2008 - The Bearded Tit (18 page)

‘So, can I ask, Rory, when did you first start twitching?’

‘Well, it started as a nervous tic when I was at school,’ I explained.

Laughter engulfed a twentieth of the auditorium.

Twitchers are serious birdwatchers. They take it seriously. They don’t want ‘upstarts’ from the telly making jokes about twitching; especially a joke they’d heard so many times before; especially the most obvious pun available, a pun that faintly ridicules the whole world of birdwatching.

‘Oh, when did I first start birdwatching? Oh that’s easy,’ I continued with a well-rehearsed h’e. ‘Well, when I was sixteen I was in this bookshop and I came across a book called
The Easy Bird Guide
and I think I must have misunderstood the title!’

At least double the laughter now. About six people. Yes, that’s more like it. That’s birdwatchers for you, you see. They’re usually of an age when the word ‘bird’ still has a dangerous double meaning. Apart from ‘feathered flying animal’, the word is racy slang for ‘girl’.

‘Bird’ is good for ‘girl’ though. I think it would be a shame to lose it. It’s neutral. Not too patronizing or demeaning. It’s safe. Bird. I mean, compare the word ‘chick’. A chick: something lovable, small, sweet, perhaps vulnerable, needs looking after, nurturing and cherishing. And girls have ‘hen nights’, do they not? And the Scotsmen use ‘hen’ as an endearment without any social or political repercussions.

My teenage children tell me that ‘bird’ for ‘girl’ is not quite as common amongst their peers, and their friends don’t use it at all. I attempted to verify this as part of my research.

‘So when you and your mates go to a party, do you say things like ‘Mmm, some nice birds here’?’

‘No, Dad,’ says my son as if he’s talking tactfully to a person with mental-health problems.

‘What about ‘chick’? You know, ‘I like the look of that chick over there’.’

‘You’re a perve,’ says my sixteen-year-old daughter.

Totty?’

‘Totty? Ha!’ says the boy-child. ‘Yes, we use that word if we’re taking the piss out of repressed middle-aged people.’

‘What about ‘babe’? Would you say to a girl, ‘Hiya, babe’?’

‘Babe is a fictional pig, Daddy. I wouldn’t advise it,’ warns my daughter, shaking her head.

‘When I was a boy growing up in Cornwall, we used to say ‘maid’. You know, ‘She’s a nice maid’ or ‘Have you got a maid at the moment?’’

‘What did they call
you
?’ asks my son.

‘Arsehole,’ says my daughter.

So here I am, addressing a room full of birdwatchers in Cheltenham and feeling very much like an impostor. Not a birdwatcher, not a twitcher, not an ornithologist, but just someone who loves being outdoors, alone in the country, in the woods, on the moors, in the mountains or by the sea. And someone who happens to know the scientific names for most British birds.

‘Is that true, though?’ asked a lady in the audience. ‘About your interest in ornithology?
The Easy Bird Guide
and all that? Or was it just an easy pun on the word ‘bird’?’

No, lady in the second row, it’s not true.

‘No. As a child I used to love drawing birds and colouring them in. And then in the first term of my second year at Cambridge, I met and fell in love with a girl called JJ who was into birds.’

And my interest in the subject became accidentally more public than I had anticipated while taking part in a television panel show called
QI
, on which I stumbled into giving the scientific names for various British birds, and while filming a programme called
Three Men in a Boat
, where I expressed my love for the odd ‘twitch’.

‘So do you go birdwatching now, then? Proper birdwatching?’ asked somebody from the back.

‘Well, my girlfriend, Tori, and I took it up properly about six or seven years ago. And we still go when we can; we’ve even got a ‘scope now. But we don’t go very far afield to do it. We keep it quite local. And we still haven’t seen a golden oriole!’

A sweet, young woman near the front raised a tentative hand and asked with an embarrassed smile, ‘What happened to JJ?’

Now, that
was
an interesting question.

M
y hometown of Cambridge is well placed for birdwatching. It’s in East Anglia. The wetlands of the fens and the coasts and varied inland habitats of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex are just a short drive away. Cambridge is but twenty miles from the headquarters of the RSPB at Sandy in Bedfordshire. Cambridgeshire boasts the birding paradises of Wicken Fen and the Ouse Washes; Norfolk has the Breckland, Titchwell and Holme bird reserves and Suffolk has Minsmere, the jewel in the RSPB’s crown; which is also very handy for Southwold and the Adnams brewery.

