Birds Illustrated
'Birds illustrated' is the imtellegent alternative to monthly magazines, with in-depth, but not high-brow articles about birds, birding places, wildlife art and photography. It has a unique and very popular column about secondhand bird books, as well, of course, as a regular collumn by the 'Grumpy Old Birder'. The magazine has very high production values including good quality paper and printing. If you visit their website and mention 'Fatbirder' you can take advantage of a great introductory subscription offer - and pay on-line too!
Grumpy OId Birder Column
Below I reproduce all the articles that have appeared in past issues of Birds Illustrated - I may even slip in some new ones...
1. Whatever Happened to Birding Etiquette?
I can remember when the response to “Anything about?” Was something along the lines of – “There’s a Spotted Redshank over by the left end of the scrape and we had a couple of Black Terns earlier…” These days that might still be the response, especially if you are acquainted with the respondent, but it seems to me it is far more likely to be “not a lot” or just “hrumph” or, indeed, just silence.
The first of these responses is far more informative than it might appear. As you gaze out over the scrape admiring the Spotted Redshank it might begin to dawn on you that what pleases you is a mere month tick to the grumpy young man who is now walking back to his car anxiously looking at his pager every 100 strides. If you then settle down for a couple of hours watching the late summer birds come and go to the freshwater lagoon and reed-bed there may well be a succession of other birders coming and going; spending a minute or two noting the ‘spot red’ before hurrying away, or perhaps asking if the Lesser Yellowlegs has been seen at all in the last two days, and, if so, where was it.
You may be joined for longer periods by quiet speaking watchers whose lips can just be seen moving as they silently count the lapwings or whose ears cock as the distant reel of a Grasshopper Warbler or ping of a Bearded Tit break the tranquillity of the scene. They will probably just nod as they arrive and leave so quietly whilst you are scanning the lagoon that you will not even note their passing. There may be that middle-aged couple with shiny green boots and shiny green optics who argue over whether the immature Dunlin is a Curlew Sandpiper or even a Pectoral Sandpiper. They may smile if you gently explain why size precludes the latter and beak the former. Chances are these dudes will slip away taking their embarrassment with them.
What is happening here? Is this really a sign of the general breakdown of our society? Country versus town, black v white, young against old? Not in my view. What’s going on here is merely the manifestation of the polarity of our pastime writ large by the sheer numbers of new birding converts. If you really want to know what’s going on take a look at the recently published A Bird in the Bush by Stephen Moss. His excellent and readable social history of birding tracks the change from a minority pursuit to a growing avi-business, from the quiet pastime of country parsons, to the hobby for competitive executives who bird by corporate jet.
As the numbers of people looking at or for birds has grown so it has become more obvious that not all enjoy it in the same way.
There are those who twitch from tick to tick collecting new birds with ID skills honed only to divide sub-species in case there is a split and their list can grow. From them an argot has emerged which reflects the competitive nature of the ‘sport’. Gripping off their rivals, dipping on a rarity, or getting crippling views of a PG Tips [Pallas’s Grasshopper warbler] or CCC [Cream coloured Courser], or finding that the PG Tips is actually a mere ‘tart’s tick’ of a gropper [Grasshopper warbler]. The very truncated nature of the bird names is evidence of how fast they must run to get to 400 before their friends.
There are specialists like those whose love of gulls make them able to tell a black and white and grey gull from a black and white and grey one. Or who can call a soft plumaged petrel in the fog from a wave-tossed trawler where chum and regurgitated breakfast break against the gunnels.
Then there are the ‘dudes’; weekend birders in green wellies and Barbour jackets, coming out of town to breathe our good country air. New to this lark they may have had rarities pointed out to them so have seen a Western Sandpiper but look excitedly through their pristine Collins Fieldguide to look up a Dunlin; saw a Firecrest at the obs but are awestruck by their first displaying Goldcrest.
Some grumpy old men in the birding world are time-served; they have spent a lifetime counting geese and making field-notes, religiously enumerating their tetrad or turning out in all weathers to monitor a Constant Effort Site – amateur ornithologists without which our knowledge would hardly grow. Why are they grumpy? Because they love birds and wild places and resent the intrusion of others… they would no more think of reporting a rarity on their patch to a bird line than they would forget to submit a record of it to the county recorder at the end of the month.
There are also some birders, and it pains me to acknowledge this, that are arrogant bores whose heads must be a burden to carry around all day. Their rudeness and superiority make it hard for new birders, and anyone who doesn’t quite fit their world view (like having the temerity to be a child or a woman). [I once spent two weeks with a group who did not share their daily sightings because, day one, after the less experienced birders had listed the species they thought they had seen that day, one bright spark intimidated them all by saying “I’m only going to count birds that actually occur in this area”…. I’ve often wondered whether he ‘counts’ vagrants that turn up in the UK. I remember another well known birder who I heard telling his acolytes that an over-wintering hoopoe had a broken beak so could not feed and would no doubt be dead the next day… the bird stayed three months before leaving for warmer climes that spring.]
Then there are the hoi-polloi; plebs like me who don’t quite know where they fit. Middle-aged men with life lists that would embarrass a teenaged twitcher. Blokes who work a patch but have been known to twitch a bird or two in the past and may even be tempted by a county tick or a world lifer. Birders who can distinguish a Black Kite from a Marsh Harrier or a Richards’ Pipit from a lost lark purely because they’ve been lucky enough to holiday where Black Kites clean the city streets and Richards’ Pipits are the only pipits to be seen; but who cannot tell a Bonxie from a Bald Eagle when its a mile out at sea during a November storm.
I suspect that we are in a majority and that there will be many like me who mourn the passing of birding etiquette and who want to turn back the tide and re-introduce the right to be wrong and the camaraderie of knowledge shared. I am heartily sick of the pontificators and prognosticators; those who laugh at birders whose skills are as green as their wellies and those who cannot be civil to strangers. I abhor the breakers of fences and destroyers of dry-stone walls in pursuit of a rarity and those who believe their right to take a picture gives them licence to push to the front or push a bird along the dunes until it is beyond the range of my arthritic limbs.
I have a dream that the day will come again when it is OK to call out a bird and be wrong without that mistake haunting you to your grave; a day when we once again tolerate varying views and rejoice in diversity. A day when the glory of the day and the beauty of the bird is once again held to be more important that the scarcity of the species.
2. To boldly go, where no field guide has been written before…
Mustn’t grumble – was the oft repeated cry of the pre-war Brit; all stoicism and stiff upper lip. Then the post war baby boomers became £10 poms and acquired the reputation for whinging. Well clearly I was part of that post war boom. Mustn’t grumble? You must be expletive deleted joking! I spent the morning clearing junk out of my garage. What, I hear you whine, has that got to do with birding? Nothing! Absolutely, another deleted expletive, nothing. That’s the point, I cleared out my garage when I should have been enjoying [well eating anyway] an airline breakfast as we prepared to land in San Paulo. Illness in the family meant I had to cancel my trip to the Mato Grosso at the eleventh hour… a month of Antwrens and Aracari, Toucans and Tody-wrens has been replaced by domestic duties and more slaving over a hot computer. Mustn’t grumble? Do me an expletive deleted favour!
I have spent months drooling over pictures of Blond Woodpeckers, slavering at the sight of sought-after Antwrens and gibbering over Jabiru. By trawling the net, calling in favours and cajoling friends I had managed to get a book and a half, a bird family CD-ROM and several hundred images downloaded onto the PC in an attempt to commit to memory at least the main families of South American avifauna that I have never encountered. You see, and here is the beef [in an American political sense as well as a whinging pom one] – there is no decent field guide to the birds of Brazil.
