2008 - The Bearded Tit (23 page)

Carduelis flavirostris
is the amusingly named ‘twite’.
Flavirostris
means yellow-faced because the male in summer has a noticeable pink rump. In the winter, however, the twite changes the colour of its bill to pale yellow. Well, there’s not much else to do, is there?

The redpoll has a pale pink chest and a reddish patch on its forehead so it gets the hard-sell name
Carduelis flammea
—the ‘fiery’ or ‘blazing’ finch.

But what about the bullfinch? Aaah (pulls sad face), the bullfinch. Such a great bird to draw and colour in. A new set of felt-tip pens. Must draw a bullfinch. What a challenge to get that breast right. Such a vivid blaze of pinky, orangey red. In my childhood Cornwall, where every garden seemed to have a flowering cherry tree, we used to see bullfinches all the time. And they keep very still, so when you know where one is, you can watch it for hours, if you’ve got nothing better to do.

And there can’t be that many better things to do, can there?

Besides, your time may be running out to see the bullfinch. Its taste for the flowering buds of fruit trees means that this plump pink beauty has been and is being persecuted.

Rather excitingly for me, there is a bunch of British finches I’ve never seen. I am not the sort of person who keeps lists of names and times and places. With birds, you do not forget whether you have seen one or not. And invariably you remember exactly when and where you saw your ‘first’ something: spotted flycatcher, Bait’s Bite Lock on the river Cam; dipper, Middleton-on-Tees; blue rock thrush, El Toro in Menorca; chiffchaff, dog-shit lane (of which, more later); marsh harrier, bedroom in Black Swan; red kite, junction 3, M40; lammergeier, London Zoo, etc.

You definitely know what you have
not
seen and I’m looking forward to my first citril finch, serin, scarlet rosefinch, crossbill and what about
Coccothraustes coccothraustes
, the hawfinch? What can you say about this one? Scary beak, scary eyes, scary scientific name.

Then we have
Carduelis cannabina
, the linnet. ‘Cannabis’, I believe, is a widespread, straggly weed and has a variety of interesting uses, including rope-making and canvas. The linnet, because of its pretty song, was a popular caged bird. You’ll recall, no doubt, the music-hall favourite from the 1880
s
‘Don’t Dilly Dally’, which contains the line: ‘My old man said follow the van, and don’t dilly dally on the way; off went the cart with my home packed in it; I walked behind with my old cock linnet…’

And so it goes on. Incidentally, we Arsenal supporters have a song based on this, which starts: ‘My old man said be a Tottenham fan!’ The rest of the lyric does not come within the scope of this book, I’m afraid.

A
fter siskins and bramblings, another first for our first day: going into a hide. A hide, as it says in the dictionary, is ‘a place of concealment for the observation or hunting of wildlife’.

Well, let’s skip the ‘hunting’ bit for now; an industrial-sized drum of worms would be opened if we started discussing hunting in a book about birdwatchers. Not that I’m by any means indifferent to an occasional bit of freshly caught, wild bird meat. Pigeon pie…yummy? And there’s no denying the appeal of pheasant or grouse. Partridge and quail cook up nicely, as do wigeon, teal and all manner of brightly coloured waterfowl. Woodcock and snipe are always a bit special on the tea table. The puffin, apparently, made for an agreeable supper for seafaring and coastal folk at one time. The Scandinavians, Faroese, Icelanders and people from eastern Canada were all more than a tad partial to puffin. And I imagine it must have looked damn fetching on the serving platter with its large red, yellow and blue bill. Though someone once told me that those people were, in fact, eating Manx shearwaters, whose scientific name—as, indeed, you know—is
Puffinus puffinus
, hence the confusion. I’m not quite sure of the veracity of the source as the man in question went on to tell me that if you
were
going to cook a puffin, you shouldn’t microwave it; apparently, they tend to explode and your kitchen will smell of burnt sardine for months.

Any decent birding site will have strategically placed hides dotted around with good, unobstructed views of various habitats: tidal marshes, reed beds, rivers, woodlands, etc. They’re usually wooden cabins with letterbox-like slits round the walls just wide enough to stick a pair of binoculars through.

