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

  A brouhaha from behind the trees makes the decision for me.

  Eight Canada geese in a mood to party are difficult to ignore. I hear them clamouring, cackling, honking. This is what they’re known for. Noise and poo and general unpleasantness.

  Their ubiquity, dominance and brazenness combine to make them almost universally unpopular among those who frequent public spaces. Shit-squirters, honking bullies, bastards.

  I get all that.

  But as I turn the corner and the lake comes into view, they’re a magnificent sight. A squadron of eight birds, organising themselves into formation, calling to each other in fervid excitement, a frenzy of organised chaos coming together at the last second as the final goose slots into place. They churn the water and the air, sending their fellow waterfowl scuttling for cover.

  They come right at me, wings straining, so low I could almost reach out and touch their undercarriage. The air is full of their honking and flapping, the geometry of their formation kaleidoscoping – Escher brought to life as they heave themselves up. The displaced air wafts over me, a reminder of the weight and difficulty of flight.

  As they deliver noisy chaos to another part of genteel Dulwich, I’m struck by the everyday beauty of the spectacle. A common bird flying from one place to another in a group. It’s what they do. Maybe it’s just the thrill of that movement and noise so close above me that stirs the blood. Or the timing of it, as if they were calling to me from behind the trees and assembled for my benefit, knowing the pram-pushers and mutt-draggers would dismiss them as mere background to modern city life. Maybe I’m just in a heightened state of post-yoga awareness, liable to wonder at anything. Hello birds, hello sky.

  Whatever, they stay with me all the way home, those geese, the images of that magical minute looping in the cinema of my mind.

  And they trigger something, a long-forgotten interest, a hidden memory buried deep under three decades of other stuff. There have been moments when it’s resurfaced, but they’ve been fleeting. Noticing the swifts’ return every year; getting and filling a bird feeder when we moved and acquired an accessible garden; rescuing a live woodpigeon from the jaws of the cat. But for each flicker of interest there’s been a subconscious tamping down, as if to say, ‘That’s enough now. You’re too busy for such fripperies.’

  Now it comes surging to the surface, elbowing other thoughts aside. On the way home I not only notice the birds, I seek them out. There’s another little park over the road. Why not go that way? Perhaps there’ll be a moorhen or two. And sure enough, there they are, black corks bobbing on the water, distinguished from their coot cousins by the red blob on their forehead.

  And that little ball of fluff on an ice-lolly stick. Long-tailed tit, no? Yes? No? Not sure. Not a wagtail. Too small. Sweet little thing, anyway.

  A blackbird on the grass, head cocked, listening out for the movement of a worm. Robins, blue tits, great tits, magpies, crows, pigeons. The air is suddenly thick with them. Where have they been all these years?

  I go home and revisit my past.

  It’s a handsome book, hardback, coffee-table-ish, with a striking portrait of a tawny owl, all feathers, eyes and talons, on the front. The Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds. It sat on the shelf in our Oxfordshire home alongside Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, and art books of glossy beauty.

  Ours was a household of books: antiquarian ones my mother’s trade, Armenian ones my father’s hobby. They filled the shelves and every available surface. Old and new, read and unread, pristine and trashed. Thrillers, biography, humour; Jane Austen, Dick Francis, Ruth Rendell; War and Peace, Tintin, Our Man in Havana.

  Both my parents read widely. I read a lot, but preferred the intense repetition method – devouring and redevouring my favourites, the emphasis on simplicity and comfort. I adored Peanuts from an early age and well into my teens, the deceptive simplicity of the drawings attractive to my lazy brain, their familiarity bringing solace when everything else was too much work. Laura Ingalls Wilder I read over and over and over again – something about the wildness and romance of a world far removed from my own somehow speaking to me. Then there was Roald Dahl, who magically knew what it was like to be me, and constructed his worlds according to my desires. Later I would appreciate the wit of P. G. Wodehouse, the acerbity of Evelyn Waugh, the mind-bending brilliance of Douglas Adams. But early on my tastes were straightforward. They remain with me still.

