My Natural History

by Simon Barnes

  Parenthood is not an abandonment of responsibility: it is the exact opposite. But it is not something you get on your own terms. You have responsibility without power. You can oppress and bully and push, as some parents do, but you can’t create a personality because it’s already there. Perhaps you can destroy one: but that’s not something many of us want to investigate.

  We trundled up and down that path as spring arrived, and I told Joe about the birds that sang and the plants that flowered. And soon Joe no longer needed the trundler to stay upright, but he took it anyway, for the security and for the love of ritual and for the pleasure of the ride home. We would identify the three species of train, and watch the rabbits at their evening graze, great fat contented things, living within touching distance of the crazy and destructive world that humans have created, and yet somehow immune from it: safe in a land of plenty, a fence to keep out danger, and no ambition but to stay in it for ever. All I wanted was to create a country like that for my son: but that, like the son himself, was beyond my control. We turned for home: Joe in the brick-bed of the trundler, knees up round his ears, and me bent in half as I pushed him back up the hill.

  19. Sea otter

  Enhydra lutris

  The art of travel is the art of sanity. It’s an exercise in clinging onto your soul in the face of mighty opposition. It is not easy: mostly because people who do a lot of travelling tend to be, to a greater or lesser extent, neurotic. You have to be slightly nuts or the constant changes of the travelling life would have no appeal: on the other hand, if you start out slightly nuts, the job of keeping sane is all the more challenging. You have to master logistics, and you have to master personal comfort.

  Each traveller has his own method, tested over time until it becomes a matter of curious pride. The methodology of travel is an extension of the self, an expression, at least ostensibly, of all the better parts of one’s personality. And unfortunately for everybody else, it is something most travellers talk about ad nauseam.

  Oh yes, always get the last flight of the day out of JFK, and before getting the cab, have an early supper; I always used that place opposite the Lincoln Center. I would check in, requesting an aisle seat, and then consume two Wild Turkeys on the rocks in the bar. Once on the plane, I would pull a hoarded sleep-mask from my pocket and, refusing all food and drink, attempt to sleep until we were told to stow our tray tables and place our seatbacks in the upright position. I could give you a great deal more detail, in the unlikely event that this were of the slightest interest, most of it designed to tell you how fabulous I am and how provincial and inadequate most other people are in comparison. For I was, for a while, fairly utterly fabulous: a Times-lord, a Times-traveller exploring the far reaches of sporting space and time for my newspaper, jaywalking at my ease across the stratosphere.

  So I had a special place for my travel documents, and another for my wallet with credit cards, and still another for the accreditation I needed to get into the sporting events. And I would have my carry-on baggage meticulously filled with things that could not be trusted to the hold (laptop, binoculars, latterly phone charger) plus journey comforts (books, Walkman, tapes, latterly iPod) and on and on and on.

  Then to the hotel. You must establish some kind of claim over your room, somehow plaster your name over its anonymity. If I was staying more than a couple of days, I would always unpack a few things: certainly the books, for I always travel with an inordinate number. Thus I would cruise about the sporting world, the Goldberg Variations on the headphones, a guidebook to the places I was visiting and a raft of heavyweight literature which I read even when people weren’t looking, all the time worrying about departure times and connections and reservations and taxis and deadlines and the question of being able to write anything at all.

  And there would be great days and there would be OK days and there would be days of nightmare: all of them coming in that exaggeratedly high relief that comes with being away from home. And I loved it: I loved the adventure, I loved the self-importance, I loved the sport, I loved the writing. But increasingly, that wasn’t enough: because I also loved the birding.

  The books were always the heaviest part of my baggage, and I would always take a bird book, sometimes two if I were travelling, say, to the eastern and to the western United States. I remember visiting Foyle’s before my first long-haul sporting trip, and buying for a wince-making £25 A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago by the majestically named Richard ffrench. I went to Trinidad to write the final chapter of a biography of the England cricketer, Phil Edmonds, and to write some pieces for The Times. The publishers bought the plane ticket, the rest I found myself.

  The year was 1986; the West Indies team were both dominant and ruthless; the England team were in disarray and on their way to a 5-0 defeat in the series: a blackwash. I reported fragments of this story with some enthusiasm, while the Times cricket correspondent, John Woodcock, gave his own measured censure. And no matter how hard we tried, everything kept coming back to the extraordinary Ian Botham: brilliant, inspired, impetuous, a man with no self-critical faculties whatsoever, raucous, pigheaded, a strident alpha male with a taste for assembling a court of admirers around himself, a hugely likeable man when he turned on the charm, as I was to discover later, but also a man to beware of, always a man with a hint of danger about him.