The hide we were heading for was on a spit of land between two huge tidal pools. More firsts for me and Tori. Our favourite: the avocet. This bird must be on a shortlist for prizes in several categories. Tall, slim, elegant. Pure white with pure black lines and a fine, dark, delicately upturned bill. This it uses for sifting for food through the silt, sweeping its head from side to side.

It is the logo of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and it’s hard to imagine a better bird for the purpose. And that is not just because it must be a gift to draw for the logo-artist, even one without coloured pens. Before the forties, this bird had all but disappeared from our shores, and the large numbers of avocet around today are the results of one of the first and most successful conservation and protection schemes ever undertaken in Britain. Among the massed flocks of streaky, brown and grey waders, this graceful bird is a star.

I was excited and nervous as I unlatched the door of the salt-marsh hide. Holding my breath, I went in and Tori followed. It was warm and dark and smelled of that stuff that does what it says on the tin.

I peered through the gloom. There was total silence. I breathed out and said heartily, ‘Ah, good, there’s no one here!’

Twenty-five people hissed ‘Ssshhh!’ at us. We jumped.

Ah yes, as my eyes got accustomed to the dark, I realized that quite a few of our fellow birders were in there. Through the narrow letterboxes, they were all peering intently across the wide expanse of water. We joined them. There were mainly ducks and seagulls. But an incontinent number of both. It really was quite special.

And more superb avocets.

‘A few ducks out there, I see,’ I said amicably to the earnest lady next to me. I wish I hadn’t.

I soon realized that we didn’t have the vocabulary, let alone the knowledge, to hold a conversation in ‘hide-speak’.

‘Barwit’s off again.’

‘That American wigeon’s back.’

‘Where?’

‘Behind that female greenshank.’

‘Are they ices out there?’

‘Glaucs, I think.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. I’ve seen ices today but I reckon at the moment we’re talking glauc.’

‘Whoa, look at that! That’s very acrobatic for a sandwich!’

‘No, that’s normal.’

My binoculars were jerking left and right, up and down, in an effort to keep up with this outlandish dialogue. And when someone said, ‘Look at those juvenile ruffs,’ I focused my bins and immediately started scanning the horizon for some hoodies down from Cromer.

All business in the hide is conducted at a whisper. This becomes a slightly louder stage-whisper if you happened to have seen something rare or something that nobody else has seen. It’s not considered twitching ‘cricket’ to emit a skittish yelp of ‘Wow, what’s this?’, as Tori did when she saw something large and dark and quite unlike any bird she’d seen before appear in her object lens. All eyes turned to her, part annoyed, part expectant.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter!’ she said to a communal ‘tsk’. They all went back to their own private twitch.

‘What was it?’ I asked.

‘A spider crawling over the end of my binoculars.’

Yes, this was best hushed up, I thought. It’s been quite a few years since we lost our hide-virginity, and I realize now that such is the nature of ‘twitchers’ that if you did say, ‘Oh look, a spider on my binoculars,’ they’d probably say:

‘That’s most likely a diadematus.’

‘Could be a dolomedes.’

‘No, not big enough; they wouldn’t come in here anyway.’

‘No, I think we’re talking thomisus.’

And so on.

The hide experience is strange. It has the silence of a public library, but one where everyone is reading the same book. Occasionally some good-natured fellow would lean over and point out a word that you may not have read or noticed. Birding in a hide is an odd mix of competition and co-operation. You want to be the first to see something, or the first to identify something, but you also want to help or instruct those not as knowledgeable or experienced as you.

Yes, there’s an element of showing off, but it benefits both parties. I often wondered at what level of expertise you have to be to engage a fellow twitcher. If, for example, a blackbird, flew past and you said, ‘Wow, what’s that? A medium-sized bird. All black with a yellow bill!’ would they say with contempt or amusement, ‘That’s a blackbird!’, with perhaps ‘you cretin’ in brackets.

Or would they, with eager patience, say, ‘Well, you’ve described a blackbird but, obviously, you know what one of those looks like, so I wonder what it could be. A ring ouzel? Did it have a pale bib? Er…was it a blue rock thrush; that would be a great spot for round here!’

I have never had the guts to try this one, but over the years I have fantasized about playing those sorts of games in a hide full of twitchers. Saying things like, ‘Do ostriches dive into water and grab eels?’

‘No, course they don’t.’

‘Well, it wasn’t an ostrich I just saw then!’