There is but one stray ray of sunshine in my otherwise dark and gloomy world – this lack of a field guide is going to make it slightly harder for anyone else new to Brazil to identify what they see. Of course, anyone in their right mind when visiting a new country in a new continent where no fieldguide exists, would be accompanied throughout by a local guide. Unluckily I engaged not one but several such fellows when planning my month long sojourn in southeaster Brazil… I say unluckily as my misery is not just that I am sweeping the garage floor rather than scanning the jungle floor; it is more poignant; more exquisitely painful for the fact that my oldest and dearest friend is, right now, sipping some South America beer whilst acclimatising in a hotel in Cuiaba [Gateway to the Mato Grosso] and trying to familiarise himself with whatever birds hop out of the foliage.
What possessed me to invite him in the first place? In the name of all that is holy I must have taken leave of my senses; damn it all, the expletive deleted bloke is already nearly 100 birds ahead of me on his world list… I languish in the 1900s whilst he has already stepped into the glory of a 2000+ man! The only reason I invited him along was because his previous visit to Costa Rica meant that he was guarantied to see less lifers than me on this trip. And what did I do when I told him yesterday that he was to be deprived of my company? I wished him luck! I think he could tell, even over the telephone, that my teeth were firmly clenched if course.
Of course he will not be alone… his younger brother is with him. Now, were I a right thinking and generous cove, I would be relieved that the man whose friendship I have valued for over 40 years will not be alone as he steps forth into the land of Anacondas and aggressive spiders, teenage gun gangs and man-eating mosquitoes. But this callow youth [is 55 still young] who tagged along with us big boys [we were, after all, a good 10 months older than he] decided to go to Brazil and try birding for the first time in his life.
Avuncular advocates of the gentle and noble pastime we all share would no doubt purr appreciatively and cluck encouragement to anyone stepping up to the plate for the first time clutching their bins in an unfamiliar grip to ask “what sort’s that then; the red, yellow and blue one that looks like a parrot?” I ask you, is that fair? Should this novice stripling see Jacamars and Jabirus, Screamers and Ant-pittas by the score whilst his elder and better will be lucky to add a Bean Goose to his year list? Of course he will have to rely on his older brother’s skill and the pointing digit of one of the worlds top birding guides to tell him what he has seen as Brazil still has no comprehensive modern fieldguide to help him decide for himself.
It is truly remarkable that I have managed, over the years to visit no less than four different countries the year before a decent filed guide was published for each… I have had to struggle with the incomplete or the incomprehensibly ordered or the uselessly monochrome. I have tried to make up my mind whether the bulbul was grey-hooded or grey-headed simply by reading about its call in a pictureless guide when the bird was as silent as a grey-cowled Carmelite.
To bring some glimmer of light into an otherwise dark and sad world I set off to Potters Bar rather than the Pantanal on the first twitch I’ve attempted in ages and managed to connect with the obliging Gray-cheeked Thrush… small compensation I know but at least I’ve managed a lifer this month – my friends emailed me to say he had added around 250 and he is only halfway through his stay! With my oldest friend gripping me off and the fieldguide still unpublished is it any wonder I’m a grumpy old birder?
3. They also bird who only stand and wait…
One of the most fundamental division of birders is into those who chase and those who wait; with the number of the former far outweighing the latter. Yet this has more to do with our collective understanding of virtue than with successful birding. Pompous pontificators assert that only those who stride out win out, and those of us who lay in wait, wait in vain.
We are told as children that exercise is healthy but also virtuous – like cleanliness it is close to godliness. If you doubt me try driving into a reserve [those which allow disabled access to vehicles] and see the obvious disdain on the faces of those you pass; it’s not consternation at your chutzpah but contempt for your lack of good citizenship. This attitude not only makes disabled drivers uncomfortable but causes an awful lot of people miss an awful lot of birds. Cars can be mobile hides - if you doubt me – try this – walk along a hedgerow and see at what point the perching birds fly away, then try driving along the same hedge at the speed of a walking cow and see how much closer one gets before they fly!
This is not me riding the usual hobby horse about disabled access but about the increasingly prevalent lack of field-craft. If ever you have been at a big twitch you would have been annoyed at ignorant photographers or selfish boors who attempt to get a little bit closer to a rarity by crashing through the crowd and taking up a stance two yards too close for the birds comfort, flushing it thirty metres along the hedge or dune. Yet the majority of people still stride out along woodland trails or seawalls, wind blown and rain lashed in the expectation that the next dune or the furthest scrape will hold something of interest… probably because it has been driven there by their over enthusiastic chasing.
Pause for a little thought… how many times has a major rarity turned up in a supermarket car park, lone suburban sycamore or seaside cemetery? Location is clearly not a consideration for the lost and lonely vagrant. I once watched a Spotted Crake in a puddle underneath a railway footbridge, hard to view hidden behind an abandoned supermarket trolley. I’ve seen a Pallas’s Warbler in a bush next to the noisiest of kindergartens, and many a Waxwing in the only tree on a housing estate. There are often Black Redstarts under the tables of a seaside café and Snow Buntings on a seawall on the edge of an industrial estate. The Marabou Storks sitting on every lamppost down Uhuru Road in Nairobi are just as comfortable as those atop a baobab in the bush. My point here is that most of us assume that birds want nature as unspoilt as we do and will always go for the most picturesque and isolated places. Whether you lie in wait like me or go search out the far horizons one fundamental holds; understand the habitat and bird behaviour. Some birds will ignore the noisiest blunderer whilst others will shrink even from those who tread carefully.
My bile boils hottest when what I spot is not a birder chasing a bird but some self-abuser with a dog! I have witnessed on four continents the game of ‘lets set the dog chasing after the shorebirds’ – what is it with these people? Dog ownership sort of implies a love for animals but the behaviour shows a total disrespect for wild animals and an even wilder observer of same - me!
I read on a website the other day that, ‘if you are not prepared to walk then you won’t see the birds’. I’ve not met the tour guide who wrote it but could he be one of those that rush past me when I am quietly watching a real stonker and then returns an hour later having done a five mile circuit without even hearing a snatch of song let alone seeing any birds. Damn it I’ve been to places where birding in the car is not just preferred but mandatory on the grounds that there are things out there that can eat you! Yet the myth persists that there is just the one way to bird… that is with hiking boots and a determined stride. As you get older you don’t just get grumpier you also slow up and even on my good days the best I can do is an amble to a hide taking a long rest before attempting another… but, even if I were young and fully able-bodied this would still be my preferred birding method!
4. The Carrier Bag flew off over the Orchard
I am writing this in my study with the window open wide and the fan full on wafting warm air over my ample and over exposed flesh – just shorts between me and embarrassment. I mention this not to titillate those of you whose imagination might create a much more attractive picture than reality does, but to let you know that the weather is quite sufficient to raise the temperature of my blood. Of course, by the time this is in print I will be shivering behind four layers of fleece trying to ID a passing seabird or tell if that dark object bobbing on the tide is a lump of tar or a Common Scoter. Nevertheless, I will still look back and recall the many cases of mistaken identity during my birding trips, with blushes and outright ire.
Its not so much the mistakes themselves, we all make them and my shoulders are broad enough to carry a red face, as what causes them… litter! Nothing can be more crass and ignorant than the wonton despoilation of the countryside with the detritus of our polluted era. Plastic which has a half-life longer than strontium 90, jostles for attention with drink cans and fast food wrappers amidst a sea of cigarette butts and dog muck [I’ll save that delicacy for another day!].
