2008 - The Bearded Tit (19 page)

It’s like discovering that your fusty old chemistry teacher likes to smoke the occasional spliff.

People feel easy with ‘pigeon-holes’. This was brought home to me by a rude fellow I met one morning at RSPB Titchwell. I was lining up my binoculars on a group of people who had just seen a Montague’s harrier—this was the next best thing to seeing the bird itself—when someone pulled my sleeve and said with unbridled surprise, ‘Rory, what are you doing here? You’re an Arsenal supporter!’

‘Er, yes…but I’m birdwatching.’

‘Didn’t you go to that game yesterday?’

‘Yes, I did. But that was yesterday and today I’m birdwatching.’

‘Didn’t you have a few beers after the match?’

‘Er…yes. And then I went home. Then I went to bed, then I got up and then I came here. To birdwatch.’

‘Yeah, but you’re a Gunner and all that. What are you doing birdwatching up here?’

‘Unlike you, I’m minding my own business!’

‘Alright, alright! That’s funny, though. I thought you was a look-alike, like.’

‘Unfortunately not; now, perhaps you’d like to piss off?’

‘Alright, alright; keep your hair on.’ He backed away mumbling, ‘Didn’t mean to upset you, Mr Bremner.’

And I have a confession to make in this area too. Simon Barnes is the chief sportswriter for
The Times
newspaper. I have been a big fan of his sports writing for years. But there is another Simon Barnes: a birdwatcher, a writer of books about birds and a regular contributor to the RSPB magazine
Birds
. Only he isn’t another Simon Barnes. He is the same one. For years I didn’t realize this and I was quite shocked. If I’d met him one morning birding on the early morning reed beds I would have probably said, ‘What are you doing here? You’re the chief sports writer of
The Times
!’

To make it easy for you, I will sum up. There are three types of birdwatchers: 1) twitchers, 2) birders, and 3) my friend Danny.

Twitchers are the real thing. They are experts. Experts by experience, practice or by self-appointment. They know the common names of birds, most of the scientific names, they have always seen more birds than you, if not each other, and they claim to be able to tell apart closely related species like the chiffchaff and the Siberian chiffchaff, which are, in fact, impossible to tell apart.

They carry pagers, so if there is a rare sighting they can be bleeped, drop everything, lie to their boss and hurtle off to Dungeness to see a black-winged pratincole. The point of the whole thing for a real twitcher is to tick things off a list, like a green-wellied trainspotter. They want to see every bird in the world so, at twitching dinner-parties, they never have to begin a sentence with, ‘Now, a bird I’ve never seen is…’

They suffer from a form of
Anoraksia nervosa
. It is predominantly a male thing. Semi-autistic list-learning.

There’s a case for saying it’s a little sad. But I’m aware I’m on dodgy ground on this one as someone who, for fun, used to spend a lot of school holidays learning lists of things: presidents of the United States; capital cities of the world; prime ministers of Britain; kings and queens of Britain; FA Cup winners since 1945, and the atomic numbers of the elements.

Twitchers have an uncanny way of making
your
birdwatching a little inferior. Here is a typical conversational snippet from the pub, post-twitching.

Me
: I saw a marsh harrier today.

Twitcher 1
: Oh, that thing’s still about, is it?

Twitcher 2
: Male, female or juvenile?

Me
: Er…the greyish one.

Twitcher 3
: Sure it wasn’t the hen harrier?

Me
: Er…not sure, really.

Twitcher 1
: Blimey, that’s back, is it? I haven’t seen that since yesterday.

Twitcher 2
: Sure it wasn’t a Montague’s?

Me
: Er…

Twitcher 3
: Well, white rump or no white rump?

Me
: I think I’ll get another pint.

All
: That’s very kind of you, don’t mind if I do.

Or, conversely, they express their superiority by pleading ignorance and asking you for help. One particular incident springs to mind. I was once stopped at a bird reserve in North Norfolk by a man with a telescope, who laughingly said, ‘Well, I really don’t know. ‘Scuse me, how are your pipits?’

‘Not great,’ I said, though I’m sure somewhere there was a long list of music-hall answers to this question.

‘Look through here and tell me what that is.’

Obligingly I shut one eye and stood on tiptoe and leant over the eyepiece.

‘I can’t see anything.’

‘Use the eye that’s open.’

