2008 - The Bearded Tit (21 page)

Then there’s
Regulus regulus
. Britain’s smallest bird. The unfeasibly cute goldcrest. Tiny and olive green with a fiercely yellow and black crown. It deserves its Latin appellation: ‘little king little king’. In French
roitelet
, in Spanish
reyezuelo
, in Italian
regolo
and in Greek the same again,
chrysovasilisko
, little gold king.

Another is
Cygnus cygnus
. Those of you with a pub-quiz level of Latin (or astronomy) will know that
cygnus
is the swan. (A baby swan is a cygnet, of course.) In the bird world,
Cygnus cygnus
, the basic unit of swanhood, is, surprisingly,
not
our very own, very common mute swan, but the whooper swan. A little smaller than our swan and less elegant with a yellow, as opposed to orange, bill. Clearly, though, it was considered by whichever nineteenth-century taxonomist named it to be just about as swanny as any swan could be. If you’re not a pub-quiz regular and don’t know this already, you may be interested to know that the mute swan is Britain’s largest and heaviest bird, and the one with the most feathers. And it is a bird to be seriously avoided if it has a nest full of eggs or young.

The mute swan is also officially protected by the Queen. She can quite often been seen at night with her machine-gun, patrolling the perimeter fence of the swan enclosure.

One of my favourites, and very easy to remember, is the wren, one of Europe’s smallest birds. The tiny wren moves fast and furtively over short distances. It lives in holes in banks, trees or hedges, under overhangs or deep in low-lying bushes. In German, it’s the
Zaunkonig
(king of the fence), in Dutch the
Winterkoning
(winter king), in Greek
trypofrahtis
(hole-in-the-hedge maker); its scientific name is
Troglodytes troglodytes
. A man who lives in a hole in the ground.

Quite interesting.

Well, I think so.

A
cursory grope around my immediate vicinity (warm woman with all the duvet wrapped round her to my right, bedside table, clock, knocked-over glass of water and soaking watch to my left) revealed that Tori and I were not down in the reed beds looking for warblers. Suddenly the loudest birdsong in the world struck up.

I groaned.

‘What are you grunting about?’ she asked.

‘It was a groan, actually. That bloody bird.’

‘Wren,’ mumbled the pile of bedclothes.

‘No, that’s not a wren. Wrens are tiny!’

‘Size is not important,’ she said laughing in a way I did not find particularly funny. ‘It’s a wren. It is loud, but it’s louder if you’ve been drinking vodka till two in the morning.’

An important birding lesson there: small, dull bird: big, interesting song. Big, coloured bird: small, dull song.

Our arrival at breakfast was very much at the ‘till nine’ end of the ‘six till nine’ range. The clock in the breakfast room said 08.57.02. Made it! We chose a table for four, as it was just me and Tori and the hangovers. Vlad was nowhere to be seen. Typical of these Russians. Can’t take it. They talk the talk, but can’t walk the walk.

A bustling old lady hurried to our table to take our order. One eye scarcely left the clock. The remaining seconds of her shift were running down. The last thing she wanted was a couple of dilettante birders extending her working day.

‘You’re cutting things fine. I think the kitchen’s still open.’

I looked at the clock. 08.59.31.

‘Not nine o’clock yet,’ I informed her.

She tutted and her face contorted with disapproval. But that could have been caused by the invisible cloud of bison-grass vapour reaching her nose.

‘No sign of Mr Sobolnikovski this morning I see,’ I continued, chatty and amiable, pretending I didn’t have the mother and father of all headaches. And the children, the grandparents, the grandchildren, some distant cousins who’d turned up unexpectedly and the neighbours who’d just dropped in. ‘I expect he had a late one!’ I chuckled.

‘Mr Sobolnikovski was up and out at six this morning, horse-riding down on the beach. Same as every morning.’

These Russians, eh? They know how to drink.

As is customary for English people with stinking hangovers, we just ordered a grapefruit juice and coffee…followed by the full English breakfast with two fried eggs, the optional black pudding, extra sauteed potatoes and fried bread, white toast and marmalade. And excellent it was, too. Tori said she couldn’t believe she’d eaten so much considering how awful she felt.

‘Well, let’s go watch some birdies, then.’

We were happy. Dehydrated but happy. We kissed and left the table to go back to our room to fetch our binoculars, just stopping off briefly while Tori popped into the ladies’ to vomit violently for fifteen minutes.