Its not just at home – on a trip to Mexico, travelling a quiet road miles from a village we pulled over by a small Catholic Shrine to look across a valley at the soaring raptors – litter was strewn everywhere and the shrine was covered in graffiti! Elsewhere we met a birder who was trying to stop developers filling in a small urban wetland which was already a dumping ground and yet the waders, skimmers, herons and ducks were still there in legions.
Take a day out in Norfolk one autumn, Maggie and I did, arriving at Wells Wood car park full of anticipation – that scrap of woodland has turned up many a mega and innumerable goodies over the years. As we arrived so did the first of the days showers – and I don’t mean the dribble of a third rate seaside hotel; I mean the power shower of a luxury penthouse suite! It really hammered – so we took the sensible course of action – stayed in the car. The car park was virtually empty so we could see the boating lake through the driving rain. It was probably hawk-eye who spotted the Water Rail crouched in the pond-side weeds; standing stock still half hidden by foliage; but it was definitely me who started to speculate… wasn’t the back more like a pheasant’s wing than a curlew’s flank? Could it be a Baillon’s Crake? Maggie was convinced it could not and was just a Common Water Rail. The sun broke through and the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, we scrabbled out of the car and scoped the pond… there in the corner, half wrapped around a twig was a brown paper bag spattered with mud – a common paper bag mind you, not a Baillon’s! Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
I have over the years managed to turn a piece of abandoned blue tubing into a Kingfisher, a bundle of string into a Stone Curlew [is that where the twitching term ‘stringing’ came from?] and a bright white cigarette packet into a Great Grey Shrike, to name but a few! If people took their rubbish home think how much better my reputation would be!
Of course, the converse happens too. Many years ago my dad was visiting from New Zealand and I took him for a few days birding in Scotland. We were in Skye when a thunderstorm hit so hard that we pulled over into an old quarry entrance to wait out the worst of it. As we sat there I looked up and saw a black plastic sack fluttering in the wind, caught in a bush at the top of the quarry face. I was outraged and vented my spleen to my father who nodded his complete agreement as I waxed lyrical at how such pristine nature could be besmirched by thoughtless humanity. Just like in Wells Wood the sun broke through as the rain stopped and the female Golden Eagle shook the water from her wings and took to the air drifting off over the hills – the most magnificent trash bag imaginable.
As for the carrier bag in the title, this was a bone of contention between Maggie and I and, as always, her keen eyes won out. We had just turned a corner and skidded to a halt at her cry that she had spotted a Barn Owl – the only one she had ever seen in Bucks where we were then living. I couldn’t see any such thing. Eventually I said “do you mean that abandoned white plastic carrier bag on the grass verge?” She nodded assent as the carrier bag took off, transformed into a Barn owl and flew off into the orchard! Don’t you just hate it that she is always right?!
5. Guides
I’ve been lucky enough to go on a several foreign birding forays, some self-directed, sometimes leading others, and sometimes being part of a professionally led group and I am always struck by just how different leaders are; in birding skill & experience but, more importantly, in their idea of what a guide should do.
I thought it was time to share some guidelines for guides as, sadly, the right motivation, people skills and organisational ability appear to be as rare as Roc eggs! Incidentally, grumpy I may be, but I have had some brilliant trips with guides who have since become friends and whose service I would, and indeed do, recommend to others.
On the other hand…
Naming no names and carefully disguising circumstances so as not to embarrass anyone, I offer some guiding golden rules.
I went on a trip with a group of disabled birders. Our guide had many years experience, however, on an outing to a world famous migration hot spot he wandered off for half an hour. He returned to tell us he had been checking out a path but it was not suitable for wheelchairs, however, it had been worth checking as he had picked up a lifer for himself! Needless to say this was a much wanted species that none of the group managed to catch up with.
Rule 1 – The guide is there to enable the group to see birds, NOT to extend his own life list!
On another trip, after a long and tiring day in the field, our guide unilaterally decided that we should all stop at a local hostelry for a pint rather than head back to base and, when it was suggested that the group should be consulted he took off at break-neck driving speed scaring some participants half to death!
Rule 2 – Guides should consult participants before changing itineraries.
On one occasion we arrived at 10.00 pm and waited for an hour before the guide turned up - in a small saloon car that three of us had to cram into the back seat of. He told us it would take 15 minutes to reach the hotel… one and a half hours later we were hammering on its door trying to rouse the owner. I can think of very few times when even good guides have been accurate about travel times.
Rule 3 – Always over-estimate travel times; customers are pleased to arrive early, if you underestimate times clients get fed up always being late.
Another guide spent all his time running down ethnic groups and banging on about the football club he supported. He laughed at his own [rather childish] jokes, but never understood the groups’ humorous remarks.
Rule 4 – Don’t assume that group members share your political leanings, sense of humour or other proclivities.
It’s hard to give the next rule anonymously – so I’ll just tell it like it happened and hope he either doesn’t subscribe to BI or takes this on the chin.
The guide [who also drove] would stop to get himself a coffee. After this happened a few times we suggested that group members [most of whom had difficulty getting in and out of a vehicle] might like to be asked if they needed a drink, or to use the restrooms. Having conceded this the guide began to buy himself mini doughnuts and only sometimes shared these with the group. The last straw came when he bought back a box of doughnuts and said “these are for treats later in the day” and went off to use the facilities. Without a word being exchanged the group instantly devoured every last crumb from the box.
Rule 5 – Birders like to be guided, not dictated to.
We were doing our own thing in Thailand but decided that one site would be better worked with local knowledge so we asked our hotel if they knew a guide. They contacted a local chap who agreed to meet us next day at first light. We rose very early for the 40 minute drive into the park. On arrival the Park Centre was closed and deserted. No one appeared and after half an hour, seeing some huts we timorously tapped on the door of one. Our guide for the day opened the doors bleary-eyed and clearly very hung-over. He emerged half an hour later and took us to several spots in the park where we didn’t see any birds and where he tried to describe partial human footprints as tiger pugmarks.
Rule 6 – Get recommendations from other birders when hiring local guides.
There are of course, too many rules to cover in one article, so I’ll confine myself to one last tale of woe.
Half way round the world we birded with a guide who had written glowingly about his Lodge’s air-conditioned, en-suite cottages, dining room and bar set amidst extensive grounds. On the drive from the airport it became clear that the man had only recently acquired his bird knowledge and was certainly no better at spotting or ID than the rest of us… but he knew the country and took us to places where birds abounded. We ended a long day arriving at his place. The cottages turned out to be converted steel containers on blocks and the air-con was a fan the size of an aircraft engine welded on to one end with a mesh window at the other. His interpretation of en-suite was an old fashioned one – the ‘facilities’ were tagged on one end and required one to step out into the world to use them. But it was the dining room and bar that really staggered us. It seemed like an old aircraft hangar [perhaps the man was the king of recycled air-force surplus] and had a couple of tables at one end, a pool table in the middle. At the other end was a table-sized hot plate used to cook everything, in, it appeared, the same grease used to lubricate the air-con. Around a flood-lamp in one corner buzzed literally thousands of moths, flies and uncountable other insect varieties in a mesmerising whirl. We headed for the nearest hotel the next morning!
Rule 7 – Try telling it like it is, honesty is always appreciated, that way realistic choices can be made.
I’d love to hear from other world birders about their experiences of being guided… maybe other people’s sunny dispositions had meant they have been better served.
6. TV Presenters
Some days as I age I lament my lost enthusiasm. All winter working week I am longing for time to lay aside commitment in favour of passion. I pine for my patch, like Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue pining for the fiords. I count the hours of day job and website chores, of shopping missions or ferrying the mother-in-law to chiropodists; dreaming of waders and woodpeckers when I should be researching or fundraising for the dba.