  More than narrative, though, I loved lists, facts, graphs and charts. Wisden, the cricketing bible, was pored over, the Records section obsessively read and reread.

  So the listing of birds, for a tragic eleven-year-old with long summer holidays to fill, was a logical enough activity.

  Interesting, that use of the word ‘tragic’; the assumption being that solitude equates to loneliness, that having an interest outside the norm is necessarily to be pitied. And the moment that interest tips over into what’s regarded as unnatural expertise, we lay ourselves open to mockery.

  Spod. Saddo. Geek.

  And that’s the widespread image of the birdwatcher. Bit of a nerd, maybe socially inept, prone to wearing drab clothes.

  I was blissfully unaware of this. I just loved the birds.

  It comes back to me as I leaf through the book. I place myself in the shoes of eleven-year-old me, lured by the fascination of the avian world. Each page is dominated by a fine colour illustration of a bird in a dramatic, if not always realistic, pose. So the hawfinch, shy and secretive, is shown eyeballing the reader – its proximity a far cry from the likely reality – and the relative hugeness of its bill diminished by foreshortening. The red-throated diver, mightily averse to land, seems to be hopping from foot to foot as if on hot coals. These striking illustrations were my gateway drug to the intoxicating world of bird guides.

  If the illustrations were the marijuana, the distribution maps were the crack cocaine. Each bird had its own. The chaffinch, available in a nearby tree regardless of geography or season, had a map completely shaded with a delicate green probably known to posh paint suppliers as Splunge or Desperate Chameleon. Fieldfares, abundant winter visitors from Scandinavia, were afforded similar treatment, but in a light hue of Blotting Paper.

  Most fascinating were the birds with narrow distribution, the rarer and more remote the better. When The Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds was published in 1969, the red-backed shrike, once abundant and widespread throughout England and Wales, was down to about 150 pairs and fading fast. The perky-looking Dartford warbler was found nowhere near Dartford but only in Hampshire and Dorset. Nearly wiped out by the harsh winter of 1962–63, it was down to just ten pairs. The golden eagle, proud and wild and impossibly romantic, inhabited the Scottish Highlands, as remote as the moon. As I look at it now I relive my boyhood longing to see one in the flesh.

  While the maps and illustrations had a magnetic allure, the text went largely unread. It was all about habitat and breeding and so on, and although it sustained my interest to a certain point, I was fuzzy on the finer details. I’d skimmed it enough to know that, despite the map’s assertion that the redshank was widely distributed across the country, I wasn’t going to see one at the bird table any time soon. And if we saw a bird of prey hovering by the side of the road, my knowledge of wing shape and likely behaviour were enough for me to holler ‘kestrel!’ without hesitation.

  I suppose my parents bought this book for their own use, as part of a general interest in the countryside to which they’d moved when I was expected in 1965. But I remember it as ‘my’ book, and it bears unmistakable evidence of its provenance. Biro scrawlings, chocolate stains, a slight separation of the front cover from its binding.

  I go through it at random, alighting on birds familiar and unknown. Collared dove, great skua, wryneck. Quail, scaup, red-necked phalarope. The names, as fascinating as the birds themselves, are known to me in a way that the names of butterflies or insects aren’t. They surge bac
k into my head as if they’ve never been away.

  At the front there’s a ten-page pictorial index of all the birds, over 200 of them. They’re pictured side by side for handy comparison, grouped by colour, many with a tick in biro against their name to indicate that I saw them.

  As I read, I’m swamped with outrage at the sins of my youth.

  First is the blackbird. The tick against it is confident, and with good reason. We’ve all seen a blackbird. It’s barely possible not to.

  Next, the starling. Again, I’m on safe ground. In the 1970s there were loads of starlings everywhere, ubiquitous as air.

  And now the shocker.

  Black redstart.

  Its tick has a shaky, apologetic air, as if deep down I knew it would return to haunt me.

  I didn’t see a black redstart.

  How do I know?