It was a fine day. Perfect birdwatching weather. By precisely 10.30 a.m. we were back in bed.

‘It’s a lovely day,’ I said, snuggling down under the bedclothes.

‘Oh yes, that reminds me,’ moaned Tori. ‘You couldn’t shut the curtains, could you? That sun’s hellish.’

I got up and glanced casually out of the window as I closed one of the curtains—

Wow! It was incredible. ‘Tori, Tori, come here quick! Look at this!’ This was urgent. She joined me groggily at the window.

A bird like none I’d seen before, barely twenty yards from the hotel, just over the car-park wall flying low and slow across the edge of the reeds. It seemed huge. Long, broad, silvery-grey black-tipped wings held in a V glide in between lazy flaps. Dark brown shoulders. Underside streaked orange and brown. A pale, creamy head. Big claws and the telltale hooked beak of a raptor. It obligingly swept up and down the waterlogged fields by the marsh. It was almost saying, ‘This one’s for you. You two beginners. This is a freebie.’

Incredible. We’d seen our first marsh harrier. There are several species of harrier and, yes, they do get their name from the word ‘to harry’. To pester or harass. The Old English is
kergian
, to ‘torment with hostile attacks’. What a fab verb! This, of course, describes its method of hunting and catching prey. The scientific name for this one, the marsh harrier, is
Circus aeruginosus. Circus
, as you know, is from the Greek for ‘circle’ or ‘something generally ring-shaped’, as in the place where children get bored or frightened by clowns, moth-eaten ponies and abused lions. The harriers were observed to search out their feeding ground in wide, circular glides, the circle decreasing until its prey was cornered.
Aeruginoms
refers to the bird’s colour. More obvious in the females and juveniles. It means, roughly, ‘rust-coloured’, from the Latin
aes
meaning ‘copper or bronze’.

A marsh harrier. Tori and I smiled at each other. This was first on our list of ‘great bird moments’, and not a bad start to our first day as real birdwatchers. We hugged. And, without a second to lose, we got back into bed.

T
he idea of flight bewitches us. Because we cannot fly, we are enthralled by those who can. Birds. They can leave the ground. They can rise above it all. They can take flight. Think of that: ‘take flight’. ‘Take flight’ means to run away. To escape. They escape.

We may have invented aeroplanes, but anyone who has seen a peregrine falcon take a pigeon at 200
mph
and then disappear knows what flying is really all about.

Gravity can do nothing but watch helplessly as a kestrel spins into the wind and glides to an effortless standstill. Any day. Every day. The M25, for example: an obscene circular weal on the landscape, but there, above the daily drudgery of traffic, is the kestrel. Motionless. Whatever the air, the wind, the earth’s magnet and the planet’s orbit decide to do, the kestrel chooses its perfect spot. It makes its adjustments and freezes in midair. A stark-still, elegant dart, stencilled on the white sky.

Kestrel, a goodie for beginners. Easy to see because they like the fringes of man’s infrastructure: roads and railway lines. These form a barrier to small rodents, which therefore tend to be more abundant here. Their movements, as cars or trains go past and frighten them, become more visible in these places. Kestrels also see parts of the spectrum invisible to humans. This means that the rodents’ marker of trails of urine seem startlingly bright to the kestrel. And it was precisely a kestrel that did it for Jon and Louise.

‘Look at that, Daddy. Is that a bird?’

‘Blimey,’ said Jon, squinting into the sun at a static silhouette. ‘It’s not moving!’

‘A kestrel. It points itself into the wind and hovers. It’s not hovering now, not flapping its wings, well, not noticeably because the wind’s obviously blowing just the right speed. Usually they’re flapping like mad to stay in one place. It’s looking for a vole or mouse or something. Watch, it will drop down on something in a minute. Or it might drop to just a few feet from the ground and pinpoint its victim and then go in for the kill. Watch this!’

The bird had dearly got something in its sights. The children would love this display of cruel and ruthless nature. ‘Keep watching!’

All four of us, me, the children and the kestrel, were stock-still, waiting for that critical moment of attack. Then, all of a sudden, the kestrel flew off and disappeared into some trees.

‘They sometimes just fly away as well.’

My son followed its departure. ‘I think that’s cool, the kestrel.’

Ah, yes. Birds of prey are definitely boys’ toys.