Then the day dawns dreary, the sun struggles to lift the fog or sleet blurs the windows. Then the warm duvet is so much more attractive than a biting east wind; dreams so much better than imagined reality. As I age, the duvet is gaining ground on cold bird hides. Yet the alarm clock of passion rings and I rise, wipe the sleep from my eyes and drag my sorry arse staggering into the world, scope in hand to the car. Then scales fall from my eyes and I see my goal clearly through the weather. The wind could bring divers by the headland or the mist could bring down migrants and soon I’m scanning the ocean for skuas or panting toward the viewing ramp at as fast a limp as the arthritis allows in the hope of a late fishing bittern or an early rising rail.
“Hold hard!” I hear you, dear mythical reader, cry, ‘what’s so grumpy about that?
The lesson is that whilst I lack a show of enthusiasm I still have passion burning inside. Recently I was talking to a friend who runs a small Kent gallery called ‘Birds, Birds, Birds’ who said that he is really surprised that in the houses of keen birders there is little showing that gives any clue of their hobby. Looking round my house you will find every inch of wall covered in bird paintings; my study lined with bird books; the grumpy birder’s bungalow is cluttered with porcelain parrots or wooden waders. Visitors chorus… ‘you a twitcher then?’ I’m not ashamed to wear my anorak with pride… even my car has Bird Fair stickers and a ‘Please pass, I’m Birdwatching’ plaque.
Still sound decidedly un-grumpy?
Well, what makes me scream abuse at the TV threatening to withhold my licence fee is passion replaced by formulaic ostentatious enthusiasm. The media labels all birders sad anorak-wearing twitchers that make train-spotter’s yawn; they use the same sad formula making their tame birders show unseemly exaggerated enthusiasm.
I have had it with Nigel Marvin walking to camera wind-milling his arms, or running from a CGI dinosaur to show how committed he is… all it shows is that he should be committed - to an asylum. Do we need Charlotte Uhlenbrook crouching behind a bush beaming at us with ever-arching eyebrows? Why must Saba Douglas-Hamilton run bare-foot through acacias daring the thorns to prove she is mad for wildlife? Who needs Jonathan Scott in a jeep, almost in tears, telling us how a leopard is in mortal danger anthropomorphised with a name like ‘cuddly’ or ‘spots’? Did we ever need Bellamy screwing up his face, squeezing his shoulders together to convey his love of the environment – I think not! The latest generation of wild world professional promoters seem even worse; all overtly eager enthusiasm and screaming parody of passion owing more to Disney than Darwin. I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter squeal like a teenaged girl, ‘oooh, that’s reeeeeally horrible’ when looking at the outstretched foot of a goose barnacle – who said the BBC isn’t dumbing down!
Do you remember Howie Watkins enthusing a generation of kids for wildlife… well he gave up the limelight to do real conservation work for a local authority. Out of the lime-light Bellamy risked gaol to preserve Tasmanian trees. Uhlenbrook spent years saving primates in steaming jungles well away from cameras - all passion with a capital ‘P’!
So forgive my lost enthusiasm for cold mornings and frosted binoculars but never imagine that my passion burns less bright or my anger at human despoliation is diminished because I don’t throw my arms about and stare wide eyed into a camera lens. Can someone tell all media people that 90% of people are not stupid; they do not need false enthusiasm and constant beaming at the camera to understand the importance of conservation or the beauty of birds? We don’t have to be weirdoes to love wild places. Mind you, speaking as a bit of a nutter, aren’t birds brilliant!
7. “When I were a lad we didn’t ‘ave two ‘apennies to rub together, and now look, they don’t even ‘ave ‘apennies anymore!”
[This one never made the magazine - as a very similar article was published that month in a rival magazine...]
I was nine when a friend lent me some roller skates; my parents had forbidden them as too dangerous. When I tried them out in the playground my legs took off in different directions – the consequently dislocated hip meant months in hospital, and the subsequent inability to walk led to quiet pursuits like fishing turning me into a passive birder. [This is like being a passive smoker; sitting quietly amidst reed warblers and spotted flycatchers is habit forming and causes serious eccentricity in later life.]
In those days ‘fishing gear’ meant an old tank aerial turned into a fishing rod, and whatever bits of tackle one could accumulate; it did not relate in any way to apparel. One’s ‘fishing clothes’ were whatever you had not too tattered to matter if it got torn or mud spattered. Such clothing was dull in colour but not deliberately camouflaged - this was the 1950s, EVERYTHING was dull… bright clothing came in at about the same time as colour TV; in fact, I’m pretty sure that real life was still in black and white back then.
Every Saturday morning I would serve petrol at my local garage at a wage of ‘two and a tanner’ – about 12p in today’s tender. I saved every penny towards the clothing of my dreams; perfect for fishing - an army surplus combat jacket! By the time I stopped growing up and out I had accumulated enough to buy it and it served me well into my early birding days. On the one hand it was the colour of the countryside and incapable of rustling, but, to be fair, it was about as waterproof as a sponge and weighed something over three tons.
You are probably thinking, ‘I need to hear this sad tale of post war poverty because…? I tell it merely to illustrate that you do not need flashy clothes to find mega birds. […each time I tell it I get poorer, and the era gets duller, but I never sacrifice a good story on the alter of veracity.] In a similar vein I once asked a fishing tackle purveyor whether colourful lures caught more fish and he said “no, but they catch more fishermen”. Herein lies my grump of the month – what is it with all this fancy birding clothing?
Last August I was on my stand at the British Bird Fair people watching birding humanity in all its forms. Top individual prize must go to the chap dressed head to toe in camouflage gear – even his rucksack and camera bag! I found myself comparing the couples who walked by wearing matching clothes – winners by a mile were the couple sporting matching ‘Bird Forum’ baseball caps, yellow shirts, waistcoats of many pockets, shorts and matching white trainers!
I’ve often wondered how people know who it’s safe to disclose their darkest desires to, such as wanting to commit horrible murders or share their bizarre sexual proclivities. Maybe they just instinctively realise that like-minded, or should I say similarly psychologically challenged, people dress alike? This was pointed out to me by Hawkeye who will immediately go and change her entire outfit if she inadvertently wears anything the same colour as me!
Incidentally, among the throngs one could see every T-shirt that was ever created sporting bird motifs. Some were so grey with repeated washing that ID became a challenge. After a while I saw another pattern beginning to emerge. I knew some of the people passing by and, apart from those wearing the uniforms of their Bird Fair stand, I began to realise that the best dressed people there were also most likely to be carrying 1954 editions of ‘I Spy Birds’ and opera glasses and only be able to tell a swan from a blue tit by using both. It put me in mind of a birding trip I was on to Trinidad. In my boat as we cruised around Caroni Swamp to look at the Scarlet Ibis roosts, an American lady sporting her 14th face-lift and wearing a floral print dress turned and said, to no-one in particular, “what’s that big red bird again?” [She might have been the lady we saw earlier at Trincity Pools wearing a very large sun hat and jodhpurs. On that occasion her tour guide said ‘There’s a caiman over there” and this lady responded with “Is it in flight?”.]
The natural corollary ought to be that the birders with no dress sense, wearing granddad’s old beret, tatty jeans, tennis shoes and my old combat jacket, can tell an Arctic from a Greenish Warbler in driving rain and dying light at 500 yards without optics. Having tried it, I can report that this is where logic fails. Heaven knows I’ve tried going into the field wearing my favourite pink shirt, my Fatbirder baseball cap, Bermuda shorts and my Kicker boots but it hasn’t done a damn thing to enhance my ID capabilities! It turns out, and please share this with your friends, that what you wear, so long as it doesn’t frighten the horses, makes not one iota of difference to your birding skills.
