A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  When I was a small boy I collected birds’ eggs: I was following in my father’s footsteps again, though this time not necessarily along a riverbank. My father grew up in a small village outside Worcester called Lower Wick, which has since been swallowed up by the twentieth-century growth of the county town. He was at school during the First World War at Worcester Royal Grammar School. His parents ran a market garden, which was extraordinarily hard work. It was such hard work that Granny Fortey had a stroke in her fortieth year, which left one side of her face paralysed, although she lived on to a considerable age. I never met my grandfather: relentless labour involving wheelbarrows and chaise cloches led to his early death in 1934. My father’s was a country life, and it was full of the pursuits that country boys followed in the first half of the twentieth century. The fields and woods were theirs to roam. The River Severn was just down the road, so fishing was a given. Wildlife abounded, and country boys acquired knowledge of birds and plants as naturally as city boys learnt about buses and sweet shops.

  The acceptable way to collect a wild bird’s egg today. A predated song thrush egg picked up from my wood.

  Egg collecting is often portrayed as sheer vandalism, and sometimes it certainly is just that. The mad lust for a rare egg to complete a collection leads fanatics to illegal and reckless behaviour. My father insisted on strict rules. The first concern was to cause minimum impact on the birds themselves. Only one egg from a clutch was to be taken, as quickly as possible, when the bird was not sitting on the nest. If a nest belonged to a familiar species already collected then it was a case of look, but don’t touch. Leave the birds in peace. An egg that was close to hatching could be recognised by holding up the egg to the light – and quickly returned. My father claimed that brooding birds returned to the nest to continue sitting on the four eggs that remained of an original five. I never found reason to doubt this. Then the preparation of the egg was crucial – it should never be allowed to go bad and be wasted. A tiny pinprick was made at each end of the egg to allow it to be blown, or a little circular hole was drilled in the side and the contents puffed out using a delicate blowpipe placed close to the drilling. Finally, a blown egg was placed in a neatly compartmentalised box, with the name and date. There was a collection at home going back to my father’s boyhood, logically laid out in several flat wooden boxes; for this young boy it was the subject of endless contemplation. What would have astonished a twenty-first-century birder are some of the species that were included in the collection. The red-backed shrike is now so rare that it sets twitchers all of a twitch. It was so common when my father was young that he saw it on every summer walk and used the nickname ‘butcher bird’ because of its habit of impaling bugs on thorns of spiky trees. I remember its distinctive, small cream-coloured egg with a band of red-brown spots near one end. When he was a boy it was never a problem for my father to find grey partridge eggs, even though they were hard to discover among the herbage; a clutch may have had a dozen eggs, so that one collected really would not be missed. It has been many years since I encountered a covey of wild partridges scuttling over a cornfield. I think I may even remember a corncrake egg in the collection. To see this bird in 2020 and hear its distinctive call the enthusiast has to travel to islands off north-west Scotland. In those neat trays lay irrefutable evidence of what has happened to some of Britain’s native birds over the last century.

  I confess that I, too, hunted for nests and eggs: the guilt sometimes steals up on me. I also believe that the search was part of my making as a naturalist. I became extraordinarily sensitive to the least movement: the twitch of a leaf, a small bird disappearing into thick cover, the furtive way a warbler would melt into the undergrowth; all pointers to where a nest might be hidden. In the water meadows by the River Lambourn I ran down the home of a reed bunting inside a sedge tussock. I cut my finger on one of the sharp, dangling leaves when I parted their green curtain to find my prize. Discovery was paid for in real blood. I located the tiny domed nest of a willow warbler tucked away in rough grass. I could somehow guess which hole in which tree would house a clutch of a great tit’s spotted eggs. This was the atavistic boy, the intuitive hunter, the useful member of the tribe. Like much of what gives rise to science, such concentrated awareness is about making close observations and drawing conclusions from them. The self is forgotten as the seeker puts everything into the senses, sight and sound. The fly fisherman ‘reading’ the trout’s intentions may not be so different. Past experience feeds future predictions: that patch of scrub looks just the place where a thrush might build his nest; this is not a pile of soggy weeds in the stream – it is a dabchick’s nest; grey wagtails favour the thick ivy covering on that bridge over a stream. We can outwit nature’s deceptions with sharp eyes and a good memory for detail. Nonetheless, some birds did fool the canny young hunter. I never discovered where the snipe hid his clutch on the ground in the damp fields, even though I saw the bird in flight many times zigzagging across the marsh; maybe the green and blotchy disguise of the eggs was just too perfect, or perhaps the bird led me astray too convincingly. Anyway, there was already a common snipe’s egg in the old collection.

