2008 - The Bearded Tit (30 page)

‘They are very similar but both beautiful in their own sweet way,’ Tori assured me.

‘If you say so,’ I added cursorily.

‘Birds of prey are obvious. They’re too easy to see.’

‘I like easy,’ I said, hoping to put the matter to rest.

‘They’re just there. Alone in the sky. It’s as if they’re shouting, ‘Hey, look at me, I’m a bird of prey!’’

‘In my book, that’s good.’ I puffed my chest out and added, ‘We hunters have a special bond!’

There was a short, unkind snigger from my side. It was early evening and we were ‘stalking’ a sedge warbler at the edge of a field by the river.

‘Look at that!’ She pointed at the small bird. A small brown bird. Streaked. The sedge is streaked and, through binoculars, rather engagingly marked. Its song, if you can call it that, is a loud, fast, excitable mix of trills, clicks, squeaks and whistles. Apparently, according to those with lots of time and sound-recording equipment on their hands, the sedge warbler has never been known to make the same noise twice.

‘Hey, look,’ shouts Tori. ‘It’s parachuting!’

And it parachutes. It does a short song flight from its perch in the undergrowth, then glides back down again.

It is lovely. And this parachuting business is quite impressive. We watched it ‘parachuting’ a few more times. On the third one, there was a sudden, loud, high-pitched squeak.

A dark angular blur shot past us.

A sparrowhawk.

No more sedge warbler.

‘That’s what I call a bird!’

Tori pulled a dismissive face and walked off.

I
t was a nice, cosy suburban bedroom. But very fifties. Too much fabric. Curtains, bedspreads, seat covers, cushions, woollen flowerpot covers. And too many flowers in the patterns. And all the colours too dark. It gave the impression the room was caving in on us. We were being drowned in rhododendrons and suffocated with mauve. Despite the attempted homeliness, this place had no heart to it. The bedroom did not smell of bedroom. It smelled of hospital. Disinfectant and anaesthetic. The uneasy smell of chemicals that hide disease and mask death. Danny lay awkwardly upright on too many flowery bolster pillows. He was clearly in shock. His white eyes were bulging. The blueness of his thin lips was emphasized by the grey pallor of his face. The dryness of his throat made his voice grate, and a sudden strange noise caused panic. Was he trying to speak or was he choking?

I looked at the doctor. ‘Do something then!’ The man looked blank. ‘Come on, for Christ’s sake! You’re the doctor!’

The doctor returned a horrified stare at me. ‘I’m not a doctor,’ he stammered. ‘I’m a man wearing a white coat.’

What did he mean by that? Was he surrendering responsibility?

‘Has he had painkillers? Have you given him painkillers? He needs something. Urgently!’ I was having difficulty getting their attention.

‘There’s something in his throat. Look, he’s got something stuck there down his mouth, down the back of his gullet,’ said one of the medical students.

‘It’s a feather. A black feather! I know what…’ The doctor thrust his hand in Danny’s mouth, extracted a small black feather and immediately spit, phlegm and sticky clots of blood spewed from Danny’s lips.

The man wearing the white coat shook his head. ‘We’re going to have to open him up.’

I was afraid it would come to this. ‘The whole chest?’

‘Yeah, cut through the ribcage, get that out of the way and slice into the lungs.’

He sounded matter-of-fact and detached.

‘How long will it take?’ I asked.

‘Not long at all,’ he said. ‘Very quick, in fact. Watch this!’

I couldn’t believe what happened next. The doctor produced a long-bladed knife and rammed it into Danny’s sternum and split his chest. It plopped open with a warm hiss. The escaping air reeked of urine, damp straw and animal filth. And then we saw them: free now from the cage of his ribs, four-and-twenty blackbirds. Large slimy crows? Crows deformed by an oil-slick? Or perhaps mutant cormorants covered in coal-black grease. Unable to see beyond a gummy squint, unable to move beyond a pitiful spasm, unable to crow beyond a rasping rattle. This was the nest of the birds of death.

I picked one up. ‘Danny, what sort of bird is this?’

‘Is it a dicky bird?’

‘That’s not good enough; I want the scientific name. I want the Linnean binomial!’

‘I can’t stand this,’ said Danny getting out of bed.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘Pub, mate. Must have a beer. And fags, mate. Got to get a snout.’ And he disappeared.

We sat together in the pub. ‘And that’s how it ended?’ I asked.

