Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? 200 birds, 12 months, 1 lapsed birdwatcher Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lev Parikian is a writer, conductor and hopeless birdwatcher. His first book, Waving, Not Drowning, was published in 2013. His numerous conducting credits include the re-recording of the theme tune for Hancock’s Half Hour for Radio 4. As a birdwatcher, his most prized sightings are a golden oriole in the Alpujarras and a black redstart at Dungeness Power Station.

  Dear Reader,

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  To Tessa and Oliver, twin pillars of tolerance

  CONTENTS

  June 2012

  June 2013

  January 2016

  February 2016

  March 2016

  April 2016

  May 2016

  June 2016

  July 2016

  August 2016

  September 2016

  October 2016

  November 2016

  December 2016

  January 2017

  Acknowledgements

  A Note about the Typefaces

  Supporters

  Dedication

  Copyright

  JUNE 2012

  It’s not the teapot it once was. White china, with a pretty floral pattern in relief, it’s longer than it is wide and has a certain faded elegance. But there are cracks and chips all over, and dark patches where it has been mended and the glue has seeped out. It has been used, and dropped. But someone has bothered to mend it. It’s a terrible pourer, so often the downfall of a promising pot. But we don’t know that yet.

  It sits on the kitchen table of my mother’s last house, the crest of a wave in a surging sea of teapots. My mother was a keeper of stuff, a collector of objects. This made for a childhood founded on curiosity. What’s this? And why is it? And let’s keep it so we can look at it. My father too was a collector, an annotator, a curator of lists. Miniature glass hats, wine labels, a notebook with details of every concert he ever played.

  Mostly, I am grateful for these habits. I’ve inherited them, and they allow for occasional moments of heady nostalgia, afternoons spent knee-deep in old photographs. But right now, as we wade our way through the detritus of a life of accumulation, they feel like a monumental pain in the arse. The teapots are ranged before us on the table. Also in the kitchen are three dozen china toast racks, twenty-one pairs of glasses, nine keys, half a dozen unfinished Post-it pads with things like ‘Call plumber’ scrawled on them, and a small colourful plastic bird that makes an irritating tweeting sound when it rocks, which it does often.

  Our friend Annie, also latterly my mother’s friend, surveys the scene. She’s devastated but efficient.

  ‘What are we doing with the toast racks?’ she says.

  ‘Dunno. Know any toast-rack collectors?’

  ‘Why so many?’

  ‘It was an accidental collection.’

  ‘Accidental?’

  ‘They both thought the other collected them. Neither of them did. After a few birthdays it turned out they both did after all.’

  Annie contemplates them in silence. This is her business. It’s what she does. She’s not just a house clearer – she’s brilliant at helping people decide what to get rid of. But I can tell she’s far from chuffed at the prospect of the toast racks.

  ‘Well, I can try them at car boots, but don’t expect anything. What about the teapots?’

  ‘How many does anyone need? Get rid.’

  ‘Oxfam. I’ll just check inside them.’ I give her a look, but Annie doesn’t quail easily, one of the reasons she was friends with my mother. ‘People put things in teapots.’

  Indeed they do.

  There are two pieces of paper, folded together. On the first the handwriting is scrawly and unfamiliar.

  Manoug,

  With thanks and congratulations on a fine performance.

  RVW

  The second, smaller, flimsier, has my mother’s handwriting on it.

  Teapot given to M by R Vaughan Williams. KEEP!

  I turn to Annie.

  ‘I think we might keep this.’

  And my head brims full with the sound of my father’s violin, silent these twenty-five years, the silver chain of music soaring upwards, higher and higher and higher, into the boundless sky, just as RVW intended.

  JUNE 2013

  It starts, like so many things in my life, with an idiotic mistake.

  Chris is an affable chap, thin, with bright eyes and a ruddy complexion. Overtly outdoorsy in a way I will never be. He moved from the north-east to the Isle of Wight forty years ago, and has kept the accent. He’s working on the walls. We’re holidaying.

  Tea is being had.

  The weather is glorious in the way only a summer day near the sea can be. Bright and sunny, plenty warm enough to spend the day outside in perfect comfort, but with a fresh breeze coming in from the coast half a mile away. Being British, we’re making polite conversation. Being British, we start with the weather.

  ‘Glorious today,’ I say.

  ‘Oh aye.’

  He appears happy to leave it at that. I don’t feel I’ve quite done my bit.

  ‘Lovely yesterday, too.’

  ‘Aye.’

  Progress, of sorts.

  ‘We’ve been pretty lucky so far this year.’

  ‘Yup.’

  I am so bad at this.

  ‘Were you working yesterday?’

  ‘No, actually… we went up to the downs for some birding.’

  This is music to my ears. I’m in a conversation with a workman and I have an opportunity to discuss something I know a bit about. This is rare. I place people who can fix things on a pedestal. I look up to them, in awe of their mysterious talents, and terrified that a stray comment will expose my ignorance. Chris, as a professional thing-fixer, is akin to a god in my eyes. So any way in is welcome. I pounce.