‘Oh yes.’

I peered into the viewfinder. All I could see was a circular blur which changed after a few seconds to a circular blur with a black patch round the edge. And then an oval blur with brown spots. Then a grey oval blur with a man in a red baseball cap. And then a bright white circle with a green number at the top.

‘Mmm,’ I pondered. ‘Tough one!’

I’d only heard of a meadow pipit, which is fairly common, so I assumed it wasn’t that one that was troubling the expert.

‘Not a meadow!’ I offered with a laugh. ‘I know a meadow pipit when I see one. Had a close encounter once when I was building a bypass in Cornwall. Strafed by one when I was having a shit!’ I reminisced.

He did not follow up this piece of information with further questions.

‘Yeah, I think we can safely say it’s not a meadow.’ Then he added with a sage frown: ‘Rock.’ Then, ‘Water!’

I just stopped myself saying, ‘Or scissors!’

Twitchers also have tons of elaborate equipment: not just binoculars, but spotting-scopes, telescopes and telephoto jibs with a flat screen to look at. These people are not happy unless they can see a goldcrest on the moon.

Birders are a less severe form of twitcher. They know about birds and like watching them. It doesn’t matter to a birder that they haven’t seen every known species. They won’t drop everything to drive to Pembrokeshire to see a pallid swift. If they actually
live
in Pembrokeshire they might drop
some
things to see a pallid swift.

Birders like being outdoors, enjoy the countryside and probably have greenish, conservational leanings. Twitchers and birders dress the same, though. For practical reasons, to do with camouflage I suppose, dull greens, browns, beiges and blacks abound. A smattering of dark blue, and a few matt reds occasionally. Fluorescent yellow is not very common, even in this age of compulsory high-visibility jackets. Pinks are not very birdwatchery. You rarely see fuchsia, carnation or ‘deep lipstick’ among the reed beds of Minsmere. Very little cerise or ‘candyfloss’. Neither would they wear tight, retro, lime-green loons, an orange Motorhead tour T·shirt or a beaten-up leather bomber jacket. These
are
, however, the sort of clothes worn by…

…My friend Danny.

Now I suppose it’s not really fair to group Danny with other birdwatchers. Until I met him, he wouldn’t have been on the World’s Top Billion Birdwatchers list. He was very much a beginner and he decided he’d give it a go because he thought if I enjoyed it, it can’t be as ‘twattish’ as he thought it was. We’d met a few years earlier in a pub and he seemed to have a higher intelligence, superior social skills and a more advanced sense of humour than most of the regular clientele; though if you knew the Imperial Arms at all, you might think this a rather meagre compliment. It turned out that he was a bit of a computer whiz-kid, and as I have always been the village idiot of the IT community, Danny was forever in my house troubleshooting. I had decided to introduce him to the hobby of birdwatching, partly because I thought it would do him good to do something other than drink, smoke and womanize, and partly because he’d be a good person to have around at the end of a day’s birdwatching, when we could sit together in the pub, drinking, smoking and womanizing. Well, that’s not strictly true; I was living with Tori so a lot of my womanizing was theoretical, but Danny was single and lived alone but for his vegetarian cat so was relentlessly footloose and fancy-free. And I have never smoked. Danny, however, smoked on the duty-free-carton scale. I’m normally fairly libertarian about vice, and so long as I am not importuned, I encourage others with as much alacrity as possible to practise their vices. I’d even watch, if it were appropriate. But Danny was giving cause for concern. He was an amusing, bright, eager and loyal friend and I didn’t want to lose him to something dark and nasty on an X-ray.

‘Hello, guv’nor!’ he said as I answered the phone.

‘Oh, hi, Danny; didn’t expect to hear from you on a Sunday morning.’

‘Is it Sunday? Shit, I thought it was Tuesday. It’s been a heavy week.’

‘OK, tell me this, Dan: how many cigarettes have you had today?’

‘Six.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long have you been up?’

‘Half an hour. Here, fancy meeting up for a beer or three?’

‘I’m going up to the coast. Birdwatching.’

‘Snatch, you mean?’

‘No. Bird birds. Tweet tweet.’

‘Ha ha ha—seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

‘Bloody hell, mate. I’m getting worried about you. You’ll be turning veggie next.’

The following day in the pub, I tried to explain it to him. ‘I suppose you have to do it to like it. Same as golf, I suppose. Thing about golf is, you either play it or hate it.’

