2008 - The Bearded Tit (24 page)

I was impressed. He’d looked long enough to notice that the second bkd was different, and he’d taken on board the idea that the female is often distinct from the male; usually less well marked. He’d also noticed that the new bird was, to all intents and purposes, sufficiently sparrow-like to be a sparrow.

But it wasn’t.

‘Not bad. Actually that bird is what used to be commonly called a hedge sparrow. Most people call it a dunnock.’

Judging by Danny’s reply I must have been sounding a bit pompous and twitchery. ‘Really? I don’t call it a dunnock; I’m going to call it Fred the Bird,’ said Danny.

Now, dismiss the dunnock as a duller, greyer version of the sparrow, if you dare. This is an intriguing bird. The dunnock,
Prunella modularis
, has a saucy, Sunday tabloid secret. Its mating habits are more than a tad spicy.

It’s into the ménage à trois. Well, the lady of the house is; or should that be the lady of the hedge? Its mating sessions often include one female and two males or one male and two females. In fact, so promiscuous is the female that quite often, while husband is away, Mrs Dunnock (whom we have to call Pru, surely) will mate with another male dunnock (whom we’ll call, say, Roger). As if that’s not ‘when-suburban-housewives-get-hot’ enough in itself, when the male returns he demands to know what Pru’s been up to in his absence. Has she had a man in to repair her nest? Or slip her an earthworm? Why is she looking so red-faced and guilty?

Well, what the male does is even less subtle than the interrogation of a suspicious husband. With his fine spike of a beak, he pecks her repeatedly in the vagina in case there’s some ‘foreign’ seed therein. This will be discharged by the invasion and the husband immediately mates with her again to ensure that his descendants will truly be his.

Ah, what a romantic tale.

‘Bloody hell, mate,’ said Danny. ‘That’s a bit full on! I wonder if they know Diana, that cheating cow! She—’

Danny’s acidic reminiscence was interrupted by a searing, high-pitched, screaming whistle overhead. Looking up Danny exclaimed confidently, ‘Ah easy one; swallow!’

Another scream overhead. And another. And still more.

‘One swallow doesn’t make a blowjob, as my gran didn’t use to say! Ha!’

‘They’re swifts,’ I corrected him.

‘You’re not even looking at them, mate!’

No, I wasn’t looking at them, and a vivid memory returned to me.

Long ago, just before the days of JJ, when I was still blind to the world of nature, I was coming out of a lecture hall with my friend Dave.

Dave had a reputation at college for being ‘a bit of a loner’. He was not a Sveirdo’, and not ‘a bit of a loner’ in the way they report serial killers on the news. Just someone who kept himself to himself, who enjoyed his own company. And, yes, he was a birdwatcher.

We were on our way to the next lecture in a different building, and I noticed some birds swooping and diving acrobatically at great speed. Even to a non-birder like me, the arc of the wings and the forked tail suggested these could only be swallows. I looked up and said, ‘Ah, the swallows are here!’

‘They’re swifts,’ said Dave instantly, head-down, not looking up from his purposeful walk.

‘You’re not even looking at them!’ I said.

‘Don’t have to. Listen to that screaming whistle. Unmistakable.’

Weirdo, I thought.

And twenty-five years later, there I am sitting with my mate Danny saying, ‘Don’t have to. Listen to that screaming whistle. Unmistakable.’

We sat and watched the swifts in silence. You can do that with swifts. To the first-time birdwatcher, swifts are easy money. They put on a show. And what a show!

‘They’re amazing, mate,’ said Danny, who was captivated enough to pause between drags of his cigarette. ‘I might even dig out my camera gear. I bet that lot are a challenge to photograph!’ He sipped his beer. ‘Hey, this is actually a bit of fun.’

‘It certainly is.’

‘What a shame I’m in Norwich, fixing a computer.’

T
ori has a good ear. Two good ears, in fact. She has two good eyes, as well, and lips and legs and, indeed, a whole host of body parts that are worth some consideration, but in a book about birds, we shall concentrate on her ears, which, as I say, are very good. Not only placed on either side of her head, like the best of good ears, but also highly effective in identifying the slightest differences in sounds, variations of pitch and tone and quality. In short, very sharp at naming the bird, based only on its sound.