8. Bird-brained Broadcasters
Are you old enough to remember Miss Hathaway in the original ‘Beverly Hillbillies’? If so you may recognise her as the archetype of the nerdy birder. We’re used to being the lesser-spotted twitcher bestrewn with outdated overweight optics dressed all in WWII kaki replete in baggy Boy Scout shorts. We have long since given up any hope of being shown closer to our real selves but surely the media can do better with birds than they do with birders?
So I am promoting myself to the media… calling all TV Stations, Radio Broadcasters and Filmmakers… I am available for consultation next time you want to use any sort of bird image, sound or live exhibit in your film, programme or even advert.
I just watched ‘Miss Potter’ with the wife, and, at the risk of ruining my credentials as a super cool legend, I admit to enjoying it, no doubt because she was such a champion of conservation of England’s Lake District. However, my enjoyment was curtailed by the use of stock audio footage to accompany a walk alongside one of the lakes. I know it is stock footage, probably from a US production company… not because I am a film buff of the first order, but because of the calls of Great Northern Divers… or should I say Common Loons. Any UK birder will know that it is a few hundred miles south of any breeding birds let alone their beautiful haunting calls - all very atmospheric for the average film-goer but unbelievable annoying to birders.
It’s not as though this is an isolated case either.
A while back the BBC produced a brilliant show called ‘The Romans’, noted for its production values, graphic detail and historical accuracy, red in tooth and claw. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed the sex and violence but I really objected to their parrots! The Romans expanded into North Africa and Asia as far as India so I could happily accept Ring-necked Parakeets and even African Greys, but I was unaware of the Romans discovery of America… how else would macaws have turned up unless we are to believe that they are long-range migrants!
I have lost count of the number of times TV and films sent me into paroxysm through paltry production. One of my all time un-favourites was further proof of early American conquest… not Columbus or even the Vikings but apparently King Arthur made it there too, as one of his henchman was seen sporting a Harris Hawk on his arm!
I’m annoyed at the Irish Bird Records Committee for not sharing that tawny owls have colonised Ireland… a fact I am often acquainted with whenever there is a night time shot on any programme set in the Emerald Isle as it is surely always accompanied by their hoots. I’m surprised too at just how widespread nightingales appear to be singing in British suburban gardens even when they should be sunning themselves in Africa.
Mind you the British are as bad – I’ve never heard mention of British Bluejays but I’ve clearly seen them in London in ‘101 Dalmatians’ – alongside our racoons? This Hollywood howler has a noble history… remember Fay Rae and ‘King Kong’ or ‘Africa Queen’ and the like? Some of you will have noticed that the bird calls sprinkled throughout the footage of our heroes hacking through jungle are almost always those of South America Species no matter where in the globe the movie is set.
I’m informed by American friends that they cringe at their fair share of bloopers too… such as an Eastern Screech Owl being heard at the opening of E.T. which is set in California! There is also a Red-tailed hawk heard on the South Pacific island where the last ‘Lord of the Flies’ movie was made… another case of long-range reverse migration?
My wife tells me not to be such a nerd; that every professional or hobbyist must have to swallow hard at how little respect is afforded to fact in drama but I still think it is indefensible. No one would put up with a film showing palm trees in Iceland or Polar Bears in Peru [although there is one in Hawai if you watch ‘Lost’] so why should birders put up with anachronistic, geographical or diurnal rubbish about birds?
So I have invented the ‘Golden Booby’ - an annual prize going to the worst example of this shoddy shortcut or lazy research; let me know if I have missed one of your favourites!
9. Big Men and Optical Delusions
Is it just me or have you a loathing for the great and good? I can’t help it but I do… not, you must understand, the people in person but their public persona; in person these people are personable [try saying that after leaving the pub]. Take, for example, Nigel Marven of ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ fame – he who I had occasion to criticise in these very columns for his overt enthusiasm… when he came up to me at the Bird Fair it was not with wind-milling arms and fists flying, but with a wry smile and a handshake – he actually enjoyed the piece, and even signed up as the latest patron of the ‘disabled birders association’ – he turned out to be an absolute gentleman. So I am sure that, face to face, the doyens of the birding world are [for the most part] fine fellows.
I am not just referring to those well-known on the national public stage but the local leaders both official and self-appointed. The leading lights of some bird clubs or even some of the long-established patch workers who become the apparent fount of all birding knowledge are among their numbers too.
Whether it be by inclination, or as a result of the adoration of their coteries, somehow these types come to define our hobby’s tenets and mores; and thus the limits to the trepidation of the majority. What are some of the rules which are thus laid down so solidly they might be in stone?
The first is never to ‘call’ a bird, as getting it wrong will result in derision. Someone once told me that they preferred to look a fool than open their mouth and confirm that status. I once saw one of the most famous of all birders pontificate on a hoopoe telling all around him that it was moribund, had a damaged beak and would not see out the day… it stayed for four months before moving on. Another time I heard a local leader dismiss a duck as not a rarity at all and pontificate that someone had called it all wrong – the trouble is he was looking at the wrong duck! My personal view is that everyone should call out any birds they see because it is far worse to miss a potential lifer than to seem a fool.
The second rule is that one should never use a field guide in the field! Apparently this not only shows that you are a rubbish birder but also means that you never learn to ID for yourself. Overseas, when one is not familiar with local birds, even the pontificators will spend half their time in the field with a book open trying to get a bird’s ID right; at home even novices are supposed to make notes and confirm ID at home. Doubtless this suits some people but not most. I say use any aid you can to be sure of ID as, as you get more experienced, you will get better and need such references less… but, unless you have seen every bird in the world many times have a good fieldguide at hand.
There are many such unwritten rules that should be exposed and ignored but I’ll confine myself to just one more rant… about optics envy.
If you are ever lucky enough to find yourself on a busy road on the outskirts of Delhi and stand for an hour or so watching the manic flow of traffic you have every chance of seeing every type of vehicle ever made from Rolls Royces to Citroen C5s along with a smattering of camels, elephants and carts powered by old water pumps. Similarly, birding at a hot spot or big twitch you will see just about every optical aid from leather-clad concertina telescopes to lenses more suitable for looking at the stars.
Two things follow from this observation. Different strokes suit different folks and some people’s pockets are deeper than others. Scratch the surface of a birding guru and they will swear by one of the great names in optics but the fact is that there are half a dozen companies out there that make brilliant bins. Some love their battered old gear and insist that they ‘don’t make ‘em like they used to’, others vow that the newest and latest are best. However, one thing is for sure, and it is that the quality is not effected one whit by whose neck they dangle from!
10. The Wisdom of the Ages…
Hear me dearly beloved younglings and harken to my words… despite what you may have been told on your grandfather’s knee, or by that wise old owl of a teacher, there are no, (as in zero, zilch, nada and zippo!) repeat no compensations to getting older! Naturally I have accumulated more knowledge than I know what to do with, and learned more at the University of Life than I have time left to forget, but this does not in anyway compensate me for rheumatism, cellulite, a grey beard and a weak bladder.
In birding terms, the fact that I have seen 10,000 Black Kites soaring over Delhi and three hundred Carmine Bee-eaters six feet from my nose on the Okavango River; Purple Sunbirds sipping nectar from a feeder at Asa Wright in Trinidad and had King Parrots land on my head outside O’Reilly’s Lodge in Australia, does in no way detract from the fact that I am no longer fit enough to slog 1 kilometre up a jungle track in 35 degrees of heat and 100% humidity, in the hope of catching a fleeting glimpse of a Serendips Scops Owl. Nor does it help me over the frustration of being in earshot of a Blue Magpie but not, as it were, in leg shot.