  I did add the egg of one species to my father’s neatly displayed arrangement: the grasshopper warbler. This is an uncommon and shy little bird, one that ornithologists lump with other ‘lbj’s’ (little brown jobs) that are hard to spot and harder to identify even if you are lucky enough to see one. Like many self-effacing insect-eating warblers, it skulks. Fortunately, it has a very distinctive song, a continuous churr, something like the rasping of the insect that gives the common name to this elusive bird. I must have heard the unusual song and located its general direction, and all those finely honed senses came into play; another of the elevated tussocks made by some variety of tough sedge hid a well-woven nest constructed of strands of grass, from which one egg was removed rapidly – a pretty, rosy-brown speckled affair. I glowed with satisfaction for hours. After the ritual of cleaning, it was placed into the collection in its own little cubicle, safe on a bed of sawdust.

  In 1954 collecting birds’ eggs became illegal for species other than those that might be considered pests. I have no idea whether my grasshopper warbler find was made shortly before, or shortly after the enactment of the Protection of Birds Act. I do know that collecting that egg would now be a criminal act, but even then I paid a high price for my discovery. Guilt arrived in my childhood and, like inoculation, it never goes away.

  My primary school on Pitshanger Lane, on the west side of London in Ealing, was rather a stern building of yellow brick with formal classrooms and wooden desks, and surrounded by a decent slab of tarmac to serve as a playground. It was within walking distance of suburban Ainsdale Road where we lived. I had already been to another school in the more distant suburb of Greenford, about which I recall nothing except a small boy pulling down his pants in class and weeing with enthusiasm, and a teacher becoming exasperated by my inability to learn to tie my own shoelaces, a task I found almost as difficult as managing to work a fishing rod. I think I must have spent most of my time in a kind of amiable fuzz. In due time I arrived at Pitshanger Lane. I assume the teaching was efficient, because I became a good reader at an early age. Playtime was announced by the ringing of several bells echoing in the corridors, and everyone belted outside. A boy known as Piggy Pearson led the gang that everybody wanted to belong to, but I was never invited. While Piggy’s gang ran around shouting ‘BANG! BANG! YOU’RE DEAD’ I preferred to hang out with several girls and two small boys who were prepared to listen to my stories.

  One day I was summoned to the headmistress’s office. Miss Long was a serious woman soberly dressed whose smile never seemed entirely convincing. Headmistresses then were not meant to be twinkly. There was a complete lack of twinkle when I was instructed to occupy a small chair in front of her. She put on her glasses, framed in black. ‘How would you feel’, she asked, quietly, ‘if you were picked up by a fierce giant and plucked out from your hou
se?’ All I recall is the intensity of the stare through her glasses. This was the ‘basilisk stare’ of P. G. Wodehouse’s fearsome aunts, but instead of turning to stone I turned to jelly. I cannot recall my reply, but it must have been along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t like it, Miss Long.’ Her face hardened. ‘This is what you do when you rob a bird’s nest! And I know you rob birds’ nests.’ Somebody had dobbed me in. I could not explain the finer points of taking only one egg and not disturbing the birds that I loved more than anything. I certainly could not explain how the hunt refined my nascent scientific instincts. I had neither the will nor the presence of mind. I was a robber. I was a destroyer of helpless families. I was a giant bringing death and destruction. I knew guilt, and guilt made me writhe and made tears well up. And Miss Long did not even know about the grasshopper warbler.