  Well, for one thing it’s a relatively scarce bird. For another it favours rubble-strewn wasteland and nuclear power stations. And for another, I just know I didn’t. I would remember.

  Memory is a funny thing. Even at forty years’ distance I retain a perfect image of my bedroom, its shape, size and smell embedded in my brain through daily familiarity over two decades: the sash windows through which I would hear my father mowing the lawn on summer evenings after I’d gone to bed; the fluorescent stars and moon stuck to the ceiling; the bookshelf, tall, unstable, books falling off it daily; the electric fire over which I warmed my school shirt on cold winter mornings; the gramophone in the corner, through which I became familiar with words and music – Beethoven, Mozart, Abba, Queen, Victor Borge, Flanders and Swann; my safe, a small metallic green box in which I kept bits of change, the occasional pound note and a fragment of rock my friend David swore had been brought back to earth from the moon landing.

  There are the vague memories, too, impressions of a mood or feeling. The sense of tranquillity as the sun set on another endless summer day in which I’d done nothing except patrol the garden with a cricket bat and ball, or the engulfing tedium of rainy Sunday afternoons, all my books reread a dozen times and sod all on the telly.

  And there are specific moments, occasions of high drama or comedy. The day I nearly made my father drop his Stradivarius; the time my mother called the milkman the rudest word in the English language; the Terrible Stereo Wire-Cutting Incident.

  In this mass of memories, the sighting of a black redstart would have taken pride of place near the top.

  The black redstart is just the beginning. As I work my way through the list, I don’t know whether to be appalled or impressed by my sheer chutzpah. To place a tick against a bird, your identification must be certain. The chances of my fledgling ornithological eyes distinguishing the Arctic and common terns at a hundred paces were as slim as a stick insect on a diet. And if I saw a quail (‘shy and secretive, usually only forced into flight by gun-dogs’) then it could only have been on a plate, accompanied by game chips and a half bottle of Château Beychevelle ’72.

  As the list of imaginary birds lengthens, I sit back and review my childhood. It’s an uncomfortable experience.

  Obviously we all lie sometimes. Doctors and dentists know this. How often do you floss? Er, well… How much do you drink? Oh, right, I mean, yes, definitely within the guidelines… whatever they are.

  If you say you’ve never lied, you’re a liar.

  But it’s a question of scale. And here was incontrovertible evidence that I was washed through with mendacity.

  Harsh? Possibly. But I had previous. The memory of my most extravagant bout of lying rises unbidden, wakening like the kraken, and just as fearsome.

  My father couldn’t swim. Never learned. My mother could but did so rarely. My brother, though, took to it with ease. I have memories of him scything through the water, a veritable Mark Spitz to my awestruck eyes. He could do the butterfly. The butterfly! Nobody can do the butterfly apart from ridiculous water babies with waists as narrow as a cotton reel and shoulders the size of Kent. My brother Step could.

  My swimming, though. Feeble. I flangled around in the shallow end, crying whenever anyone splashed my face and keeping as much of my torso out of the water as possible.

  After a while my inability even to float successfully became an embarrassment. I joined the ranks of the sinkers, the jetsam of society, destined no doubt for bitter, unfulfilled lives, our rancid discontent fuelled by our childhood inability to swim more than two feet without sinking to the bottom of the pool.

  The orange inflatable armbands and chipped polystyrene floatboards – I needed three just to avoid drowning – were the final humiliation. I had to learn to swim.

  Or I could just lie.

  In a carefully planned campaign, I came home from school over a period of two weeks with reports of my growing prowess. I reckoned that by the time I was called on to prove my new-found powers of swimmery, I’d have had plenty of time to learn the essentials.

  I told a story of ever-increasing bravado. I had, I informed my mother one evening, passed my ‘width’, a test which entailed, unsurprisingly, swimming one width of the pool without touching the bottom or sides. Then my ‘two widths’. Then, thrillingly, the ‘length’. Thrillingly, because it meant I’d ventured into the deep end, albeit with the constant ministrations of the PE teacher, who walked alongside the pool with a long hook in one hand, ready to fish me out. In his other hand he probably carried a medicine ball, because you weren’t a PE teacher in the 1970s unless you had one of those permanently about your person should the need arise to throw it unexpectedly at the spindliest boy in the class.

