cancer. She died in 1999 in a mini-bus crash in Madagascar, after becoming one of just a handful of people to have ever seen a red-shouldered vanga, a species which had only been discovered two years earlier. In total, Snetsinger saw more than 8,500 species of birds. No one has yet seen all 10,000.

  I used to know all the birds

  At the age of five and three quarters I think I would have described myself as a birdwatcher.

  This should really be collared doves, but coloured is more socially acceptable.

  As I’ve explained, I am now a Liverpool supporter. A slightly ashamed gloryhunting Liverpool supporter from the south coast (I do support Sussex in the cricket – does that help?),
but a passionate Liverpool supporter all the same. I blame the facts that my dad was a Spurs fan, we lived exactly halfway between Portsmouth and Brighton and Liverpool were really really good when I was getting into football. This elegant piece of prose was read out by my Man Utd-supporting brother at my wedding and shall always be a source of embarrassment for me.

  28 January

  I hadn’t until now been aware of an event called the Big Garden Birdwatch. For one day, each January, the RSPB urge people all over the country to spend an hour spotting and counting the different birds in their garden in a bid to harness the collective power of the nation’s bird lovers. It’s an excellent way to gather data that would otherwise be impossible to collect. And now that birds were on my radar, the Big Garden Birdwatch 2006 seemed to be everywhere: Radio 4, The Times, BBC Breakfast – OK, fairly middle class, respectable media, but all banging on about birds.

  Choosing what I thought was the most popular time of day for birds to visit my garden, I sat down at 12.30 p.m., feeling nervous. I’d already seen my robin and the blue tits earlier that morning and was afraid they wouldn’t return. What if I saw nothing during my allotted hour? Trying to be positive, I also turned on the BBC’s live FA Cup 4th round match featuring Newcastle (the magpies) versus Cheltenham (whose central midfielder was called David Bird). Here’s how the hour panned out:

  12.36 p.m.: Ray Stubbs makes a bird joke. David Bird’s wife is due to give birth today. ‘If she does, she should call it Robin!’ he says, and laughs. I don’t completely understand why. He may have been referring to the fact that it’s still winter and the player’s surname is ‘Bird’ or he could be implying that Cheltenham would be ‘robbing’ Newcastle if they win. Either way, I don’t think it quite works.

  12.52 p.m.: 0–0 in the football. My fat robin arrives. Phew.

  12.57 p.m.: Two starlings land on next door’s fancy bird feeder. Frustrating.

  1.11 p.m.: Still no goals and no more birds. Are the two starlings the other side of the wall scaring off the other birds? They’re certainly not helping.

  1.12 p.m.: A magpie! Next door, but tantalisingly close to my side of the wall.

  1.16 p.m.: My male blackbird arrives. The fat robin joins him. I’m now drawing with the Anglo-Italians next door.

  1.17 p.m.: Another, thinner, robin arrives. Not another species but a welcome arrival.

  There then followed a flurry of activity.

  1.24 p.m.: Chopra scores for Newcastle in the forty-first minute of the game.

  1.25 p.m.: Scott Parker makes it 2–0 just as the female blackbird and a blue tit arrive.

  1.30 p.m.: They think it’s all over. It is for me. It is for Cheltenham too. The score remains 2–0. Newcastle will go on to lose in the quarter-final against Chelsea while Liverpool will batter Birmingham 7–0 away.

  The hour flew past. I surprised myself by watching the birds more than the football, the highlight being my fat robin messily eating out of the Defender II while the blackbird couple ate the spilt seeds from the ground. This, I felt, was my first real test and I’d passed. I had no trouble recognising any of the (three) species that came my way. I did wish there’d been a few more, but it felt good to be part of a birdwatching movement. About 500,000 people took part, spotting over six million birds in total. (This was, according to the RSPB website, ‘a mind-boggling response’ – how’s your mind now you know those figures? Boggled? They’re right then.) I hadn’t seen a carrion crow, a chaffinch, a coal tit, a collared dove, a dunnock, a feral pigeon, a goldfinch, a great tit, a greenfinch, a house sparrow, a jackdaw, a long-tailed tit, a rook, a woodpigeon or a wren, all birds that made it onto the RSPB’s subsequent ‘most common’ list. But, as Duncton says, seeing no birds is just as useful for the data. After all, he’d spent four hours searching for two tiny eggs.

  31 January

  My Granny phones her son Duncton every Sunday evening. When the phone rings around 7 p.m., he’ll say, ‘That’ll be Granny.’ He then spends the next thirty minutes gossiping away about the week’s events in Sussex, Kent (where she and he used to live) and Norfolk (where she lives now). The top three topics are family, friends and politics, although since Tony Blair stepped down she doesn’t get quite as worked up as she used to about the latter.