  I think I know who spilled the beans. A boy in my road had junior membership of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which was running a campaign against egg robbers. The Society was prominent in getting the law changed. I don’t imagine that my young contemporary contacted Miss Long himself, but his father was something important like a bank manager and not inclined to think that there might be more than one way of looking at things. I suspect he picked up the telephone. I arrived home in tears, and my mother was furious. She was more or less convinced of my perfection in all respects, and my distraught little face was more than she could bear. I think there must have been a subsequent scene at North Ealing Junior School in Pitshanger Lane. It was not long before I was taken away to a different school, and I suppose that Miss Long must have been part of the reason, but, as usual, nothing was said at home. When I asked what had happened in later years I was offered a different scenario. I was, said my mother, such a dreamer, that my parents thought I would never pass the 11-plus examination that was the passport to grammar school, and a superior education. So off I went to the junior school of the City of London School for Boys, an excellent private school in the middle of London, which was, of course, a fee-paying public school, according to the topsy-turvy nomenclature that is such a speciality of the English. I was nine years old, and I do not remember collecting any bird’s egg ever again.

  Armed with The Observer’s Book of British Birds I was now just that – an observer. I have remained so. One of the first birds I spotted near my new school was a black redstart that had moved into a City bombsite left by the Luftwaffe. It was as rare as the grasshopper warbler. I didn’t seek out its eggs. Today, I doubt that I retain the skills to discover any small nest deeply hidden among a tangle of brambles. The eight-year-old boy would have got there first.

  My father’s old egg collection, complete with its grasshopper warbler, simply disappeared. This is some sort of tragedy. It is illegal to trade in British birds’ eggs, so it certainly was not ‘sold on’. My mother may have accidentally dropped it during one of her many moves. However, the RSPB has encouraged the destruction of some of these collections, and that could well have been its fate. The disappearance of a century-old collection fillets a data source that might have provided a closer look at the time and pace of change affecting British avifauna. My father sampled Worcestershire when most grown-up naturalists were fighting in the trenches. Those records are gone, filed now only in my memory. Was there really a corncrake egg? Memories are fallible. Collections are archives of what was there, regardless of moral judgements about the way the specimens were collected. Although the incident of the grasshopper warbler still tweaks a guilty nerve I am not the only scientist to be sceptical about the role of egg collecting in the decline of British birds, just as I don’t believe my sister picking marsh orchids had anything to do with their virtual disappearance from the Lambourn Valley.

  The garden of our house in Ainsdale Road was full of birds: Ealing was a leafy suburb. My mother often emphasised that our road was in postal district W5 rather than W13, an area that she regarded as rather downmarket. She should have known; she was brought up on the smarter side of Ealing, when it lay almost at the edge of London. Ealing Broadway station was the terminus of the District Line in the west and pre-dated other Underground lines that came to link distant villages like Ruislip into the city. I don’t suppose birds cared which postal district they were flying through, although I expect the ones in W5 had better vowels. Our garden thronged with house sparrows: Cockney sparrows. The cheerful ‘chip chip’ of the house sparrow was a perpetual presence around the garden; any morsel dropped by chance was seized in a second: chip chip (‘ta guv’nor’). We had a large garden for London, with a pond that was forever leaking, and a couple of apple trees that were assailed by bullfinches when the blossom was about to burst in April – they just seemed to delight in destroying the buds. House sparrows and bullfinches have grossly declined since our Ealing days.