‘That was how it ended.’ Danny looked quite shaken, but he managed a smile. ‘But you, you bastard, asking me for the Latin names for birds after my body had been cut open.’

I hoped that I would never do that in real life. ‘And what would Dr Freud have to say about a dream like that?’

‘It’s got to be about smoking, hasn’t it?’ said Danny reluctantly.

‘Er…well, it’s quite possible.’

‘If I’m going to keep having dreams like that, I’m going to be too scared to go to sleep.’

‘What are you going to do about it, then?’ I asked.

‘I’m going to have to seriously consider giving it up.’

‘What, smoking?’

‘No, sleeping!’

A
friend of mine, who is resident in an exotic faraway Eastern place, once said to me, ‘What’s odd about England is the seasons. How do you put up with things changing all the time?’

To me, the question seemed incomprehensible; almost sacrilegious. How does he put up with every day being the same tedious round of rain, sweltering sun, humidity, rain and so on?

‘I always know what the day is going to be like,’ he boasts.

And is that a good thing? Is that not like being in a prison? Does that not turn each day’s weather into a routine, a drudgery? The subtle change to the landscape as the seasons pass is surely one of the unrivalled pleasures of the English countryside. The snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and the tentative pale greens as winter gives way to spring and the gentle days of May bursting with blossom and…but you already know. I don’t need to tell you. Keats and Wordsworth would have been lost without the four seasons. And as for poor old Vivaldi!

I once told my children that birdwatching was nothing like trainspotting because, unlike trains, birds do not follow a timetable. But they do, of course.

As any countryman will tell you, our bird life is locked into the timetable of the seasons and the accompanying changes. We have resident birds that do different things at different times of the year: singing to find a mate, mating, nest-building, frenzied food gathering as the young arrive, the young fledging and maybe another bash at breeding.

Then we have the visitors. A whole different set of birds arrives in spring, autumn and winter. It is a pleasure to see or hear the song of a new arrival; some birds that have come from as far as South Africa turn up on a favourable breeze to feed and breed in England.

They arrive bringing delight, but they also bring mystery. Birds migrate so they are always near an abundant food source, but why do they fly so much further than they need to? Swallows winter in South Africa, fly to us for the summer to breed and then return. But why here? I have seen swallows in Aberdeen in the summer. They’ve come from South Africa to find food to sustain their breeding, but on the way they have flown over Central Africa, which has more than enough food for them. And Greece, Italy, Spain, France. Loads of flying insects in all those places. No disrespect, but why the hell Aberdeen? And their navigational abilities defy belief; they are the stuff of NASA’s dreams. The cuckoo, born here in English woodland, flies south to find a mate. The couple returns here to leave their egg in the nest of an unsuspecting pipit or warbler. The staggering mystery is how did the cuckoo find its mate? Brought up by its small brown surrogate parents, a cuckoo had never seen another cuckoo before.

The unexplained does not diminish our joy at seeing or hearing the first of the year. It is an annual pleasure that Tori and I share. In our house, there’s a tangible excitement as March and April approach.

Who will get the first chiffchaff?

Blackcap?

Sedge warbler?

Swallow?

This is so much a case of a pleasure shared, a pleasure doubled.

This is a true point of connection; something you share with someone you love; a connection with that person and a very concrete connection with the seasons, with nature, with the world.

I mention the cuckoo because it is the most identifiable arrival. People would write to the national press to boast ‘first of the spring’. Frederick Delius, Bradford’s most famous musical son, wrote ‘On Hearing The First Cuckoo In Spring’, which surprisingly consists of more than two notes.

And one swallow doesn’t make a summer but it certainly means the end of winter. I love the fact that this phrase is now so fossilized in our language that scarcely a sporting weekend goes by without some report using the cliche. ‘Middlesbrough may have won three on the trot but one swallow doesn’t make a summer.’ Or: ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer, the Red Sox are still bottom of the league.’

Our summer visitors are not exactly clockwork, but it’s amazing how close to the same date they arrive each year. Because the chiff-chaff has such a recognizable song and its arrival is usually around the time of my birthday (St Patrick’s Day, but keep it to yourself, I don’t like a lot of fuss), I always note my first hearing of it. For me and Tori this is very special,
the
moment that winter is over.

And how about this? In 2003,2004 and 2005 I heard my first chiffchaff on the same date. The 15
th
of March. I wonder if Julius Caesar heard one on that fateful day? In 2006 it was much later, the 22
nd
of March. In 2007 it was the 19
th
. It was about ten in the morning and I was walking down a tree-lined street in town when I heard it. I phoned Tori at work straight away. Standing right under the chiffing and chaffing little bird, I said, ‘Listen to this,’ and pointed the phone towards the tree. ‘Did you hear it?’