Those among you who by inclination or lack of means have not birded overseas will, no doubt, be ready to beat me about the head with your copy of Birds Illustrated or at the very least chastise me for my ungratefulness. How dare I whinge when I’ve been able to see some of these avian wonders; what right have I to complain? Well I am just back from one of those tropical paradises. Sri Lanka is truly a beautiful country with charming and friendly people. Indeed not only is it a birder’s paradise but nirvana for the epicure too. There is little in world cuisine to compete with a simple ‘village’ curry of okra or aubergine with fresh coconut, rice and chutney washed down with a Lion beer. Well I do dare complain as my infirmities have prevailed and prevented me from bagging all the endemics usually seen by any able-bodied birder.
Take the National Park at Sinharaja; lush and fecund where the clearings are full of enormous butterflies and swooping tree swifts. Given that this is still a developing country there is little to spare for infrastructure and only forest tracks lead into its interior. Having been given special dispensation and being allowed to ride in on a jeep could still not get this overweight ornithologist close enough to see the Ashy-headed Laughing-thrushes, Red-faced Malkhoas or White-faced Starlings. Indeed a red-faced Bo found it impossible to ride up a 1 in 4 slope pebble-paved like a river bed, in a jeep with neither seat-belts nor doors. The choice was brace myself and suffer agony, or fall out, or give up several endemics, and this weak flesh had to opt for the latter course.
I was under no illusion when I arranged the trip. I knew I would dip out here or there and, indeed admit that we were very fortunate to see more than 200 species and three quarters of the endemics and nearly 50 endemic races. But that’s never enough for us is it? Twitch for one bird and see it, is our yardstick of success; go twitch for three birds and get two and we are in despair.
And what do we do when we see that new lifer? When a bogy bird is found after years of searching and you ‘grip off’ your oldest friend by seeing a bird he hasn’t? Well we do a little dance or take a celebratory nip; we smile inwardly or even, if sufficiently alone, punch the air in glee and triumph. A day later and the triumph is forgotten, all we can recall is a bird we dipped out on 10 years ago!
An hour after we landed in Sri Lanka we were driving north and stopped at a local shop for some bottled water. As we alighted a group of half a dozen babblers hopped down an alley and we grabbed our guide demanding instant ID – Yellow-billed Babblers, our first lifer… but within the next hour we saw them every mile or so and over the next two weeks saw them virtually hourly… the exciting lifer had instantly become the every day. Why are we so fickle? How can something become mundane because we see it constantly for two weeks when we are unlikely to ever see it again? I saw more than 50 bird species I had never seen before but still bemoaned the birds I didn’t see. Obviously I’m older, but clearly no wiser!
11. Confidence Mon Brave!
It has long been a source of extreme angst and ire to me that ugly SOBs of the ‘treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen’ persuasion get the good looking, good natured and otherwise intelligent women. Why, I have often internally whined, do these blokes think they are God’s gift to women? To me they seem more like the spawn of the devil? Moreover, why do women agree with them?
I, on the other hand, believing myself to be, on the whole, an ugly to average catch, have always been diffident in the extreme. Indeed it wasn’t until my wife told me who, from our mutual past, used to fancy me, that I realised how many birds, in the 1960s chauvinist sense of the word, I had dipped on! How ever did I managed to find such a first-class mate when my display behaviour has always been so second-class? It could not have been my toneless song, and the depth of my sartorial inelegance means it surely wasn’t attractive plumage that persuaded her to pair with me for life.
Before the reader’s patience is exhausted, and my extended metaphor is stretched to breaking point, I should explain in what way this rant is pertinent. To answer the question I implicitly posed, the trick to being a successful male is confidence, and this is a trick I wish I, and more of my birding friends would learn.
I had a call from one of my best birding buddies the other day, how, he wanted to know, could one be sure of the ID of an adult male White Wagtail in winter, when first winter Pied Wagtails look so very similar. He had been studying a bird that was regularly visiting his garden, which very, very rarely gets any sort of wagtail, and had been told that it must be a Pied as White’s never over-winter in the UK.
I don’t know who told him this, but clearly whoever the culprit was he had plenty of confidence in himself, and so, no doubt, is considered an authority by others. My mate has such a poor opinion of his own birding skills that he is easily talked out of his original conviction. Why? He has the bird regularly, right in front of him at close-quarters, and he sits with the fieldguide open at the correct page showing the subtle grey tones, and, moreover, has seen hundreds and hundreds of both sub-species in his time. Yet someone combining arrogance and ignorance has talked him out of his conviction simply because he is confident and my mate is not.
Do White Wagtails ever over-winter in northern Europe? Rarely, is the answer in most books, but never say never! In any event, they do pass through the UK on their way to breed in Iceland and are one of our first migrants. I’m not an expert but I have seen them at all sorts of funny times and, I’m talking about the easier to ID adults of both races side by side. Part of the confirming evidence for climate change is that more and more of the species that were wholly migratory have begun to winter further and further north. When my dad was birding Cetti’s Warblers were rarer than cockerel’s eggs, now they burst your eardrums from low bushes every 50 yards around my local reserve all year round.
Some years go I was on a trip to India and we had broken a long journey with a stop for a picnic lunch at a nicely wooded area with a stream. I was distracted from joining the rest of the party by a beautiful White-rumped Sharma weaving along the bank of the stream. This got me looking at the birds where I was and I clocked up a number of new species. One was a new Bulbul for me and, when the group re-joined us, one of the party told me, in no uncertain terms, that this particular Bulbul could not be found in this area; indeed it wasn’t to be seen within several hundred miles of where we were. He referred me to the field-guide we were using, which confirmed his affirmation in so far as its miniscule map was able. I just couldn’t believe how I had got it so wrong. It was then that our local guide quietly took me aside and told me the bird I had seen was now quite common here and that it had either expanded its range or had just been overlooked in the past. In other words I was right but had been quite ready to give up a lifer when pontificated at by a more confident birder.
One of the best things about birding is that unexpected birds turn up in all the ‘wrong’ places. If they did not, there would be no twitchers, just a few twits who think they know it all and an awful lot of us diffident camp followers.
12. Bee-eaters over the Jacuzzi
Several weeks ago I was lounging in a Jacuzzi, cold beer in hand, staring into a cloudless sky watching hawking bee-eaters. Each ‘chup’ announced another colourful acrobat joining the throng.
The distant ‘oo oo’ of a hoopoe and the fluting whistles of golden orioles echoed across the valley separating our villa from the edge of a small town.
Later, lying on the roof terrace with a novel in my hand I realized that I had re-read the same page five times, distracted by booted eagles, and swarms of swifts vacuuming up aerial plankton; the sun soaked bums of passing serins and the gleaming spotless starlings.
In the evening I sat among cork oaks listening to a distant eagle owl call from the cliffs instead of being hunched over the computer screen, chased into my study and the arms of the Eagles last album by the opening bars of the Eastenders theme tune. If I turned too prune-like in the bubbling water and chose to laze in the garden instead, the novel remained un-read as a family group of Sardinian warblers worked along a tiny hedgerow three feet from my toes, oblivious to my presence. I struggled to identify warbling songs among the eucalyptus trees or the heart of shrubs, Orphean maybe, or perhaps melodious – my tin ear got a real testing.