‘Oh, I hate golf, mate, it’s a pillock’s game!’ he said, drawing in a lungful of death.

‘I know; I hate it as well. But that’s because I don’t play it. There’s no ‘in between’. If you don’t go birdwatching, you think it’s for pillocks. A lot of people think I’m a pillock, coz I go bird-watching.’

‘And other reasons,’ he said, nodding. ‘So what do you do, exactly?’

‘Well, it’s very simple. You go outside and look at birds.’

‘Bloody hell, mate. Is that it?’

‘Well, you take your binoculars and go out to the countryside, preferably, but not necessarily. Or the coast or woods or river or wherever, and watch the birds.’

‘OK. Right, say I’m in a wood with my bins and I see a bird. What bird would I see in a wood?’ he asks.

‘Woodpecker, maybe.’

‘Alright, I’m watching a woodpecker through my bins, then what do I do?’

This line of questioning was getting tough. He was beginning to sound like one of my children. I answered rather unconvinc-ingly, ‘Keep watching it for as long as you can.’

‘Why, what’s it going to do?’

‘Fly away, probably; that’s what birds do.’

‘OK, I see.’ He smiled in a humouring-me sort of way.

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘I’ll tell you what, mate. I’m warming to golf.’

‘Y
ou sad bastard,’ said my daughter in that no-way-to-speak-to-your-father way that daughters have nowadays when they speak to their fathers.

‘It
was
the spoken English prize you got, wasn’t it, Louise?’

‘I’m sorry; I just can’t believe you want to go birdwatching. I mean, what is the point?’

Such a huge question. A huge question to which the answer, if I had one, would seem, at best, microscopic.

‘That’s a very dangerous question to ask, Loulou.’

‘Why?’

‘Because any question beginning ‘what is the point of is doomed to failure.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the logic will collapse like a house of cards until only one question remains: ‘What is the point of anything?’’

‘What wthe point of anything?’ my son chipped in unhelpfully.

‘What is the point of anything?’ I thought for a while. ‘Well, it’s something to do to fill in time before you die.’

Jon replied, ‘But everything is something to do to fill in time before you die, so why birdwatch, why not do something immediately pleasurable and rewarding?’

‘OK.’ I tried again. ‘It’s a way of getting out into the countryside.’

‘But you can do that without birdwatching.’

‘True, but it’s a way of reminding yourself that humans, that ‘you’, in fact, are not the only creature in the world; of reminding you that we share our planet with other living things that are just as important as us.’

‘Who says they’re just as important as us?’ My son was beginning to annoy me. I hoped he wasn’t going to grow up to be a lawyer. ‘And you can know we share our planet with other creatures without going out to look at them.’

‘Alright,’ I said, determined not to back down. ‘If you go out birdwatching with me, it would give me pleasure; it’s a way I can do something I like and spend time with my children.’

Louise’s turn. ‘So you want to spend time with your children when they’re being bored? Why not spend time with them doing something they want to do, something that gives them pleasure?’

‘Yes,’ Jon added. ‘Like
not
going out birdwatching.’

Loulou laughed.

They were turning into quite a double act, these two. The only plus for me was that I had never experienced them being so united, so ‘on the same side’, so ‘not scratching each other’s eyes out’.

Then Jon asked the predictable question. ‘Isn’t birdwatching the same as trainspotting?’

I was ready. ‘What? I can’t believe you said that! Where’s the skill in trainspotting? Trains follow timetables. You know exactly where each train is going to be at any time. Even if you’re trying to spot an obscure bit of rolling stock you know it’s not going to fly off when you approach it. Or go and hide in a bush. Trains behave in a predictable way; there’s nothing exciting about their behaviour: they don’t fly, they don’t sing, they don’t think, they don’t surprise you!’

I was pleased with this. Jon’s face betrayed the formation of a smart-arse comment.

‘They sometimes turn up on time. That surprises me!’

‘Well, let’s put it this way,’ I went on, ‘what would the world be like if there were no birds?’

‘Birdless.’ Where
did
he get this irritating habit of fatuous banter?

‘Wouldn’t you miss the sound of birdsong in the woods?’

‘I wouldn’t miss it at five on a summer’s morning when I’ve got a hangover and I’m trying to sleep.’