This Birding Life (30 page)

The rainforests around the falls are equally productive for birds, though as in all jungle habitats to see anything you need a combination of patience, luck and an ability to resist the attentions of mosquitoes. Our first walk, in the late afternoon, was fairly unproductive, although as ever we heard all sorts of intriguing sounds from birds we could not see.

Several dawn starts, especially when accompanied by Daniel, our expert local guide, were much more productive. We saw three species of toucan, including the huge version made famous by Guinness
adverts; two trogons (one of which materialised out of nowhere in response to a tape recording of its song); and many other forest birds, including colourful tanagers, a tiny woodpecker-like piculet, and the extraordinary White-bearded Manakin, the males of which attract their mates by loudly clicking their wings.

But for an event which combined the very best of South American birding with a truly rewarding cultural experience, my colleague Mike and I travelled into the local town of Puerto Iguazu. There, we visited the Jardin de Picaflores – the garden of hummingbirds – owned by a local couple who have dedicated their lives to showing the beauty of these gorgeous birds to anyone who cares to visit.

Even before we could sit down we were assailed from all sides by the whirring of tiny wings. Just a few feet in front of us, plastic feeders filled with nectar were being visited by a constant stream of different birds, each of which hovered momentarily to feed, then flew off like a bullet.

Hummingbird identification is never easy: the birds rarely stick around for very long, and the males and females of each species are often very different in appearance. But we took a deep breath, and with the expert help of the owners we gradually began to get our eye in.

An hour later, we had managed to identify no fewer than eight different species, including the iridescent Glittering-bellied Emerald, the splendid Black Jacobin, and the enormous (at least for a hummingbird!) Scale-throated Hermit. All the while, we had been joined by a procession of local mums, dads and children, all highly entertained at watching two slightly mad British birders having the time of their lives.

I
n some ways, this chapter is a miscellany of odds and ends: pieces that don't quite fit into neat categories elsewhere. But it has its own coherence: the same themes recur at different times, reflecting my continuing obsessions.

In no particular order, these are:

• birds I have seen — often triggered by a single sighting that in some way revealed something new in my mind about a familiar species;

• birds I have yet to see — a very long list, for which I selected my top eight for a piece loosely based on
Desert Island Discs
;

• people I have met — especially those involved in the development of birdwatching from a minority hobby into a global pastime, such as the late Max Nicholson;

• birding with friends – the often underrated social aspect of birding, and the wider benefits the pastime has for our emotional and spiritual lives;

• birds I love – all of them, really; but in particular my favourite bird of all, the Swift.

What only occurred to me as I was compiling this book were the extraordinary changes that have occurred in such a short time – not much more than a decade since I wrote my very first
Guardian
column (the piece on gulls that opens this chapter).

For example, in 1993 I wrote about gulls' habit of wintering inland; today we have tens of thousands of pairs breeding inland, too, on the roofs of our major cities. When I first wrote this column, if you wanted to see Red Kites you had to travel to mid-Wales; today, thanks to a successful reintroduction programme, they are a common sight in many parts of the country. And who could have foreseen that for a period we would be forced to avoid some of our favourite corners of the countryside as a result of foot-and-mouth disease?

Finally, several of the pieces in this chapter reflect on the wider meaning of birding – not just why we do it, but why we
need
to do it; why, in essence, watching and enjoying birds is good for us.

At first sight, gulls don't have a lot going for them. Compared with the beauty of Kingfishers, the grace of Avocets or the splendour of Golden Eagles, it's no wonder that, for many people, they are low down the bird-appreciation hit parade.

But gulls have something else in their favour – something pretty useful in today's world. They're successful. No other group of species
is quite so well adapted to late twentieth-century life – a life lived alongside all the effluents, pollutants and rubbish produced by humans. Gulls are a kind of avian waste-disposal system. Especially during the winter months, great flocks of them gather at rubbish tips and sewage outfalls – anywhere there's something to eat.

Gulls appearing inland in winter is a relatively recent phenomenon, and numbers have increased dramatically since the Second World War. Indeed as recently as 1945 the Black-headed Gull was described as an ‘uncommon visitor' to the London area. Today, this species spends virtually all its life away from the coast, so the word ‘seagull' is becoming less and less appropriate.

During the short daylight hours, gulls' main concern is finding food. Being more or less omnivorous, they find waste-disposal sites most to their liking. Almost any edible refuse, from carcasses to vegetable peelings and chicken bones to excrement, will eventually find its way down their ever-open gullets. In recent years the sheer numbers of these flocks – anything up to 50,000 birds at a single site – has caused problems. Many of these are associated with the gulls' habit of communal roosting during the night.

Gulls are creatures of habit. Every evening, an hour or so before dusk, they begin to leave their feeding grounds and head towards a roosting site – usually a large area of water such as a reservoir. The health hazard of thousands of gulls defecating into the water supply is truly mind-boggling. But in west London, roosting gulls present an even greater danger. The gulls' own flight-path, from Poyle rubbish tip, near Staines, to the nearby Queen Mary Reservoir, passes right across the busiest man-made flight-path in the world – the main runway in and out of Heathrow Airport.

But not all our gulls spend the winter inland. Despite Britain's dwindling fishing fleet, ports and harbours are still a good place to find the more marine species. The archetypal ‘seagull', the Herring Gull, predominates, usually accompanied by its larger cousin, the predatory Great Black-backed Gull.

For the sharp-eyed birdwatcher, there are more unusual visitors to be found among the gull flocks. A Ring-billed Gull from North America is currently spending its fifth successive winter on a recreation ground in Uxbridge, Middlesex. And as many as 50 Mediterranean Gulls have taken up winter residence at the sewage outfall at Copt Point, Folkestone.

Hundreds of miles to the north, at Scottish fishing ports such as Ullapool and Stornoway, two refugees from the Arctic can be found. Glaucous and Iceland Gulls can be told apart from their commoner relatives by their all-white wing-tips, giving them a ghostly appearance in the fading afternoon light, as they follow the fishing fleet home.

This winter, the eastern Scottish port of Fraserburgh has played host to an even rarer Arctic wanderer, the legendary Ross's Gull. This tiny bird, less than half the size of its larger relatives, has a plumage tinged pink by its main diet — shrimps from the Arctic Ocean.

After breeding in the remotest corners of Siberia, Ross's Gull normally spends the winter around the Arctic Circle – one of the most northerly winter ranges of any bird. But for at least three wandering individuals, the lure of the fish-offal of Fraserburgh has finally proved too strong.

Aird an Runair is, as Private Frazer of
Dad's Army
might have said, ‘a wild and lonely place'. On the north-western edge of the island of North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, nothing but the Atlantic Ocean separates it from North America. This makes it the perfect spot to watch the British weather approaching from the west, the clouds rushing in from the sea like film that has been speeded-up.

One May during the 1970s, a Kentish birdwatcher, David Davenport, made the long journey to North Uist, on a specific quest. Spring is the perfect time to visit the Western Isles: tiny flowers carpet the meadows, breeding Lapwings perform tumbling flights over the machair, and if you're lucky, a splendid Golden Eagle may soar into view. Most prized of all, the elusive and mysterious Corncrake, returned from its African winter-quarters, keeps islanders and visitors awake all night with its repetitive call.

But Davenport had other things in mind: having looked at the weather maps, and studied seabird migration routes, he was convinced that he would discover one of the most extraordinary avian spectacles in the British Isles – the passage flight of skuas past the Hebridean coast.