A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  When finally I do drag my gaze away from them, I realise that behind the sounds of the gathered birds, the motorway has been keeping up its distant roar, trains have been clattering past on the way to Exeter and Plymouth, Land Rovers have been splashing through the little lake that’s spreading onto the main road, and dog-walkers have been taking advantage of the lack of traffic to let their animals off the leash.

  This whole extraordinary circus of avian life has been happening just yards away from all the paraphernalia of the modern world. The birds, in their way, have learned to live with it, even to take advantage of it, where they can. For all that we (quite rightly) blame ourselves for the decline of many species, we’re also the reason why many of them are there in the first place.

  Take the skylark, a species beloved of poets for its song and, until recently, emblematic of the downlands and open country of lowland Britain. In recent years it has undergone a worrying decline, with farming practices among the reasons blamed, but it would never have been so widespread and ubiquitous in these islands in the first place if man hadn’t cleared the forests to allow sheep and cattle to graze.

  Or the house sparrow, another bird that has suffered a huge drop in numbers and range in the last couple of decades. Again, our changing agricultural methods, along with modern building technology and the fashion for tidy gardens covered in decking, are blamed for what has happened, but the bird’s very name suggests that it has long depended on the presence of man for both food and lodging. It must, of course, have originally managed without either, but thousands of years of living cheek by jowl have forged a complicated symbiotic relationship.

  We Britons are proud of our tendency to self-deprecation. We’re suspicious of anyone and anything that proclaims its virtues, its presence even, too loudly, and this attitude extends into the world of birdwatching. On the one hand that’s down to necessity. We don’t have the plethora of brightly coloured, sharply plumaged birds that you find in the tropics or around the Mediterranean; so if you’re going to make a habit of watching birds in the British Isles, you’d better be able to get excited at the sight of what are rather disparagingly referred to as LBJs – Little Brown Jobs.

  But standing here, watching the birds swarming across every inch of the Levels that’s still above water, it occurs to me that we take the same view of birds as a whole, not just the individual creatures. We see them in our gardens, or on a walk in the country, we feed them and make notes on them, photograph and paint them. Some of us even write poems about them.

  Only rarely, though, do we consider birds en masse. A great many experienced birdwatchers will tell you that Britain has little to compare with the great spectacles of the bird world. We have no large-scale migration bottlenecks to compare with Falsterbo in Sweden, or Tarifa in Spain. We have no massive gatherings of majestic cranes, such as you might see in Israel’s Hula Valley, or in central Europe. There are no opportunities to watch noisy crowds of gaudy, bickering parrots, as at the clay-licks of Central and South America. And what do we have as an equivalent of the crack-of-dawn explosions of colour that are the cock-of-the-rock leks of Ecuador, or Peru?

  Away to the north, just about where I know the M5 must be, a little cloud of black specks is starting to form, growing almost imperceptibly with every twist and turn. For a minute or two, it struggles to take shape, threatens to fall apart under the multiplicity of different instincts and urges contained within, then suddenly attains critical mass, a point at which every starling within sight decides that, if it’s to make it through the coming night, it needs to be part of it.

  And as I watch, a thought starts to take shape, hesitantly at first, but with growing conviction and confidence. These are our spectacles. What they might sometimes (and it is only sometimes) lack in colour, size and grandeur, they make up for by being all around us on these crowded islands as we go about our everyday lives. Often all that’s required for us to see them, to be a part of them, is to stand still for a moment or two, and watch, and listen. Even when there’s a bit more travel involved, or a longer wait, we’re not talking about day-long treks into the back of beyond, or enduring terrible privations. These are wildlife spectacles that take place within our everyday world. That depend on being part of it, in some cases.

  By the time I reach the car again, my decision is made. What does a year’s worth of Britain’s greatest bird spectacles look and sound like? I’m about to find out.

  1 The Mating Game

  It starts with a singleton, of course. A solitary bird, drifting on the edge of a loose group in midwinter. It’s cold, and the days are short, so there’s little time to spare from the constant struggle to find food, but when the sun breaks through the scattered cloud around midday, and briefly summons up enough strength to send steam rising from the puddles along the lakeside path, the chances are that the bird’s thoughts turn to other things.

  One other thing, to be exact. The propagation of its own genetic material, and so the survival of the species. When you’re a bird facing umpteen natural and unnatural threats to your safety (and most do), as well as stiff competition for nesting sites and food, it does to think ahead.

  In the case of this particular bird, a great crested grebe, pairing off is a process that happens every year. Not for it the sort of lifelong partnerships you get with some species, such as corvids. The aforementioned competition for nest sites contributes to the instability of pairs, with the parent birds often going their separate ways at just about the same time the young leave home in late summer. They could end up with the same partner the following year, of course – individual birds are always likely to return to both wintering and breeding sites that they know – but it’s far from guaranteed.