Tori and I had decided to start our birdwatching career in North Norfolk. A love for nature and the outdoors was just one of the many things we had in common. Notable others included the joy of marriage and parenthood and the hell of separation and divorce. We had both emerged at the other end of the latter two and their attendant nightmares, wiser and stronger; and completely knackered. Birding up on the coast was a comforting symptom of a new period of serenity in our lives.

A convenient, straight line north from Cambridge would take us beyond King’s Lynn to Hunstanton and then we could take the coast road eastwards. It was going to be a first for me. Being a western man, I knew nothing of the landscape, the people, the towns, the geography or history of North Norfolk. I’d heard of the Norfolk Broads and probably made comments about them being a girl-band from Norwich. I’m sure there probably was one, or has been one since. Norwich, I knew, was famous for Colman’s mustard, and the football team was called the Canaries and played in yellow, a source of much amusement to schoolboy football fans. Delia Smith, their celebrity-chef fan, had not been invented back then. I had heard of Cromer crabs, which I am sure we Cornish schoolboys had assumed were something venereal peculiar to East Anglia. And I think Bernard Matthews’ turkey farms might have impinged on our remote south-western consciousness with the way he said ‘boootiful’ in the advert, which also contained the line ‘Bernard Matthews’ turkeys; they’re good and they’re from Norfolk’, giving rise to the joke slogan: ‘Norfolk ‘n’ good!’

And at university, a fellow language student was a girl who came from a place called Wells.

‘That’s near Bath, isn’t it?’ I’d asked her.

‘No, not that Wells; Wells-next-the-Sea.’

My, my, how I laughed. A placed called Wells-next-the-Sea. This gave the little-travelled Cornish boy a lot of mirth.

‘Is it on the coast, then?’ I laughed.

‘Of course, it is. Hence the name.’

‘Does it change its name when the tide goes out, then? Wells-not-quite-as-next-the-Sea-as-earlier-on-today?’

I was later to learn that Wells is in fact at least a mile from the open sea due to changes in the coastline, but it was until the sixteenth century a bustling seaport.

‘You’ve some need to laugh,’ said the Norfolk girl. ‘You’re from Cornwall; you have the daftest place names in Britain.’

Ridiculous. My home village is called Illogan and we are within easy reach of places called Prospidnick, Warleggan, Gwennap, Ponsanooth and Praze-an-Beeble.

The priority was accommodation. After an hour of yellow-paged frenzy, I was armed with a list of hotels, B&Bs and pubs in Norfolk. This was the huge first step. Tori and I were about to become real birdwatchers. We were actually going to go to find the birds, rather than have them find us.

We were about to change from people who liked birds to people who deliberately went out looking for species they had never seen before. We were about to write lists: birds seen that day; birds seen that year; total bird species seen in our life. We were about to cross the line. Move up to the next tier of twitching. We now had binoculars, a Thermos flask and an RSPB sticker on our car windscreen.

OK, some might say we were about to become even sadder, even more middle-aged or that we were taking a big step further along the autistic spectrum, but let them scoff; for us it was an adventure. All things considered it was just me and my beloved, spending time together in the countryside, sharing a new experience.

I was not having much luck. All accommodation in the whole of North Norfolk seemed to be taken.

‘Ooh, no, I’m sorry. You did say
this
weekend?’ asked one lady with the incredulous outrage of someone who’d been asked if I could take her teenage son away in a sack and tie him up in my basement for a kinky
soiree
I was having with some Middle-Eastern business clients of mine.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s only four days away. I’ve been fully booked for this weekend since last year!’

‘Oh, I thought, as it was only the middle of April—’

Her interruption came snapping down the line.

‘Well, exactly. Haven’t you heard of ‘birdwatching’? It’s
the
time of year, you know. Some people have rooms booked continuously year after year. You won’t find anywhere round here at this late stage!’

‘Oh I see,’ I said blandly, which for me, in the circumstances, was quite an achievement.

‘You’re clearly not a birdwatcher,’ she added. Well, that almost did it. I just hoped I didn’t bump into her one daybreak in the salt marshes. I wouldn’t be responsible for the final destination of my spotting-scope.

I explained the situation to Tori.

‘Apparently in April and May all accommodation within a hundred yards of a bird is taken. By birdwatchers, of all people.’

Tori tutted. ‘Sad bastards. Why don’t they get a proper hobby?’

‘Well, at least it sounds as if we’ve hit upon the right time of year to start.’