  I’m fairly sure such a timetabled phone call is not unusual, but I’ve often wondered how or when it was first implemented. Did something happen to make Duncton decide an allotted time was necessary? Maybe it was Granny who became too busy for unscheduled calls? I suppose things are different now with mobile phones and emails, but I can’t quite imagine sitting my own parents down and informing them that from now on I’ll be ringing them on Thursdays afternoons at the end of Countdown. I might just try it one day soon – it’d be fun to see how they react.

  During our Big Year, I decided a monthly bird update, rather than a weekly call, would be sufficient. Fifty-two phone calls about birds seemed ridiculous, especially if they were all to be as disheartening as the first.

  I was proud of my first month’s haul of twenty-eight species. Before the year began I’d tried to name as many birds as I could off the top of my head (species, not types – so barn owl, not owl) and had only managed fifteen before becoming desperate and saying Thunderbird. With winter still very much upon us, I’d already seen almost twice as many species as I previously knew existed. I was even getting quite good at telling some of these species apart. I could differentiate the two main tits with ease, was pretty confident on robins and had a vague acquaintance with a number of ducks.

  Duncton, however, was already on eighty-five. Eighty-five species in one month! And he hadn’t even left Sussex. I’d driven 3,145 miles around the UK and flown to the French Alps. He’d barely left his front room.

  To put this in a broader context, Adrian Riley, the birdwatcher whose record I was trying to emulate, ended his first month with the words: ‘My score for the month was a poor 164. I was “the weakest link”.’

  I was way behind Duncton, who only had about half the score of a proper competitive birdwatcher. And that proper competitive birdwatcher was disappointed with what I thought was an incredible tally. But, as he explains, ‘… for the first time, I was aware that I was playing with the big, bad boys. No more hiding behind the bike sheds with a crafty fag; no more lunchtime beers; it was “game on”.’

  The ‘big, bad boy’ mentioned here is a certain Lee G R Evans, perhaps the most famous twitcher this country has ever produced, with whom Adrian had once been friends, and against whom he was now competing.

  Like nearly all non-birders, I’d never heard of Lee G R Evans15 before reading Adrian Riley’s book, but a quick bit of research showed that his reputation stretches far and wide within the birding community. Duncton may be a birder, but Lee G R Evans is birds. Born in Luton, he got hooked on birds after seeing a green woodpecker at the age of eight. They now provide his livelihood, through books published and birdwatching tours. His fascination with them is absolute, and in the course of his single-minded and colourful birdwatching career he’s been at the heart of so many adventures and scrapes that he has become almost legendary. While his dogged tactics are sometimes questioned, his dedication is not. Looking at his own, very popular website, I saw that Lee found 221 species in the first month of 2001. He was also the UK record holder for year listing (spotting as many species as possible in twelve months, just as Duncton and I were trying to do), achieving 386 species during 1996. He was, indeed, a ‘big, bad boy’.

  As I listed my sightings during our first phone call, Duncton told me that merlins don’t hover and kestrels do also have a blue, silvery sheen. I’d seen a kestrel on the stag, not a merlin. This was disappointing news. And to make matters worse, Duncton had seen a merlin in the last week of January. He didn’t break this news with any hint of malice. But as he described his various successes (‘My rarest was probably the cattle egret. And I’ve had three sightings of hen harriers.’) and future plans (‘I’m off to Minsmere with P
eter16 tomorrow so I should tick a few more off there.’), I started to wonder if all I’d done was to fan the embers of his birding desire, rather than absorb any of his passion myself. Up till now he’d seemed happy to trundle along, noticing whatever birds came his way whenever that happened. Now, he had a focus. He was making lists. Perhaps these urges were always there, bubbling beneath the surface, and I’d simply turned on the tap. Either way, I had another eleven months of potential humiliation ahead of me.

  As we wound up our conversation, Duncton noted the despondency in my voice. I told him I worried his lead was already insurmountable. ‘No, no, no,’ he chuckled. ‘It’s like the tortoise and the hare. You’ll be fine!’

  For a brief second, I was consoled. That’s right, I thought, I’m the tortoise – and the tortoise always wins. But the more I thought about it, the less that sentence rang true.

  Surely on most occasions the tortoise doesn’t get anywhere near winning? Surely in more than ninety-nine per cent of races between hares and tortoises the lithe, long-legged mammal thrashes the lugubrious, long-living reptile? Surely the only reason that particular tortoise’s victory is still celebrated today is because it was so unusual? Could it ever happen again?

  I would certainly need a lot of luck, possibly even a birdwatching miracle. But at least, if it did happen, it’d be a memorable, if scarcely believable tale.

  1 The latter two being particularly manly occupations in my opinion.

  2 A not unusual example of a bird’s name also being a noun. See also stilt, stint, kite, bunting, hobby and yellowhammer.

  3 It’s the same with insects. Flies aren’t the only ones that fly, but they got the catchiest name. Daddy-long-legs were hard done by. Is that even a real name? How did that get through the naming net? Daddy-long-legs? Or do adults call them something different? Someone please help me.