This is more difficult for me. I’m not at all tone deaf. I can sing well enough to have earned roughly £7 a day one week busking on the London Underground, till I was moved on by the authorities. I can tell the difference between musical notes, but not with any scientific precision. A great deal of music, therefore, sounds exactly the same to me, but then I do listen to a lot of country and western. The trouble with birdsong, I suppose, is that I have too long associated it with the disruption of sleep after a particularly large night.

Slowly but surely Tori has educated me in this field, which is surprisingly rewarding, not least because a lot of birds can be heard very easily, but seen with great difficulty.

A fine example of this is the Cetti’s warbler. It is one of Britain’s only two resident warblers, the other being the Dartford warbler. That’s got to be British, hasn’t it: the Dartford warbler. A lovely, bird too. Dark for a warbler, with a rich reddish-brown breast and a striking red eye-ring. A marked long slender tail, prominent in its short, bouncy flights from bush to bush. The Dartford warbler: take a picture of it with you to have in your car when you’re stuck in diabolical traffic crossing the Thames in East London.

Our other local, very British warbler was named, needless to say, after Francisco Cetti, an Italian Jesuit monk born in Germany in 1726. You will probably never see this bird, no matter how close you’re standing to it, but you will get no marks for hearing it. It is a small, nondescript bird, brown on top and pale underneath. It sings from deep cover in bushes, ditches, reeds or hedgerows, and it goes like this: doot, doot, doodoodoodoodoodoodoo doo doo.

Or if you prefer: chwee…chwee,…chewechewecheweche-wechewechewe.

You get the idea? Two sharp, single, abrupt notes followed by a splurging trill. Tori compares it to the opening phrase of Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ march N°1 in D major; you know, the one that goes ‘bom…bom…bombombombombombom’.

She started me off with the easy ones. Not just
simple
songs, but the ones you hear all the time because they’re either the first in the year, the loudest or the most far-reaching.

Cuckoo? I think you’ve all got that one. Next!

A great tit? Two notes. The first higher than the other. Is the professor of music around? No? Oh well—the interval, I reckon, is about a fourth. You know the melody of the first line of ‘Street Fighting Man’ by the Rolling Stones? The Rolling Stones? Well, they were a huge rock and roll band…oh this is silly!

Just imagine an insistent schoolboy, desperate to answer the question, frantically waving his raised arm and screaming, ‘Teacher, teacher, teacher!’ That’s it. Great tit.

The chiffchaff is another song that’s difficult to miss. This tiny bird often delivers its two-note song from high up in the treetops. It carries for miles and seems to cut through all other birdsong, apart from the great tit. It’s similar to ‘teacher, teacher, teacher’ but the other way round. The second note is higher and the song comes out for longer periods than the great tit. It sort of goes: ‘doot-dit doot-dit doot-dit doot-dit doot-dit doot-dit’, with the ‘dit’ being higher than the ‘doot’. It occasionally slips in a crafty extra ‘doot’, giving us ‘doot doot-dit doot-dit doot doot-dit.’ You get the idea. Its name imitates its sound, though I think ‘chaff-chiff’ would be a more accurate name. For me, it has the quality of a knife being sharpened on a steel, but I could be alone in this.

OK, a quick pub-quiz moment: which common British bird is sometimes called the yaffle? Yes, that’s right, the green woodpecker. ‘Yaffle’ is a supposed imitation of its loud, laugh-like song. Other names for it include eccle, hewhole, highhoe, yaffingale, yappingale or yackel. That should give you a broad feel for what we’re talking about. It sounds like laugh of a fictional baddie. It’s the cackle that will follow a line like: ‘You shall never escape from here and the treasure will be all mine!’ Starting high and shrill, then descending in pitch and energy. (And definitely not ‘dood a lee dee doo, dood a lee dee doo’, the call of the Disney bird Woody Woodpecker.)

The skylark is easy, too. I once fell asleep on a summer meadow listening to a skylark. At least, I think it was me. It was long enough ago to be someone else. But this bird demands special mention. The skylark perhaps offers the best clue to man’s affinity with birds. Think of all the art, literature and music inspired by it. I would defy anyone who has heard a skylark to improve on George Meredith’s poem which begins:

He rises and begins to round

He drops the silver chain of sound

Of many links without a break

In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake

All intervolved and spreading wide

Like water-dimples down a tide

Where ripple ripple overcurls

And eddy into eddy whirls
.

