2008 - The Bearded Tit (29 page)

It didn’t seem fair somehow, back in human-world, on a summer’s Friday evening in Mojo’s cocktail bar. Surrounded by sublime and exotic beauty, there was I, the dullest and drabbest of dull, drab males, drably and vainly leering over the dreary rim of his dull beer glass. And I don’t think standing up and delivering a loud, intricate song was going to help.

A punt full of hen-party-goers had pulled up alongside the quay. Most of them in T·shirts and bikini bottoms. They climbed on to the quayside and started cavorting, free from care and sobriety. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Tori nudged me and pointed towards the river.

‘Moorhens are quite nicely marked when you see them close up, aren’t they?’ she said.

I nodded. ‘You took the words out of my mouth!’

A
fter some reprehensibly bad driving round single-track country lanes, Danny arrived at a pub so inhospitable looking it would be guaranteed to be free of twitchers. There were two cars in the car park. One without wheels and one without doors.

‘This is our kind of place!’ said Danny, lighting up a cigarette. ‘I can’t imagine any birdwatchers come here.’

‘I can’t imagine any humans come here. Listen, why don’t you just not smoke for a bit. You’ve done enough damage already today.’

We walked into the tiny public bar.

It was packed with birdwatchers who stopped talking as one and turned towards us. It was so unwelcoming, I thought one of them might come up and tie the dartboard round my neck.

I’ve never really done ‘jauntily’ that well, but I took a deep breath and made an attempt, starting with, ‘Evenin’ all.’

Much to our relief they nodded non-committally and got back to their conversations.

We squeezed into a gap at the bar to order a couple of pints, bisecting a worrying dialogue about ‘the fire’ at Titchwell.

Danny and I exchanged glances of the ‘uh oh better not hang around here too long’ variety. We were staggered that news of a not very big fire about ten miles away that probably only started half an hour earlier could have reached this remote watering-hole before us. That’s Norfolk for you: big county, small place.

‘I heard there was a couple of blokes in a hide drinking whisky and smoking. Not birders. Up from London, I expect. Probably staying at the Hoste in Burnham Market with them showbiz types,’ said one.

‘Two pints of the local bitter please,’ Danny said cheerily to our host.

‘That’s off,’ he said glumly.

‘Looks like it,’ Danny replied, pointing at a glass on the bar. The victualler was unimpressed.

‘Two lagers, then. Thirsty work this twitching, eh?’

The entire room looked us up and down. ‘See anything special?’ asked someone.

‘A fire,’ Danny said.

‘Yeah,’ I added, ‘we thought it might be a phoenix.’

‘I know all about the fire,’ a man at the bar said, fixing his knowing eyes on us.

It was a worrying moment that lasted longer than moments should.

‘Er, do you know how it started?’ I asked tentatively.

‘Course, I know how it started!’ he blurted.

Another worrying moment, at least as long, if not longer, than the last worrying moment.

‘I started it myself. Some of them old reeds and dead wood is no use to man nor beast, you got to burn it. Away from the reserve though.’

‘Of course.’ Danny and I nodded with enthusiasm, endorsing the local’s good countryside practice. Relieved by the knowledge he was not about to be arrested for arson, Danny’s confidence grew and he instigated some jolly banter with the other customers.

‘OK, any of you twitchers ever seen a dunlin?’

There were a few dismissive snorts from around the room.

‘What about a curlew? Any of you heard of one of them?’

‘Is this your first day birding then?’ asked the barman.

‘How dare you, sir! I was born in a nest and raised by ruffs.’

A voice from the corner shouted, ‘Have you seen a little crake?’

‘No,’ answered Danny, ‘when did you last have it?’

The landlord had apparently tired of our presence in his establishment and pointed at the two half-full glasses in front of us.

‘I expect you chaps want to drink those pints up and leave the premises now, don’t you? I expect you two are staying up at the Hoste as well, aren’t you, with your London friends. S’pec you’ll want to get back up there soonest, won’t you?’

‘Yeah, well, we just stopped off for one,’ I said draining my glass.

Danny did the same, with a parting, ‘Bloody nice meeting you chaps. Take care now.’ And as the door closed behind us he went on a bit louder, ‘Hope this pub never burns to the ground. Could cause up to three quids’ worth of damage.’