  Before our family owned Primrose Cottage, fly fishing was conducted from a caravan parked in a field on the Pococks’ farm at Woodspeen, just down the road from Boxford, towards Newbury. The two Fortey children ran wild through the farm with the Pocock kids, Roger and Susan. We made camps out of bales of straw, and we jumped from great heights into beds of hay. The Friesian bull was admired – from a safe distance. We spotted huge rats in the cavernous old barn, and they were always heading off furtively somewhere else. There was plenty of mud about, and our knees were usually filthy. We were free to wander over the fields and into the abandoned chalk quarry; cuts and bruises were a small price to pay for unfettered exploration. Nobody thought about hidden perverts. My sister discovered ponies. On the farm, sparrows flitted in small gangs everywhere, arguing amongst themselves. Their scruffy nests were stuffed into the eaves of outbuildings, and Tony the farmer occasionally poked them out, but the sparrows seemed unconcerned. They were back in a week or two. Neater nests of summer swallows perched on the cross beams in the barn. The aerobatics of the swallows provided an unremarked background to our adventures. Just above the farm a tiny single track railway line ran between Newbury and Lambourn: what might have been the smallest station in the world – Woodspeen Halt – was apparently there just to serve the farm. It was little more than a bare platform with a noticeboard. Every two hours a tiny train rattled along the track, but I never saw it pick up a passenger at the Halt. This little spur off the Great Western Railway must have been the least economically profitable line in Britain; a few years later it was axed by Dr Beeching.[1] Between trains, the track was part of our domain. Thorn bushes had grown up alongside the railway cutting, and in early summer it seemed that every bush included a singing bird. High-pitched recitals of ‘a little bit of bread and no cheeeese’ progressed in rough sequence along the trackside – the song of the yellowhammer (bunting if you prefer), and it was part of the indispensable music of summer. It was easier to appreciate the song than to identify the yellow face and red-brown back of the bird itself, tucked behind a bush. Small boys are not statisticians, and memory may decorate the past with more than a lick of paint, but I am certain that there were a dozen yellowhammers requesting the passer-by for bread without cheese along the small piece of railway track close to Woodspeen Farm. It was a common bird. In the twenty-first century it has become almost scarce. My attempts to teach my children to recognise the yellowhammer’s song – as my father once taught me – have been frustrated, although I still discover a few birds in the Chiltern Hills every year. The decline of this charming omnivore has not been because of the activities of egg collectors; in fact, the downturn in this, and many other species of birds, has happened since 1954. The disappearance of their food is surely the cause; after all, there are still plenty of bushes for them to occupy. Once more I recall the difference between two car journeys to the River Itchen half a lifetime apart: the first with my father, windscreen spattered with fat corpses at the end; the second with a body count hardly worth mentioning.

  * * *

  If I felt most alive in the countryside, for much of the time I was just a small boy in a London suburb. Ainsdale Road could be the e
xample of the 1930s expansion of London westwards, part of an extensive development of similar-looking streets that stretched all the way to Park Royal station on the Piccadilly Line. That distinctive Underground station made it into Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Buildings of England as a pioneering piece of modernism. None of the houses on the estate that included my childhood home would have earned a mention in any guide: they were uniformly unremarkable. Even the most optimistic estate agent could not talk of a wealth of period features. Bay windows at the front, and French windows at the back, a perfunctory bit of exposed timber: that was the extent of their art deco embellishment. Ours was a semi, inseparable from a nearly identical neighbour, like a Siamese twin. A small brick wall separated a modest front garden from the quiet road lined on both sides with similar houses; a garage (with a shared drive) indicated that these were houses for people who could afford a car. The wealthier inhabitants had four bedrooms. Three bedrooms was the norm, like ours: an utterly undistinguished but comfortable home redeemed by a large back garden. Travellers returning by air to Heathrow glimpse uncountable similar estates from far above, where they seem to be draped around the Victorian cores of London’s first great expansion. They house millions of people. My mother remembered the houses being built, spreading outwards beyond Perivale to Greenford ‘like a rash’, she said. When she was a little girl Greenford was a village without electric light. It was an expedition to go there.