  And that’s as far as it goes, for now. A thought, no more than that, as fleeting as the flock of long-tailed tits flitting through the nearby trees (in an example of the many and varied breeding strategies developed by birds, they will likely be a tight-knit family group). But it is a thought that will return with increasing frequency as the winter draws on. Our bird disappears beneath the dark, icy waters, back in pursuit of the fuel of life.

  It’s a couple of weeks later, and bitterly cold. There’s a full moon jewelling the thick frost on the verges and tarmac all the way from Grantown-on-Spey. Early starts in the Scottish Highlands, even in late spring, can require layers of wool, fleece and Gore-Tex. In late January, that’s doubly true.

  Nobody’s thinking about the temperature, though, and that’s nothing to do with the noisy fan pumping heat into the hire car. Huddled beneath our beanie hats, all four of us are running and re-running half-a-dozen key ID characteristics through our minds, even though we know there’s not much we could mistake for what we’re seeking.

  When we reach the sign welcoming us to Nethy Bridge, our silence deepens, and the tension tightens a notch or two further. We turn up through the village, into Abernethy Forest, and without being told each of us turns to stare into the pine-darkened reaches of the woods, two to each side of the car, which slows to little more than walking pace. Each time we reach an opening to one of the rides that criss-cross the forest, we stop for just long enough to satisfy ourselves that the dark shape in the middle of the track is only a fallen branch or, on one occasion, that the sudden flurry of movement is nothing more than a red squirrel.

  Red squirrel! On any other day, seeing this elusive and charismatic native mammal would be reward enough for rising long before dawn and forgoing tea and porridge at the hotel. Long since forced from large parts of Britain by the bigger, North American grey squirrel, which carries diseases the reds are helpless against, and out-competes it for food, the red squirrel hangs on in good numbers in the mountain fastnesses of Scotland, thanks in part to the presence of pine martens, which can prey easily on the heavier greys, but which the lightweight reds can escape by climbing to the furthest, thinnest branches.

  What we’re looking for today has an even more tenuous grasp on survival in these islands. C
apercaillies are our largest game birds by some distance, with an appearance that might be described as that of a black grouse on steroids, or even a rather more handsome version of a turkey. The name, from the Gaelic, means ‘horse of the woods’, and gives some impression of the size of the bird, and the noise it can make. The folk names of birds are often more interesting than the official moniker, but in this case the labels ‘wood grouse’ and ‘heather cock’ sell this striking bird very short.

  Males are notoriously territorial, to the extent that they’ve been known to attack people and even Land Rovers, and this also means they’re not overly fond of living in close proximity to their own kind. Combine a low population density with a preference for habitat that is relatively rare, and you have a recipe for slow but sure extinction.

  In fact, capercaillies have already been extinct in Britain once, in the eighteenth century, the result of over-hunting and the clearance of large areas of forest, before being reintroduced in Scotland in the 1830s. This population prospered to the extent that the bird again became the target of shooters. In more recent decades, hunting has ended, but deer fences and over-grazing of the forest understorey have added to the pressure on the species. The pine marten, too, might not be helping – with no larger mammalian predators to keep them in the trees, as happens elsewhere in Europe where wolves and lynxes are present, they take the eggs of ground-nesting birds such as the ‘caper’.

  All this has added up to a worrying decline, from around 20,000 birds in the 1970s, to around 1,000 now. Conservation organisations are addressing the problem, but it’s a touch-and-go situation.

  But they’re surviving in Scotland, at least. Sightings are hard to come by, especially on public land and the main reserves, and private estates are often the best places to look. But they’re out there. Somewhere.

  Today we’re lucky. Sort of. A long odyssey through the forest, by road, track and narrow footpath, produces not a single male. We call in at the known lek sites – a lek being a sort of arena for the purposes of territorial posturing and sexual braggadocio – but to no effect. It will, admittedly, be easier to see them as the year draws on, yet this is still a disappointment.

  But as we edge along one path around the perimeter of a little clearing, there’s a sudden flurry of movement a few yards away, and a brown, mottled shape erupts into flight, scudding low over the bell heather and bilberry, until it reaches the denser cover of the pines. The rich chestnut edges to the tail mark it out as a female capercaillie. We’re excited and relieved that at least some of the birds are around, knowing that where there are females, there should be males not too far away, and we resolve to come back another morning, soon.

  To be a birdwatcher, of any level of enthusiasm or expertise, is to live your life according to a completely different calendar from the one you grew up with. Submitting to it is no easy task, though, because it brings with it small disappointments and unexpected melancholies that can daunt even the most indomitable heart.