  In those quaint old days, the press and the players stayed in the same hotel. (Not me: I was staying in a guest house up in the hills of Malabar.) Journos and players would mingle amicably in the bar of an evening, in a manner unthinkable today. But Botham was never among them. He was the first cricketer to attract the tabloid news hounds on a regular basis, and he decided that the best way to avoid trouble was to lurk in his room with a few chosen companions. This self-incarceration was torment to him, and it didn’t work, either, for he found scandal in the next leg of the tour when the team went to Barbados. (As a point of information, Botham always denied that anything untoward took place between himself and Miss Barbados, and says that the story that they broke a bed together is untrue.) He was a man oppressed and unhappy, out of sorts with himself and out of touch with his game. At the second Test of the series, played in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Botham made two in the first innings, one in the second. He was out at the moment when England looked as if they might just make a decent fist of things. It was a blow from which England never recovered, in the match and in the series. Botham knew he would be condemned for his failure, and as he walked off the pitch, he turned towards the press box and made a mime of a man suspending himself from a noose. Go on then, you bastards, hang me. It was the big story of the day: of the match.

  A news cameraman caught this exit on camera and then had the wit to pan towards the press box to capture the stony faces of his judges, all turned solemnly and sadly towards the failed hero. The film was shown on the national news back in Britain, and the nation observed that one journalist was not gazing at Botham. Alas, the camera clearly showed someone hanging out of the press box with binoculars trained on something at 90 degrees to the action. I even remember what bird it was: a crested oropendola. You can see it on the cover of the old editions of Ffrench’s book: a chunky black thing with a blazing comet-tail of yellow.

  In that moment, I was skewered for ever, caught exactly as I am for all time: a man stuck between two worlds. Just like the human race, really: one half wrapped up in the affairs of humankind, the other half swept into the wilder world beyond. As a writer, too, I was neatly sliced in half in that instant, as if by a magician: Botham holding one end of the saw and the oropendola the other.

  The oropendola set a pattern, and I have followed it throughout my professional life. I would watch sport with delight, but with my eyes constantly escaping, attracted to a movement in the sky. I like to think that my involvement in two wildly different worlds has been an advantage, each side informing the other, taking away the strait and blinkered vision of the specialist. But I wonder also if my life as a professional
writer has not been fatally split: perhaps a too-wide fascination with too many different things has compromised any ability I might have.

  These thrilling but slightly ludicrous collisions between the sporting life and the wild have happened all over the world, and I have always treasured them. I have a long shelf of field guides, comparatively few of them bought for purpose-built wildlife trips. Instead, I have lugged them around in the hope of chance encounters in the midst of all those sporting journeys, in search of moments that would lift the day beyond the human and the humdrum. I remember receiving not one but two phone calls during the football World Cup of 1994 in the United States, after a match at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena: both from colleagues on other papers wanting to know what bird it was that had flown so ominously across the stadium with a dead lizard in its claws. I was delighted to tell them it was a red-tailed hawk: disappointing them, I suspect, because they wanted it to be a vulture or an eagle, for this was a match fraught with significance. Colombia, pre-tournament favourites, were eliminated after their match against the United States, in which it seemed Colombia didn’t try a yard. Pablo Escobar scored an own goal and was assassinated when he got home to Medellin. An augury is, by etymology, a truth revealed by the behaviour of birds.

  But more often, the encounters with birds and other forms of wildlife have been pleasingly random. I have always savoured birds that entered the stadium and became participants in the drama: a shikra at the Wankhede Stadium in Bombay; a lesser kestrel at the Stadium of Light in Lisbon; alpine swift over the Olympic complex in Athens; red-rumped swallow in the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing.

  Whenever possible, I would seek relief from the intensity of travel, the pressure of work and the thrilling self-regard of sport, of humankind and of myself, and play truant. I would cease to be a swaggering hard-travellin’ professional sportswriter and become a birder: a nerd, in the eyes of all save myself. I would enter the phone box and willingly emerge as Clark Kent. And so I found roseate spoonbill near a rubbish incinerator in Florida, New World warblers in Central Park, cinnamon teal in LA.

  My New York rituals changed. For some years, I had a dizzying if one-sided love affair with New York: oh yes, ten minutes in the place and I was a tough-talking New Yorker myself. I knew special places to eat and drink, remarkable places to buy stuff, fabulous places to walk and hang out. New York became a kind of Venice to me, an impossible, magical and utterly romantic place in which exoticisms could be found at every step. The enthralling bookshops seldom saw me pass them by, and I bought a many books about the wild world: Gould, Singer, Moss, Schaller, Ridley, Tudge, de Waal, Wilson.

  But in the midst of this love affair, I found an intoxication beyond the 50-block strolls down Fifth Avenue, the hanging-out in East Village, the pavement beers as I watched New York’s endless parade of the gorgeous and the mad. I found an escape: one which both nullified the city and made it still more wonderful. I would get the subway. I would take the clanking A train away from Manhattan, away from my hotel on Central Park West, fancying myself no end of an intercontinental adventurer as I did so, a train going either to Rockaway Park or Far Rockaway, wonderful romantic destinations, but I would get off before the line split, at the more prosaically named Broad Channel, and walk through an utterly changed landscape of wind-blasted wooden houses with plastic bags rolling down the street like tumbleweed, a lost sad place in which you constantly expected to meet Kurt Vonnegut heroes selling storm windows.