We were out in the car park.

‘So, back home?’ Danny said.

‘No fear,’ I said. ‘That miserable git has given me an idea. Let’s go to the Hoste.’

Years earlier on a colourless November afternoon, Tori and I had been driving round North Norfolk after an abortive bird-watching session. As frequently happens in that place at that time of year, the sea, the sky and the land had drained into an icy monochrome as daylight faded and the flocks of huddled waders had become part of the mottled background. That evening, sunset had been called off at short notice and the sky was as slatey in the west as it was in the east. We drove through one anonymous village after another. The houses were blind, the streets were empty and the occasional string of Christmas lights in a window merely emphasized the bleakness.

Then we drove into Burnham Market.

The town was ablaze with light, music and laughter. The pale yellow facade of a pub called the Hoste Arms dominated a pretty village green whose tiny brook reflected the dazzling main street, bustling with excitement and smiles. This was an oasis. A lavishly tasteful, old world Las Vegas in the desert of winter Norfolk. It seemed like a mirage. But we stopped. We stayed. We went back over and over again and it became our base-camp for birdwatching and much more besides.

‘This place is bloody excellent, mate,’ enthused Danny, drooling as his eyes passed along the array of real ales and real barmaids.

We fell in with a fairly bad crowd, which was fairly good, and had a very good time, which was very bad. I phoned a jealous and incredulous Tori to say that we had been forced to stay at the Hoste in Burnham Market that night, due to fire in one of the hides at Titchwell bird reserve.

I introduced Danny to an acquaintance of mine who was a photographer in London, who was coincidentally doing some freelance work for a natural history magazine. Danny and he talked a load of apertures while I got in some mild womanizing practice just in case I’d have to come out of retirement and do it again for real one day.

In a corridor on the way back from the gents I passed a glass case containing a stuffed bird. Judging by the date on the case, it was a genuine antique and a testament to the Victorians’ mania for taxidermy. This bird was another resident of the soggy world of reed beds and accordingly it was clothed in another mottled, feathery symphony of browns, blacks, creams and rusts; but a spectacular symphony, none the less. I’d never seen one this close up but, then, few people had.

‘Hey, Danny, I’ve just seen a little crake.’

‘I was wondering where that had got to!’

B
oys and girls are different. No, it’s true. And there are more male then female birdwatchers. And there are more men than women in pub-quiz teams. Men like the names of things. They like learning lists. They are fact misers. Why should this be? What happened to us fearless hunters who once risked death on a daily basis to stalk dangerous prey and bring home meat for the table? The hunting stopped, that’s what happened. By and large women made the home and reared the children. It could be argued that their role has changed less over the centuries. But what of the alpha hunter male? Hunting was about knowing the land, mapping it, learning the names of places, recognizing what was prey and what was food, the names of both, the behaviour of both. It was about looking into the distance. The hunter had to dominate the world, he had to control it; to control it, he had to know it. Knowing or not knowing meant surviving or perishing. So, the modern, sedentary, castrated male hunter twiddles his thumbs and idles away his time cataloguing facts. Is not the pub quiz an elaborate ceremonial version of hunting, a coded and symbolic assertion of the hunter male’s dominance over his environment and, indeed, over his rival males? We have gone from scanning the landscape, spotting our quarry, ambushing it and tearing it apart to knowing who won the FA Cup in 1979, which of Henry the VIII’s wives survived him or which common bird is
Strix aluco
.

This is not a sexist generalization but based on experience. I’m not rerunning a tired cliche of the sort that claims that ‘girls can’t read maps’ nor ‘catch a cricket ball’. I am familiar, of course, with these theses. And when it comes to lists of seemingly unconnected names and numbers, do men do it better because they care more?

Or maybe it’s to women’s credit that they care less. The female likes and knows the big picture, the general picture, and is not bogged down or preoccupied by tiny details. How far is that mountain away from here? Is that animal spoor a wildebeest or leopard? How long would it take me to run to that tree? Is that plant poisonous? Which is the only Beatles’ song with the word ‘peanuts’ in it?