The kestrel (
Falco tinnunculus
) is a deeply satisfying bird to see. Almost impossible not to see one every day. And certainly impossible not to identify. Fluttering, or motionless, in the sky above a road or railway line, homing in on a vole. In outline, a smooth, chestnut-coloured paper-aeroplane with long tail and narrow, angular wings. And when motionless and against a pale sky, a cross. A crucifix, perhaps. The Christ on the Cross of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ kestrel poem ‘The Windhover’.

And birds of prey are easy. Not to identify, mind you. Take it from someone who has spent hours underneath a Bonelli’s eagle thinking it was a booted eagle. Or was it the other way round? In the end I decided to call it an ‘eagle-beginning-with-b’. (The word ‘beagle’ had already been taken.) No, birds of prey are an easy way in to appreciating birds. Especially for blokes. They are attractive, fast, smart, crafty and, at some stage, they tear other living things to shreds. And men like women, too. And the great thing is, by and large, they glide, soar or hover in the open, clear skies. So easy to see. And they’re generally on their own.

I suppose there is some sense in that. Blue tits do not tend to make social groups with sparrowhawks, just as we don’t tend to invite psychopathic serial killers round for dinner (oh, and please bring a carving knife!).

But the sparrowhawk does not like to be too conspicuous. It relies on stealth and ambush. It flies low and fast and its short, broad wings make it highly manoeuvrable. It can zigzag between trees, change direction and suddenly appear from behind a hedge to grab a chaffinch that ‘will never know what hit it’. I had seen three sparrowhawks before I realized I had seen any at all. In fact, I was beginning to think that ‘a sparrowhawk’ was not an object at all, but an event. This is how it goes: there is stillness. A polite garden tucked away in a well-behaved suburban street. The clean feeders are well stocked with nuts and seeds. All the regulars are there. Same lot, every day; wonderful to see them all, though. Blue tits, great tits, chaffinches, greenfinches, sparrows and, if you’re very lucky, maybe a nuthatch. But the scene is one of serenity. Humanity on the fringes of nature. Nature on the fringes of humanity. Man interfering with nature in a benign way. We love it. The bird table: for birds, children and old people. And then—

What was that? A bolt of feathered lightning. A whoosh. A dark, grey-brown flash. Noise. Alarms. The garden is now empty. Empty but for a few fluffy, blue-ish feathers, floating in the air, a bright red streak on the bird table and the stillness of death. Ladies and gentlemen—the sparrowhawk.

‘It’s not really birdwatching you do, is it, Dad?’ Jon asked. ‘It’s just walking in the country. Not even in the country, always. I mean, you could walk to a pub three miles away and if you see a bird you can identify you call it birdwatching, when it’s really going to the pub!’

‘Don’t give my secret away, son!’

The mini-idyll was spoiled by the tinny ringtone of a mobile phone.

‘Oh, Lou, I can’t believe you brought your mobile phone with you.’

‘I only brought one of them!’ she said, scowling. ‘Hey, Rozzie, hi, how are you?…No, I’m out at the moment…no, I’m with Jon and my dad…What are we doing? Oh, we’re…um…we’re out.’ Louise looked at me sheepishly. ‘We’re shopping in town!’

I
t’s hard to explain the appeal of watching birds. They are not even fluffy and cuddly. There are some cute little ones and some brightly coloured ones but they are, in the main, spiky and reptilian with blank cold eyes. They don’t do anything special when you watch them; just get on with their lives. But maybe that is special. They eat, have sex, have children and die. And they are not that worried by us. Animals avoid us, but birds can always fly away, so they are taking less of a risk in being around. And they’ve adapted to us fairly well. If you watch crows on the motorway scavenging the dead carcass of a hedgehog, a pheasant or even a crow, they move out of the way when a car comes hurtling towards them. But they’ve learned to time it very well. You can see a rook stabbing at the dead body, casually stepping aside as a car bombs past, then nonchalantly returning to its food seconds later. And be honest: you don’t see many dead crows on the carriageway. Birds are there, doing their thing, right under our very noses.

But it’s hard to explain all this, especially to someone like Danny who is, shall we say, rather ‘urban’ in most ways.

By day he drives around the country, visiting factories, schools, hospitals and offices, servicing computers and secretaries, and by night he’s salivating over or dropping ash on some poor girl at a back-of-the-pub rock gig. I was determined to get him out bird-watching. No lifestyle and twitching can be mutually exclusive. Unless your lifestyle is shooting as many birds as you can as they fly over your house. But let’s not get sidetracked into talking about the French in these pages.