  The big sky was filled with planes, for this was almost beneath the flight path of JFK. I would walk briskly through these streets, as far, it seemed, from downtown Manhattan as the moon, and make my way to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, and there I would see birds: the more beautiful, the more remarkable, for their proximity to the city. The refuge covers getting on for 10,000 acres, and more than 300 species have been seen there: and I saw plenty on various visits in various seasons: redstarts, willets, night herons, egrets, scaups.

  But I remember it best on a wild winter’s day when the wind whistled through the canyons of Manhattan, and leaving the bars, or even my hotel room, seemed an act of folly. But acts of folly have always been something I am good at, and so I walked, trained, walked: and then stumped around the refuge, collar of my townie coat around my ears, relishing the birds, the scenery, the big sky, my own bravery, my own folly. And then, just to reward me, just as I was turning to leave, the dusk came and birds began to fall from the sky: big white birds with black-tipped wings. The snow geese were coming: and my heart rejoiced: bird after bird after bird, a wild world with the most citified city of them all just a train ride away. My crazily split professional life seemed validated in that long moment as the fine plump birds descended in their fine fat numbers.

  Other days, other journeys, other truancies. Ground hornbills on a lightning trip to the Masai Mara, when I had been in Nairobi writing about Kenyan runners. Black kites over a Zen temple in Japan during the World Cup of 2002. Painted stork in a trip to Bharatpur during a cricket tournament. Great crested grebes, seen during a break in the cricket at Nottingham. During the Olympic Games of 2008, I even wrote my weekly wildlife column from Beijing. In the three and a half weeks I compiled a list of 13 birds, later amended to 12; I decided later that the barn swallows I claimed were all red-rumped. Even here, even amidst the enthralling craziness and the glorious wall-to-wall 16-hours-a-day action of the Olympic Games, I found the odd moment to look skywards. The sky was mostly filled with smog and dragonflies and those red-rumped swallows, but on two occasions I saw a falcon: a hobby, a dashing and thrilling killer that eats both dragonflies and swallows.

  I have been known to push these things too far. Like the time I was covering Nigel Mansell’s first taste of motor-racing in the United States in 1993. He was testing at Laguna Seca raceway in Monterrey, California, and I watched him in the morning, did the press conference and got the story, and then, while he was at it again in the afternoon, I slipped off to walk along the seafront. The sea lions barked and plunged, but I was looking for something else. I found it when I found the right bar. It was at the end of a pier, and I sat there drinking Mexican beer and gazing out at the kelp-beds: and there they were, sea otters swimming and playing and feeding, so lovely that I longed to swim out into the ocean and join them. I peered through my binoculars, pausing occasionally to order another beer, while the sea otters lay on their backs in the water, cracking abalone shells with stones on their tums in the time-honoured sea otter way. And they were glorious and the world was ditto, and I had another beer, and said to myself: this is fine. This is wonderful. This is perfect. And to think you are being paid to do this!

  It was with a douche of horror that I remembered I was in fact being paid to write about Mansell, and I needed to file copy within two hours. A further douche: what if he had killed himself in afternoon practice and I never knew? This would have been the ultimate journalistic cock-up. I ran incontinently back to my hotel and rang Mansell’s fixer, for this was in the time before mobile phones. I got through first time and was told that Mansell had set a new lap record for Laguna Seca and gone home happy, saying nothing more. And so I wrote my story and filed it, my mind occasionally flitting back to those fabulous fat sinuous beasts that plied their trade among the long strands of kelp: the furriest animal on the planet, for the thickness of their coats wards off the ocean chills. I had, I knew, stolen something. I had stolen a fragment of wild from the routine of the tame. Pausing only to acknowledge to God that I owed Him one, I hammered out a really fairly decent tale, in content if not in style. I was told that I had done well: just how well, I kept to myself.

  20. Tiger

  Panthera tigris

  For some years I shared my house with a tiger. Well, he was only intermittently a tiger, but the times when he was a tiger were profoundly significant for us both. I remember the first time: he was at his grandmother’s house and came across a tiger mask. Not precisely a mask: it was more like a hold-the-front-page green eyeshade, bu
t with tiger stripes on the peak and a superstructure that included tigrine eyes and ears. It was a mask, then, without the claustrophobia of masks, and Eddie regarded it gravely for some time. When I helped him put it on, as much for my own amusement as his, the transformation, the transfiguration took place. Eddie roared. He made his fingers into claws and roared again. After that, for once Eddie has taken a fancy to a notion he is reluctant to let it go, he spent a great deal of the evening roaring and it seemed likely that we would need to get the tiger mask surgically removed before he went to bed.

  Eddie is my second son, and he has Down’s syndrome. Animals have been as important in his growing up as they have been for Joe, as they are for every developing human. The signing system of Makaton has been of immense importance to him, and among the first signs he was able to do (after biscuit) were cat and dog. To sign cat, you draw whiskers on your face with your finger-tips, to sign dog, you stab downwards, paw-like, with two fingers on each hand.