Girls want to cut the crap and get to the good bit. I am touched when I hear girls talk about a night out. The conversation could go like this:

‘I met this bloke in the pub last night…’

‘Yeah…’

‘And he walks over and he starts chatting me up…’

‘No? What was he like?’

‘Well, he wasn’t bad. Quite hot actually.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, but he didn’t realize that I knew him.’

‘What?’

‘I know who he is. And I know his girlfriend!’

‘Noooo! Get away…’

And so it goes on. An interesting tale of intrigue. I fancy that if two men embarked on a similar conversation, it might go like this:

‘I met this girl in the pub last night.’

‘Which pub?’

‘Lamb and Flag.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Corner of Conway Street.’

‘Oh I know. Used to be the Moon and Sixpence.’

‘That’s the one.’

‘What’s it like nowadays?’

‘Good. Nice drop of Young’s. Keeps his beer well.’

There are differences between males and females in the birding world too. Put bluntly: boys like birds of prey and girls like warblers. I’m well aware that generalizations are clumsy tools and can be unfair and misleading, but my limited observations tell me that boys like raptors and girls like BJ
s
. (Brown jobbies, if you must know. Or LBJ
s
—little brown jobbies, in twitching parlance.)

You can understand this superficially. Raptors attack things and rip them to shreds or carry them off somewhere and rip them to shreds later. And they have all the equipment that goes with this: huge powerful talons, hooked bills and fabulous eyesight, which means they have big eyes in a perpetual frown. A piercing glare that seems to say, ‘What are you looking at, fuck-face?’

Boys like this.

The LBJ
s
, which are mainly warblers, are tiny, slim, secretive birds usually with amazing songs. They are pale beneath and brown above. Sometimes they are streaky brown above and pale beneath. Sometimes they are streaky brown above and streaky pale beneath. Rarely, though, streaky pale beneath and not streaky brown above. They are, in short, cute birds.

Girls like this.

But I don’t think this is the heart of the matter. LBJ
s
take a lot of care, patience and hard work to see. Boys do not like this. LBJ
s
skulk and hide deep in trees, bushes, hedges and reeds. Boys can’t be bothered with all that nonsense, even though, as a girl will tell you, the bird, when you finally see it, is beautiful, delicately marked and superbly individual, not just a little brown job.

Raptors, on the other hand, are easy. They perch openly, alert and busy. The glide, hover or soar, in full view of everything, except, of course, some unlucky mammal on the ground. If there is a red kite about, you will see it. And spectacular it is. There is absolutely no effort involved in finding a red kite in the sky and watching its lofty magnificence for hours. A piece of twitching piss.

Boys like this.

Warblers, on the other hand, are tricky. Well, for a start, pick up a book of British birds and look in the index under warblers. There are forty-two entries. Most people have probably never heard of any of them, though those with a little country knowledge, or maybe pub-quiz knowledge, may have heard of these:

The whitethroat: a pretty bird that used to be widespread and resident in this country, and now visits from April onwards. In the olden days country people used to call them Peggy. ‘Morning, Peggy Whitethroat,’ they’d say. I’ve no idea why. Next time I’m in the olden days, I’ll ask a country person. The whitethroat takes it name from the colour of its throat. Which is? Anyone? White! Very good. It often sings its scratchy but musical song perched openly when its white throat is unmistakable. Its scientific name is
Sylvia communis
, meaning ‘common forest dweller’. It is not as
communis
as it once was, nor particularly forest-dwelling, but it does give its name to a whole bunch of similar birds, the ‘sylvia warblers’, one of which the whitethroat is usually paired with in books. Another well-known bird:

The blackcap: as you probably can tell from its name, this bird has
not
got a white throat. Like all warblers this one has a lovely song, bright and clear, getting louder and faster. Its scientific name is
Sylvia atricapilla
, which means ‘forest dweller with a black cap’.

The chiffchaff, one of my favourites already mentioned, is the little bird with the memorable two-tone song. The chiffchaff is virtually identical to the willow warbler, its twin, you could say, but the tiny, dull, greeny-brown willow warbler’s song could not be less identical. An ascending trill becoming a cascading warble, fading away but finishing with a slight flourish.