The stunned silence from my mythical readers is becoming palpable… I can hear their brain cogs churrrr like demented nightjars trying to see how even the most curmudgeonly cove can complain about such avian ambrosia.
Well, I assume you mean apart from the fact that I am no longer among the wildflowers of an Andalucian Spring nor serenaded by suburban birds that in the UK would be considered glittering prizes.
Two things have the bile rising like sap on a sunny April morning.
On my return from this necessary total relaxation, where my only worries were sunburn, indigestion and whether I had enough pulp Science Fiction with me to last the week, the very first email I opened related the scores of my friends and rivals in the birding world. [Sue, Andy, Brian and I agreed to share our year lists a few seasons ago. What began as mere information exchange has succumbed to competitive urges. Having hung up my ‘twitching’ boots many years ago I confine myself to birding in my home county – they are happy to confine themselves to the entire country and its territorial waters! This not only means that I lose every year… but if I miss a good bird within my normal ‘can I be bothered to chase a rarity’ range, it is unlikely to turn up again for 12 months]. For some reason the one week in May I chose to be out of town was the same week when every continental bird not flying over my Spanish Jacuzzi was hovering over my house or at least within a 20 minute drive of it! More bee-eaters turned up there than I saw in Spain… hoopoes and alpine swifts, orioles and ospreys abounded.
If there is a right place to be at a right time you can bet your last lifer that I will be 800 miles away!
This propensity is not confined to my holiday choices but the everyday too. If I get up at silly o’clock and sit for hours at my local reserve you can guarantee that this is the day all the migrants get up late and pour through half an hour after I’ve gone home for lunch. If I work first and play later I arrive at the hide to choruses of ‘you should have been here an hour ago, boy have you missed some rarities’. If I hear of an unusual bird and drop everything to pursue it, it stays until three minutes before I turn up, but if I assume it will pass through fast it sits on a log for five days choosing only to fly off if I decide to sneak a visit.
The other wasp in my holiday honey was that birds were thriving in throngs where urban sprawl and inattention abounded, but my chemically farmed corner of ‘the garden of England’ it is a case of acres to the bird not birds to the acre! Man’s greed for surplus and subsidy has turned a time and in a place that should be rich and bountiful for birds and bees, into a sterile patchwork of production units and high yield hectares.
13. Bank Balances or Bank Swallows?
Worried by the growing urban sprawl, more and more people are buying a few acres of woodland to keep for no other reason than that they want to ensure our green and pleasant lands will not become urban desserts. Many of us are, in a sense, landowners as we support such organisations as the Woodland Trust, the RSPB, a preserve owning Audubon Society or some other organisation fighting to keep some of our homelands wild enough to suit furry or flying critters. Many of us proudly frame certificates for our study walls saying that we own our acre of Amazonia or other world wild place – doing our bit for heritage.
There are, of course, many landowners who believe that the land is in trust for all our children, that they do not so much own land as have the privilege to hold it for a while.
Our literature is littered with romantic images of the rural idyll from Hardy’s Woodlanders to H E Bates’s Ma & Pop Larkin, from Flora Thompson‘s Larkrisers to Gerard Manley Hopkins wandering the land lost in the ‘glory of dappled things’. Of course the reality was of hard work and hard times, with some landlords as cruel and harsh as any of Dicken’s Beadles or headmasters. We tend to romanticise the wilderness too whether it be Jack London’s White Fang or Scott’s beautiful Highlands we imagine a past where nature reigned and humankind merely borrowed from its bounty.
But… [dear reader surely you know me well enough by now to have expected there to be a ‘but’]… my experience of the average farmer, in the UK at least, is that they are by no means sentimental nor as forward looking as we would have them. Pier’s ploughman knew that those lucky enough to have holdings were not all caring ‘husbands of the soil’.
When I lived and worked on a farm some years ago I found to my amazement that not all farmers loved birdsong and badger setts, moreover, many were very careless of the land squandering it under rubble and rotting machinery.
But it is neither the romantic idealists, nor the careless farmers that has bought my country’s wildlife to its current low level but rather those who can only see land as production units, copses as timber banks and every acre as hard won from Mother Nature. Agribusinesses value a bank balance far higher than they value a bank vole.
I live in a town where farmland is still trapped within spreading urbanisation and so I must pass fields when going shopping or posting a letter. While it is not completely devoid of birds there are only a few species and mostly low in numbers. This is hardly surprising as the land is never out of use. A crop is taken one day, the land is ploughed and ‘treated’ the next and within a week or two it is back growing the same crop as it was last month, last year and the years before. It is barely rested and not coaxed into productivity but beaten into submission as acid is used to scour it of life so that pests cannot attack the monoculture. Crop after crop of cauliflowers are grown and attract only woodpigeons and feral doves from the town.
In my youth land lay fallow one year in four and each year it was planted with a different crop, nature was not the enemy but a helper. Can you imagine now someone planting seed singing the old country lay of my youth ‘one for the rook and one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow’? Nowadays every kernel is dressed with pesticide, herbicide and laced with artificial fertilizer.
The farmers must carry some blame but far more important are the huge food-selling combines who squeeze and squeeze produce prices until the pips can squeak no more! Supermarkets pay so little for home grown grub that farmers go under. Overseas growers get even less so we import pole beans from Kenya, potatoes from Peru and apples from the antipodes – further burdening the world with fossil fuel wasted and more pollutants discharged into the air.
The current ‘credit crunch’ was brought about by banker’s so far removed from the lives of ordinary people that they saw homes as commodities and livelihoods as production units. Such grasping greed has bought ruin for many thousands of innocent people now lies bare-boned in the light of reason for all to see. We are waking up to the destruction of pristine forest that such greed is causing. More and more of us are becoming aware of how traditional farming has given way to short-sighted exploitation that ruins the land for generations. Its not about profit or loss but usury, the rich taking more than they can ever use and often impoverishing those who have little or nothing.
So its not enough for us lovers of all things wild to sit at home feeling pleased with ourselves for buying an acre of rainforest or for feeding the birds in the yard. We have to reclaim our land, save it from those who would destroy it in the name of progress and start acting locally to save us globally.
We can’t take it back just by paying our subs to a conservation society, we must start insisting that more of what we eat is grown at home, and that in such a way that worships nature not destroys it, the closer we can get to modern organic production the healthier we and the land will be; the closer to home it is grown, the cleaner will be our air and the less the globe will warm… and the better the land, and the cleaner air, the more the birds will flourish!
14. A Great Man's Passing
Do you wonder from where each generation draws its birding inspiration? While many people seem to take up birding in middle or even later life and regret the opportunities missed, the overseas holidays unaccompanied by optics or the walks untroubled by an ear or eye out for the birds. But listen to the well-known figures in birding and sooner or later you will hear about that inspirational teacher or charismatic character that got them started early on the path to obsession. Sadly, many such great men have passed.
Let me tell you about the passing of another great man of birding. Eric, or ‘C-B’ to friends and colleagues, taught me all that’s really important about watching birds and appreciating their beauty and behaviour.
When I was six or seven I would lie with my head hanging over the foot-end of the bed so I could look under the eaves above my bedroom window where a pair of House Martins would construct their mud hut, as skillfully as any master builder. Sometimes I’d watch them drop into a muddy puddle, barely lifting off again armed with a gobbet of sticky mud they would transform into a pearl-like building block. So I had a passing interest shared by all country kids briefly aroused by ‘ousels’ singing melodiously and ‘blue birds’ making nests in ragstone walls; stoked by the mystery bird whose neat nest I found tucked between an apple tree and a brick wall and by the moss and cobweb globes exposed by Autumn winds in the ‘old man’s beard’.