  ‘Oh, are you a birdwatcher?’

  ‘Oh aye. The Isle of Wight’s grand for birding.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ I weigh up whether to reveal my interest. Oh, go on then. ‘I loved birdwatching as a kid. I don’t have so much time for it any more, but I still lo
ve it.’

  Anything to stay in the conversation.

  ‘Oh aye?’

  He’s polite but non-committal.

  ‘So what do you get on the Isle of Wight? Lots of seabirds, I’d imagine.’

  The words ‘It’s an island, you idiot – of course there are seabirds’ seem to tremble on Chris’s lips, but he’s kind enough to suppress them.

  ‘That’s right. And loads of migrants at the right time of year. Diverse habitats, see. Estuaries, cliffs, mudflats, downs, woods, farmland.’

  ‘Fantastic. See much yesterday?’

  Here it comes.

  ‘We had the first nightingale of the year. Gorgeous. Pretty rare these days.’

  I have options. I could say nothing. I could make polite gosh-how-lovely noises. I could change the subject, talk about art, go-karting, nuclear physics. Anything. But I have to show that I can keep up.

  ‘Oh, I saw one too.’

  Idiot.

  Chris is surprised, politely dubious.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. It was up…’

  It hits me.

  Not a nightingale. Of course not a nightingale. Never a nightingale.

  Small brown bird, yes. Nondescript plumage, certainly. Known for its song, absolutely. But never a nightingale.

  Slivers of old knowledge seep back.

  You don’t see nightingales. Or at least you have to work quite hard to. They’re secretive, fond of pouring out their liquid song from the depths of a bush merely for the fun of seeing hapless birders in a state of delirium.

  What they don’t do is go up to the top of the downs where there isn’t a tree or a bush or a hedge in sight, and, to rejig the poet Shelley, pour from their full heart profuse strains of unpremeditated art while higher still and higher springing from the earth like a cloud of fire.

  Nightingales don’t do that. Skylarks do.

  Chris is waiting for me to finish my sentence.

  All I need to do is this: ‘Gah, silly me, not a nightingale. A skylark. I saw a skylark. Ha ha ha! What a mirthful moment has unintentionally resulted from my idiocy! Do tell me, an ignoramus, about the nightingale.’

  But I can’t. I can’t admit I’m wrong. I’m a conductor. We don’t do ‘wrong’.

  So I leave it there, like a turd in the middle of the carpet, and ignore it, even though I know I’m an idiot, Chris knows I’m an idiot, the whole world knows I’m an idiot.

  I blather on for a bit, pretending I can’t remember where I saw this mythical nightingale, and the conversation staggers on.

  Chris drains his cup and gets back to work, pausing at the door for a second. He seems on the verge of saying something, but he’s an affable chap, as I may have mentioned. The moment passes and we each get on with our day.

  After Chris has gone I sit looking out across the countryside and beyond it to the sea. Large black birds wheel and turn behind me, cawing and grawing, communicating in a language that to my ears is harsh and grating, but to them is conversation.

  Carrion crows. Or are they rooks?

  I used to know this stuff. I really did. Well, some of it.

  I turn to look over the road. This part of the island is known as The Undercliff, and the land banks sharply up behind the house.

  More snippets of knowledge return. The birds are circling a group of tall trees. That’s a rookery, isn’t it? So they must be rooks, not carrion crows, although I’m still none the wiser about how you distinguish one from the other.

  They’re acrobatic, tumbling down then soaring on an updraught, describing a broad arc before coming in to land, branches trampolining under their weight.

  A movement to my left. A bird, flying across the road and landing on the wall in front of me, its direct flight a rebuke to the rooks’ meandering. It’s purposeful, a piebald flash with a purple-green gloss in its tail.

  My mother’s voice in my head, the words on my lips.

  ‘Hello Mr Magpie, how’s your lady wife?’ Then spit three times.

  Not actual spitting. More of a quick ‘ttht’. A habit inherited from my mum, vestige of an old country superstition. And obligatory when you see a magpie. Magpies are harbingers of death. Good job I said hello to it, then. That’ll stop it, the murdering bastard. A group of crows is called a ‘murder’, I recall, and while these thoughts waft through my head I’m suddenly aware that the place is full of birds I only partly recognise.

  A bunch of sparrows jazzing around in the tree just over the wall. Definitely sparrows. But which kind? House? Tree? Hedge? They’re in a tree. Must be tree sparrows then. Or hedge. Is that the one also called a dunnock?

  I can’t remember. And for some reason this upsets me. Why? I don’t mind not knowing the name of the tree. I don’t do trees. Never have. My dad did, even planting some in the field next to our house a couple of years before he died. They’ll be all grown up by now. I picture them as they were, whippy saplings kept on the straight and narrow with restraining girdles, like the braces on my teeth. Oliver will be that age soon. I hope he doesn’t have to endure what I did, teeth-wise.