William Blake calls it the ‘mighty angel’. Shelley famously calls it ‘blithe spirit’. Wordsworth tops them both with ‘ethereal minstrel’, and Chaucer gives us ‘bisy larke, messager of the day’. All inspired and inspiring, and most of them spelled correctly.

Tori has taught me song thrush too. A masterful singer. Loud, bright, short fruity phrases, all different but each sung at least three or four times so you do not miss how good they are. Robert Browning, who was yearning to be in ‘England, now that April’s there’, spoke of the wise thrush that:

…sings each song twice over

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture
.

In Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’, birdsong is uplifting and positive. He is walking through the countryside one bleak, winter’s evening when a thrush starts singing. He wonders what the thrush knows that he doesn’t know.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed hope whereof he knew

And I was unaware
.

Nightingales, blackbirds, swallows, swifts, sparrows and so many others make a near endless list of bird- or birdsong-inspired art. And invariably birdsong is life-affirming, it is about joy, about hope, about freedom. Sebastian Faulks’s beautifully grim novel about love in the First World War is entitled simply
Birdsong
.

To most people the sound of birds is their first, sometimes only, contact with nature. It is a powerful and beguiling connection to a non-human world. It is a contact number for the wild.

But Tori, for all her good ears and delight at birdsong, is a wise girl. She knows the true meaning of birdsong.

‘Listen to that!’ she said. It was one I recognized. We were on a scrubby heath above the town of Sheringham. It was an easy sound to learn. Two pebbles being clacked against each other followed by a short chirrup. The stonechat. So evocative of the high, coastal heath where we were. A beautiful sound.

‘Beautiful to us,’ Tori reminded me. ‘Not to them. We humans plaster all sorts of deep and romantic meanings on to birdsong but to them it’s communication. They’re only interested in food, sex and territory.’

‘Territory’s never bothered me that much,’ I said as a whitethroat started its song nearby. ‘Now, are you going to say that’s not beautiful?’

Tori smiled. ‘It is beautiful but it probably means ‘Get away from my nest’.’

We walked back down the footpath towards the sea and took in the beautiful, joyous, romantic sounds of birds, tweeting their beautiful, joyous, romantic birdy messages.

‘Look at the colour of my breast!’

‘Get off my land!’

‘Any chance of a fuck?’

N
o, not that sort of hobby. Not the bird. The pastime. Oh yes, there is a bird called the ‘hobby’. The bloke who invented the flicky table version of football called Subbuteo, wanted to call it ‘Hobby’, but he couldn’t. So he chose the scientific name for the small bird of prey called ‘hobby’, which is
Falco subbuteo
, and means something like ‘falcon lesser than a buzzard’. An odd description of this fascinating raptor. A favourite of mine.

Deadly as a hawk, sleek and elegant as a swift.

The only bird of prey that can take a swift on the wing.

And how else could it do it but by looking like a swift: small, slim, compact body with long, pointed, sickle-like wings. Snatching beetles and dragonflies from just above the water or reeds, this bird has no equal. It is effortless in grace and finesse. It’s unusual, too, for a British bird of prey, in that it is a summer visitor to us from Africa. But that’s not the hobby I meant.

I suppose drawing was my hobby as I grew up. Cartoons, silly monsters and birds. A lot of birds; cartoon birds and silly monster birds, as well. But it was never a proper hobby; it was something I’d do to while away the time when I should have been doing something else. But there comes a point when a mild interest becomes a hobby, an obsession.

My boyhood home in Cornwall overlooked a football pitch. Illogan British Legion FC. The bedroom I shared with my two brothers had a fantastic view of the pitch. In Highbury speak, we were at the ‘Clock End’. Every Saturday afternoon, we’d gather at the window and cheer on ‘Luggan’. But unfortunately the goal at our end was obscured by a large hawthorn bush. From the age of seven to the present day, I’ve wanted to sneak out in the middle of the night with a chainsaw and chop it down. It would not have been difficult to work out who the culprit was, though. And the standard of football in those days probably wouldn’t have merited such arboreal vandalism. On the one occasion our father actually took us into the ground to watch the match (and both sets of goalposts), we were shocked to find out they charged an entry fee.