‘I can’t hear you. There’s a lot of traffic noise.’

‘Listen. Can you hear it? Isn’t it amazing?’

‘I can only hear a bus, I think, or a lorry.’

‘Wait, I’ll hold the phone up as high as I can…there, did you hear it then?’

‘Sorry, darling, you’re breaking up.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Listen, we’ll have to speak later. It’s all crackly.’

‘But did you hear it?’

‘Sorry what was that?’

‘Did you hear it? First of the year!’

‘Hello? Are you still there?’

‘Hello…I think I’ve lost you.’

‘Hello?…Hello?…Look, I’ll call back later.’

So I waited till she got home. I couldn’t wait to tell her. ‘Sorry about this morning,’ she said as soon as she walked in the door. ‘I couldn’t hear anything you were saying.’

‘Don’t worry, ‘I said. ‘It’s just—’

She interrupted me straight away.

‘Oh, guess what! I heard a chiffchaffthis morning. First of the year. Just before you phoned me, in fact.’

‘I heard one as well!’

‘Liar,’ she mocked.

‘That’s why I phoned you.’

‘Yeah, right!’

She’s lying. I know she is. ‘Oh and something else,’ I add. ‘I saw a swift!’

‘Blimey, that’s amazing! That is early. I’m impressed. Where did you see that?’

‘Er…’I mumble, ‘on a repeat of
Bergerac
.’

‘R
edshank,’ exclaimed Danny, pointing at the water’s edge.

And so it was.

It had been nearly a year since I introduced Danny to twitching. Nearly causing a major fire in a bird reserve and having nightmares about terrifying growths in his chest had not noticeably made him cut down on smoking, but he had retaken up his old hobby of photography with a commendable zeal that was earning him money and taking him over Europe and beyond.

‘Yes, that’s a redshank.’

I was tempted to act the real twitcher and say, ‘Yes; or is it a spotted redshank?’ even though I knew it
wasn’t
a spotted redshank but still wanting to show off that I knew there was such a thing as a spotted redshank and that they were a little bit tricky to tell apart. And not just showing off my expertise but to remind Danny of the teacher-pupil relationship I had with him when we were birding, and to reinforce our respective roles.

‘Well done, Danny.’

‘Don’t ‘well done’ me, young man!’ Danny retorted, semi-jokingly. ‘Didn’t I photograph one last time we went out?’

‘So you did.’

Danny coughed. He coughed again. And then again and I thought he was not going to stop.

‘Sorry, mate. Bloody fags. So what did little Tori think of them?’

‘She loved them.’

In fact she’d said, ‘Blimey, these are fantastic pictures.’ Danny had printed off the digital originals on to high quality photographic paper. ‘Amazing shot of an avocet.’

‘Not difficult to photograph waders though,’ I’d said.

‘That’s a bit unkind; this dunlin is amazing!’

‘Yes, or is it a little stint? No, you’re right, it’s a dunlin.’

‘He has a good eye.’

‘Yeah, well at least one part of his body is good.’

Tori looked reproachfully over the top of her reading glasses. ‘Sounds like you’re jealous.’

‘Eh?’

‘You were the one who wanted to get Danny out birdwatch-ing. Now he’s quite keen, you don’t like it.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Just because he’s uses a camera and you use binoculars, you don’t like it. You think it’s a branch of photography rather than pure, immaculate twitching.’

‘Not at all. I’m pleased for him. He’s out in the fresh air, not smoking and drinking…as much.’

Though Tori had a point. A little tiny bit of a point, anyway. I was imparting my superior bird knowledge to Danny and he was turning it into photography, which was already his hobby. And it was also a subject I knew nothing about. In fact, I loathed photography: surely one of the world’s most overrated talents, if that’s not too generous a description. I always thought the gift of the world-class photographer was to be somewhere where something was worth photographing and to have his camera with him. Anything above and beyond that seemed to be pretentious bollocks. Though I didn’t want to annoy or upset Danny by voicing this opinion. It dawned on me that perhaps the bit I liked about birdwatching with Danny was the ‘
après
’. Danny was good at ‘après’: eating, drinking, talking rubbish, swapping obscene reminiscences, having a huge laugh and making fools of ourselves in mixed company. The photography aspect of our expeditions had made it more serious for him and less fun for me.