  I replay the earlier conversation in my head, the habitual practice of the paranoid. I’m struck by the irony of my mistake. Skylarks were part of my childhood, a regular spectacle over the field by the bus stop at the end of the lane. Once, I walked the quarter mile home, the larks’ song lingering in my head, replaced as I approached the house by the sound of my father’s violin as he practised The Lark Ascending, composed by the owner of a certain teapot. A satisfying conjunction of nature and art.

  Confusing a skylark with a nightingale is an understandable slip of a rusty brain, a conflation of two brown songbirds. But still. It’s like confusing Schumann and Schubert. No, worse, it’s like confusing Schumann and Manfred Mann.

  I try to dismiss it with a shake of the head, and am glad to be distracted. Oliver is approaching, cricket ball in hand.

  ‘Catching practice, Dad?’

  Catching practice it is. Sod birds. They’re not for me.

  JANUARY 2016

  New Year. New hope. New plans.

  Same old, same old.

  The year 2016 begins with resolutions, mostly abandoned within a fortnight, according to long custom.

  I claim not to make resolutions, knowing they’re pointless. But like many who make that bold statement, I compile an informal and secret list in my head. Writing it down and sharing it would only lead to later remorse. It takes shape nonetheless, item by item.

  More exercise, obviously.

  Less booze, obviously.

  I could lose some weight.

  Some flexibility would be nice. My toes seem further away than they used to be. I’d like to be able to touch them when I’m seventy.

  If I’m seventy.

  Ah yes, that reminds me: find a way of silencing the little voice that pops up daily and reminds me I’m going to die.

  I add two words to the list: INNER CALM.

  I have a yoga app on my iPad. It’s almost invasively peaceful. Inoffensive music meanders in the background while lithe people contort themselves into positions I can only dream of; a soothing voice accompanies the routine.

  After five minutes I want to hurl the iPad out of the window.

  But I do the yoga. And the mere fact of doing it makes me feel better. Perhaps the devotion of time to yoga-like activity is the key rather than the yoga itself. Maybe a ten-minute nap on a purple foam mat every morning will provide all the rejuvenation I need.

  Flushed with this early success, and eager not to be the guy who gives up within a week, I research local classes. I soon find my ideal. A Monday-morning session in a bright loft space ten minutes’ walk from home. Our teacher, a tall and cheerful Californian called Gingi, has a way of making you feel that turning up is itself an achievement. This I can relate to.

  ‘Slide your hands below your knees, maybe to your shins. Perhaps even your ankles. Don’t overreach, just put yourself in a place of challenge.’

&
nbsp; I grab my feet. No challenge at all. I’m brilliant at this. At some level I’m aware that being brilliant isn’t the point, but still. Yay me.

  When it comes to the sitting postures, my composure evaporates.

  Sitting on the floor and I are uneasy bedfellows. I become aware of stiffness in my legs. I assume the starting posture with difficulty. And when Gingi rocks smoothly forwards, his weight transferring over his feet to crouch on all fours, inner calm has never seemed more remote.

  ‘Ungainly’ is one word you could use to describe my movements. ‘Catastrophically awkward’ are two more.

  I’m rubbish at this. Woe is me.

  Gingi’s voice elbows its way through the defeatist noise in my head.

  ‘Don’t worry about what you can and can’t do. Do what you can.’

  Talk about timing.

  Maybe he’s telepathic. It doesn’t matter if I can’t do it. That’s the point.

  By the end of the session I’ve connected breath with movement and put myself in a place of challenge but not stress. No matter that I’ve spent an hour exhaling when I should have been inhaling and vice versa. That will come with practice.

  I emerge feeling calm and purposeful. I have the rest of the morning to myself. There’s work to be done, but I’m a freelance conductor, familiar with the internal dialogue between boss and employee.

  Just going for a walk.

  You going to learn that Strauss later?

  Of course.

  OK then. Twenty-five minutes. Forty, tops.

  See you this afternoon.

  Fine.

  The park is a mile away. A couple of laps then home for lunch. Health, energy, vitality. Perhaps it’s something to do with being fifty and born into a family with a history of heart disease on the male side. Perhaps it’s because, for the first time in my life, the scales are beginning to nudge 80 kg, regardless of my efforts to stand on them more lightly. I used to vow never to let my weight go over 78. Now look at me, all chins and paunches and clothes that feel one notch too tight.

  The park is familiar territory, patrolled by dog walkers, yummy mummies and joggers, their peaceful morning occasionally disturbed by a marauding cyclist or park vehicle. I stride through the gates, listening to a fascinating podcast about Thucydides, the details of which will leave my head fifteen seconds after it’s finished. Sun. Sky. Frost. I ponder nothing more urgent than whether to take the left or right fork to skirt the boating lake.