Life changed when I was nine and an accident left me in a hospital bed for three months, and ‘confined to quarters’ for another nine. Scratching for a way to get me out of the house and my head out of a book, dad took me fishing; carrying me from car to lakeside where we spent many a summer’s evening drowning worms.
Coarse fishing should consist of watching a float for when it dashes away as a fish takes the bait… but we were distracted by the constant traffic of butterflies, bees and birds in the Reed Mace.
Sometimes we watched Sedge Warblers weaving their nests between reeds; sometimes we would see our fisherman’s patience echoed by a Spotted Flycatcher constantly going out and back from a dead limb in pursuit of midges. Often we marveled at screaming Swifts vacuuming up aerial plankton, or at the way Swallows took sips from lake surface whilst on the wing. Once we watched a fat Cuckoo chick, overflowing from a Reed Warbler’s nest, push out its tiny step-sibling. And once, that seminal moment when I was re-born as a birder, when the spangled jewel of a Kingfisher landed on my fishing rod, dived for a minnow and took its prize back to its waiting brood. All the while my dad would name the birds and butterflies and give me the names of the plants around us in a hushed voice. Somehow they carried an implicit assertion that the lakeside was a cathedral where we paid homage to Gaia and appreciated her bird and butterfly angels.
When I was a teenager, before sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll were invented, he would drive mum and me up to an old farm track on the edge of the hazel coppice. In the cooling summer evening we would listen to nightingales. Dad would bring a gallon can of water and pour it into the track’s ruts and then watch the subsequent puddle. Within a few minutes Swallows and Martins, Bullfinches and Meally Redpolls, Thrushes and Warblers, would be slaking their thirst a few feet from our quiet vigil.
The last time I visited my dad we went birding on a New Zealand beach the day after a storm. He used my scope with his good eye and watched hundreds of Flesh-footed Shearwaters dabbling among the gulls and terns.
When dad got it together after mum died, he made his last visit to England. His health was too poor to manage the plans I had to take him back to Skye to watch Golden Eagles as we once had, or even to manage a trip to Suffolk where we had once spent an entire evening watching Barn Owls bring food to their chicks at precisely 15-minute intervals. We managed just one outing, to a reserve in Kent where you can watch waders from the car window. It lifted his spirits and he forgot his infirmities as we discussed the miracle of the migrations of Arctic Terns, which we saw then and had seen together in NZ.
Dad told me the names of wild things and their ways, but his example taught me to love birds and so much more… quiet appreciation, patience, and awe. He showed me the wonder of nature and that all mankind should respect it. I knew a great man and he left this world on 10th of May 2008.
15. How to be a super-cool birder…
How can you become a super cool birder? The short answer, of course, is you can’t. I mean have you seen what we wear? Some of us try by sporting one earring; do we look like a super-cool dude or a prat? You’ve guessed it. My left ear sports a parrot dangling from a ring - have noticed a similar trend among well-known birders – are we even trying to look halfway normal? I don’t think so!
How could it be otherwise? Are there any birding Matt Damons or Kira Knightlys? Err… have you been to the British Bird fair? 20,000 visitors and only six ravishing beauties. There is my wife [I have plenty of guts but they would make rubbish garters], one of the girls pushing the refreshments cart, two PR Girls from Guatemala, an NGO worker from Colombia and an TV interviewer… notice the trend here? Only one of them is a birder. [Oddly I did notice that there were a few good looking women wandering the marquees but assumed they were long suffering birding wives and girlfriends. However, as Quasimodo is better looking than any male birder, the WAGS were either all suffering an eye ailment or were from Stepford!]
One of the questions for the ‘Just a Linnet’ panel I was on at the 2007 BBF was ‘why doesn’t Kate Humble come to the Bird Fair’? Derrr! Have you seen Kate, all legs and ‘Orphan Annie’ eyes, does she look like a birder, I think not! She is a TV presenter so must be pretending to like birding to earn a crust. Look at her fellow nature show presenters… which ones are birders and which actors. I’ll give you a clue, the quiet, tall dark and handsome ones can’t tell a fly-catcher from a fulmar; the short, fat, hairy loquacious nutters are birders!
Freeze a birder in a block of ice and tow him to Antarctica and he wouldn’t be cool. Birding is in the blood just like e-coli is in the bowels, so the outward manifestation of birding is not dissimilar; we look as if we have been vomited forth from a charity shop. Clothing co-ordination to us means wearing an anorak that is the same colour as our binoculars. The winner of the Best Dressed Man at the Bird fair 2007 was wearing camouflage from head to toe, two pairs of bins and a scope… the only accessories were a redundant compass and a Swiss Army knife dangling from some webbing. The interview he gave to the local TV station was so articulate they dropped the item in favour of a piece on Polish Plumbers. I’ll tell you how cool we are, we are so cool that the local TV station waited until everyone had left the Bird fair before doing their piece to camera in an empty marquee because they didn’t want any of our super-coolness to rub off!
Is a birder wearing shades cool? Of course not! He’s only got them on as he drank 7 pints of Old Speckled Hen last night and this morning he can’t even remember his own name!
Does wearing a green hijab make a birder look cool like the film stars and sportsmen who wear them? No! It makes us look even more shifty and dangerous like an Islamic fundamentalist checking cars at an Afghan roadblock. The latter looks dangerous because of his radical politics; the birder looks dangerous because he appears to have just burrowed under the wire from a secure mental health facility.
What can you wear around your neck to look cool? A simple coral choker might do it, or maybe a single gold religious symbol or even a tattoo of your child’s name if it is named after a capital city. Would a pair of 8x30 Swaro’s cut it? I think not. This is particularly sad as most birders spend inordinate amounts of dosh at the Swarovski, Zeiss, Leica, Kowa or Opticron etc. stands firmly believing that the ownership of a pair of binoculars costing around £1,000 will make them look right-on fellows. Wrong! If you want to look cool and buy Swarovski then stick to the crystal! Even other birders don’t think you look cool when you spend an inheritance on optics as they all did that too!
How about music… does dangling an iPod from your ears grant you membership of the right posse? No dummy! Even the most naïve of observers realise that you are not listening to the latest rap track or iTune but that you have created your own MP3s to learn the subtle differences between Blackcap and Garden Warbler songs. They know you are not bopping to the groove of a hip jive combo so don’t even bother to try and keep time with the rhythm because you will still look as cool as a drunken uncle at shotgun wedding.
How about trying a trendy walk like a super-cool Caribbean; that strut with slightly nodding head acknowledging that you are God’s gift to womenfolk, or like the Asians who sashay with a sideways move of the head while driving one-handed up a Himalayan pass or walking across a Bollywood film-set. Starlets swing their booties and up and coming trendsetters pace with one finger coiled into their jacket loop as it hangs across their back. Can the birder manage a suave saunter? Nah. The best he can manage is a hobbled trot trying to get to a twitch before a rarity flies off, or a stagger not a swagger, when carrying binoculars, telescope, backpack, fieldguide, waterproofs, sipping bottle and lunch!
There is just one way to be a cool birder… sea-watch in November with a gale force wind from Siberia pinning you against a north-facing seawall – and for cool read cryogenically preserved!
If you want more... 'Birds Illustrated' is no more - the excellent magazine always cost more to produce than it brought in and finally folded rather than compromise its standards. The Owner/Editor David Cromack decided to semi-retire and concentrate on his small publishing house - Buckingham Press - but he has been tempted out of semi-retirement to edit a brand new magazine 'Bird Art & Photography' and has persuaded yours truly to re-emerge as the grumpy old birder so you can now see my column there, and re-printed here in due course...