There was one place left on my list. A pub that had rooms. Very close to Titchwell bird reserve. I called it, ready to adopt a different tone. A booming, cut-glass English voice answered.

‘Good morning, Black Swan…’ Must be an aristocrat down on his luck. ‘Vladimir Sobolnikovski speaking.’

That threw me off guard.

‘Oh hi, Mr Sobolnikovski, my wife and I thought, at the last minute, you realize, that we fancied a bit of twitching this weekend. So just ringing around the usual places seeing if there were any cancellations to be had…maybe? You know, sort of…er…last·minute cancellations…er, coz obviously we normally book the year before, being twitchers and all that…in April?’

I could hear pages being turned at the other end.

‘No, sorry…no, wait. Yes. You’re in luck. Cancelled last night. Best room in the place. Facing the marshes and the coast and what-have-you.’

‘Sounds fantastic!’

Sobolnikovski went on, ‘And I’ll guarantee you see marsh harriers without leaving your bedroom.’

‘Why, are they in the wardrobe?’ There was a pause, then welcome laughter.

‘What? Oh ha ha ha, yes. You silly arse!’

‘How serious are you about this lark?’ asked Sobolnikovski.

‘Which lark? Sky? Crested? Short-toed? Thekla?’ I replied.

‘Well, you obviously know your stuff.’

‘No, we don’t. He just know the names of lots of birds. This is really our first ‘grown-up’ expedition,’ Tori admitted.

Sobolnikovski eyed me up and down from beneath a furrowed brow on hearing the phrase ‘grown-up’.

He was refilling the shot glasses with bison-grass vodka as the clock behind the bar pinged midnight. The three of us were alone. The really grown-up twitchers were well into their serious early nights and probably dreaming of dark-eyed juncos or Corsican nuthatches, eagerly awaiting their five-thirty alarms.

‘Where are you from then originally, Mr Sobolnikovski?’ I asked our host.

‘Oh that’s not my real name, that’s just a sham. I changed my name years ago. Didn’t like the original.’

What was it?’

‘Anatoly Zhukovovitch…’ He paused. ‘Too Russian-sounding.’ He laughed uproariously. And so did we. I was beginning to like Vlad the Imbiber. This birdwatching business seemed most agreeable. And we hadn’t even seen a bird yet.

‘What time’s breakfast?’ asked Tori in a practical, female way.

‘Six to nine.’

‘That’s a bit early, isn’t it?’ I spluttered through the vodka.

‘Some of my residents think it’s too
late
! Especially when the mornings get lighter. Every one of my residents this weekend is a serious birder, you realize.’ He paused and knocked back the firewater adding, ‘Apart from you two phoneys. Of course.’

A few more
za nashe zdorovjes
later and we were tucked up on top of the bed, fully clothed and snoring contentedly.

W
hisper it softly, but there are more birdwatchers than you think. It could be as many as one in five people. Look around you on a crowded train or at a party, and someone, possibly someone standing near you, is a birdwatcher. Another thing about your birdwatcher is that he is not always prepared to admit it. It’s one of those things you do that you think should be kept to yourself. A dodgy secret. It just takes one person in the room to own up and say, ‘I go birdwatching occasionally,’ to make the other closet twitchers open up.

‘Do you? Oh, so do I!’

‘Where do you go?’

‘Have you seen a purple gallinule?’

‘I’m going next week, will you join me?’

‘I saw a Montague’s harrier last year!’

It’s one of those things like voting Conservative, watching porn and liking Leonard Cohen songs: we all deny it, but a lot of us are doing it.

But surely you’d recognize them, wouldn’t you?

Birdwatchers are country people, aren’t they? Middle-aged anoraks with beards who like to make lists and get up early. Birdwatchers are low-level eco-warriors, aren’t they? Into conservation and ‘save the planet’ and anti-bloodsports and all that.

Well, for a start most real ‘country’ people seem to be in favour of bloodsports and a large number of the people I go birdwatching with in Norfolk shoot for fun. Birds and animals, that is. But the point is that, in general, people have a fixed idea of what a birdwatcher is like. People like to have fixed ideas. It’s easy. It’s unchal-lenging. It’s always unsettling when you find out, for example, that someone whose politics you despise likes the same sort of rock music as you. Or that someone you like and admire as a bit of a whacky, slightly louche renegade turns out to be a devoted churchgoer; or a golfer; or a newt-keeper.