The very fact that I think about arsing around like this reveals something about my levels of commitment to the hobby. Maybe I just do not want to immerse myself totally in birding. Perhaps I need to retain an ironic distance. But I have to admit that that first afternoon in the hide at Titchwell was a special event.

There were a few old friends from the days of JJ and the Emmanuel College ponding committee. The tufted duck, the wigeon, the teal, the shelduck and, of course, mallards. There were a few speciality acts too. The shoveler. What a great name. What a great bird. Boldly marked with a bottle-green head, white breast, black back and an orange-brown belly and flanks. But what is special is its bill, which is huge and wide and, you know what, like a shovel. It sweeps this broadly from side to side through water and wet mud to find food.

‘Look, that’s a shoveler!’ Tori’s excitement drew indulgent glances from the twitching brotherhood.

‘That’s the female next to it,’ someone pointed out. This was helpful as the two sexes, like many ducks, were completely different but for one feature.

‘The bill is the giveaway,’ the twitcher went on. ‘In both sexes, it’s spatulate.’

Excellent. ‘In both sexes, it’s spatulate.’ Another first for the day. The word
spatulate
. (From the Latin for ‘a little shovel’.)

‘N
o, I can’t…Possibly later…No, I’m still in Norwich…The Eastern Evening Press, their whole system’s gone down. I could be here for hours…’

Danny was in the middle of a spiky conversation with his team manager.

‘I’ll call you back. This could be an all-day job.’

He switched off his mobile. I put the two pints on the table. ‘Bloody work hassling me!’ We were in the back garden of a pub in Cambridge. He lit up a cigarette.

‘How many have you had today, Danny?’

‘This is my second…’

‘Good.’

‘…packet.’

‘I read somewhere that smoking’s bad for you.’

‘I don’t pay any attention to all that scaremongering; they’ll be saying drinking’s bad for you soon.’

There was little hope.

‘And what about those awful things you’re stuffing down you?’

I stopped mid-crunch and thought about the Thai prawn-flavoured mini-poppadums that filled my mouth. I was sure they would not give me lung cancer, but Danny’s comment made me reflect as an unworldly, spicy, salty slime trickled down my throat.

‘Mmm. You’re probably right. I’ll chuck the rest.’

He grabbed the open bag. ‘No, don’t. I’ll take them home for the cat.’

A sparrow hopped by our feet. ‘Er…don’t tell me. Sparrow!’ spluttered Danny excitedly.

‘Very good.’

Building on the excitement of his first blue tit, he was eager to learn, and had begun to notice that birds were all around him, every day, even when he was at ‘work’ like today.

‘House sparrow,’ I explained to him, desperately trying not to sound condescending. ‘That’s the only one we see regularly. But there’s a few others around. There’s the tree sparrow.’

‘Hangs around trees?’

‘Er, sort of. And the Spanish sparrow.’

‘Hangs around Spain?’

‘Indeed; and the rock sparrow.’

‘Likes rock music.’

‘Excellent. And this is the house sparrow.’

‘Likes house music.’

‘Close enough!’

‘Pretty thing though, isn’t it?’

Danny, who’s only known the existence of birds for two weeks, says that the sparrow is a ‘pretty thing’. Now, that is really something! The sparrow, especially the house sparrow, is usually considered the dull bird’s dull bird. An annoyingly abundant streaky-brown thing. I’d even heard myself say on numerous occasions, ‘Oh. It’s only a sparrow.’

But listen to Danny; he was blind, but now he sees! He thinks it’s pretty. Look closely. It is. Quite a mixture of black, dark brown, reddish-brown, light brown, grey and black. It is sociable and noisy, and do you know something? It sounds like a bird. No, what I mean is that it sounds like you’d expect a bird to sound.

Its song is almost the prototype ‘chirrup chirrup’. It always sounds slightly out of tune, though, as if it’s struggling to be musical. They’re not difficult to see because they’re not that shy and they always hang around human habitation. And, of course, they are very common.

But are they?

Their numbers are declining with worrying speed.

‘Hey, Danny, look hard and close at this pretty brown bird, because time is running out.’

‘OK, I won’t smoke any more today!’

‘I meant the house sparrow’s time is running out.’

‘Oh look, there’s another one.’ He was pointing at a similar-looking bird. ‘But that’s got slightly different markings. Female?’