  In truth I was still floundering six inches from the edge, ready to cling to it the moment a drop of water came near my face.

  The breaking point came. Two weeks after the last of my grand tales of natatorial derring-do, my bluff was called. We would, my mum said, be visiting her sister that weekend. What an opportunity for me to display my swimming skills in her beautiful temperature-controlled pool, didn’t I agree?

  Up to a point, Lord Copper.

  Of all the tears in my life, none were more bitterly shed than at bedtime that evening. The whole story came out in a bubbling snotfest unprecedented in Oxfordshire. My mum, sympathetic but with a keen sense of the comically absurd, must have been hard-pushed to bite back the laughter.

  Sadly, to judge by the disgraceful litany of falsehoods before me, this comeuppance doesn’t appear to have changed my behaviour at all.

  I do a quick stocktake. According to the markings in the book, I compiled a list of 133 birds in my childhood. Of these, it seems at least 30 per cent were fictional. Deep down, I’m not surprised. Memories of my habitual birdwatching activities float to the surface.

  There’s a flock of gulls over there. Herring gull. Tick. Black-headed. Of course. Lesser black-backed. Probably. Bound to be a great black-backed in there too. Let’s throw in common as well, why not? And a kittiwake for good measure.

  I ask myself why I didn’t pursue a career in politics.

  These invented sightings have a whiff of Mitty-esque fantasy, but also remind me of Snoopy, the best beagle ever. Some of my favourite Peanuts strips were those in which Snoopy sat on his dog kennel fighting the accursed Red Baron. The habitual commentary, ‘Here’s the World War I fighter pilot…’ later extended to other spheres, in particular his repeated attempts to achieve publication (‘Here’s the world-famous author…’), and reached a zenith with, ‘Here’s the world-famous checkout clerk.’ Looking back from the safety of thirty-odd years, I can picture myself striding around the garden, binoculars at the ready. ‘Here’s the world-famous birdwatcher…’

  I put the book away. In the real world there are things to do. Tessa will be back soon, in need of sustenance after a morning of singing at three-year-olds. I have emails to answer, procrastination to perfect. And at some stage I really must do some work. Easy as it is to assume that conductors merely wave their arms in time to whatever music the orchestra chooses to play, some pieces require serious
study.

  Birdwatching? It’s for the birds.

  But as I make myself a cup of coffee, a silly thought pops into my head.

  Why not start again? Why not go out and look for birds? Why not make it this year’s project?

  There’s my resolution, right there.

  More exercise? I would get it hunting down a bittern in the reed beds of Suffolk. Inner calm? Almost inevitable when you’re sitting in a hide waiting for a water rail to show its head. Improving the mind? Learn the difference between the plumages of a chiffchaff and a willow warbler and get back to me.

  As the idea takes root, I look out of the window. A blue tit is at the feeder, ferreting around for seeds and then bouncing off on a secret blue tit mission.

  It starts here.

  One.

  As well as a rich history of lying, I boast a decent inventory of abandoned projects. There’s a pattern to them. A flurry of enthusiasm, a cooling-off period, a ‘just-get-on-with-it’ phase, a lull as real life intrudes, neglect as the project dies an early death, a brief resurrection as I revisit my grandiose plans weeks later, the gentle ebbing of interest as I realise it was a stupid idea, the quiet and unlamented death. It’s been like that all my life. R.I.P. The Great Lego City (1972), the Scalextric World Championship (1979), the plan to become Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic by the time I was fifty (1989–1994). Projects large and small, all discarded, fecklessness always marginally outpointing enthusiasm.

  I know myself well enough to recognise that without a tangible goal my project will fizzle out. I have to set a target. Maybe it’s a boy thing.