  There’s the moment, for example, some time in June, when you notice the first couple of leggy, awkward wading birds picking their way around the shores of your nearest reservoir or gravel pit. Whatever excitement you might initially feel about finding black-tailed godwits, or maybe greenshanks, is quickly diluted then dissipated entirely by the realisation that these are adult birds, whose breeding attempts in the north of the UK, or on the Arctic tundra of Greenland or Norway or Svalbard, have failed. Maybe they were among the unlucky ones that didn’t even manage to pair off in the first place. But whatever the reason for their presence, they’re here because there’s no time, in the brief summer of the far north, for second chances. Unable to fulfil one biological imperative – the perpetuation of their species – they’ve moved straight on to another, the urge to move south and get first choice of the prime feeding spots for the winter to come.

  Because that’s what we’re talking about. With the summer solstice still a few days away, autumn migration will be already underway. The world is turning far faster than we might suspect, and birds are always several wingbeats ahead of us in realising that fact.

  Journalists and other media types, admittedly, might find this slightly easier to deal with than most people, given that they’re used to working months in advance. After all, Christmas comes in early September, in the world of monthly magazines.

  But, for birdwatchers, this whole new timescale brings with it a corresponding consolation – or rather several. The first week of March, for example, can bring the first summer visitors to Britain into the south of these islands, with the frail, brown silhouettes of sand martins battling their way through the blustery winds like so many leaves left over from last autumn’s bonfires.

  Even before that, there are the first signs of new life. Right now, in the middle of this spirit-crushing second half of January, with the weather at its worst, the days stubbornly refusing to get longer, and the festive celebrations a dim memory, birds are getting ahead of the game. The indomitable robin, undaunted by winter or darkness, turns its song up a notch or two and pours its silvered notes into the cold air. Blue tits and chaffinches dart in and out of nest holes and boxes, bidding to secure the most desirable residences for raising a family. Grey herons’ nests clot the top branches of bare trees, and in quarries and crags ravens return to nest sites that have been their homes since the days in which they were gods, or at least the earthly messengers of the divine. And across certain areas of Scotland, the Pennines of northern England, and the hills of North Wales, black grouse are heading to their own leks with a single, unshakeable purpose.

  In many cases, black grouse will have started returning to their leks in November, or even earlier. While the females only make their appearance at these sites (and black grouse are very faithful to the same leks year after year) around the beginning of March, the males gather much earlier. That’s why, just a week or so after my failed ‘caper’ quest, I find myself in a hide looking out across Welsh moorland just before dawn. The weather – cold and crisp – is perfect, and the habitat looks just right, with forest nearby, and a scattering of individual trees intruding onto the moor.

  Dawn comes slowly on a day of scudding cloud, and it takes a good twenty minutes for a succession of impressionistic pencil marks to become the fence lines of a sheep enclosure, for a shadow to become a low shrub, and for a little jungle of bushes to become the birds we came seeking, a slight rise in the temperature seeming to suddenly thaw them from their stationary vigil.

  Each of half-a-dozen huddles of undergrowth gradually resolves itself into a male black grouse – or blackcock, to give them their old name – as our binoculars and scopes do their work, taking in the largely purple-black body, with white wing flashes, the lyre-shaped tail trailing behind, and the shockingly red wattles, the only real points of colour in a landscape still struggling to cope with the idea of day.

  While capercaillie leks may involve a solitary male – especially these days with the population in decline – black grouse can be found in much larger numbers. In some parts of eastern Europe leks can attract more than 150 males. In the UK, a group of thirty would be considered pretty exceptional, twenty would be good, and the six we can see (within minutes two more bushes transform before our eyes) make up a more than respectable count. As we’re about to find out, even eight black grouse can put on quite a show.

  We hear them announce the beginning of their strange ritual. The flight call of one of their close relatives, the red grouse, coming from somewhere close at hand, seems to set them off, and all at once our amorous adventurers are strutting back and forth, uttering their own low, liquid display call, and presumably eyeing their rivals nervously. The tails are cocked and spread wide and white, making it appear as though snow has suddenly gathered in the hollows and cwms of the little plateau, while the wattles flare brighter than ever. And once or twice a bird jumps up, briefly, onto one of the fence posts, the better to survey the scene of his planned future triumph, before return
ing to the ground and joining the others in their patient wait for the smaller, greyer females. It might be two months yet before the greyhens arrive, but the males will be back here day after day, displaying with greater and greater fervour, until all that bubbling and squeaking becomes a crouching, creeping parade punctuated with mock and occasionally real fights, in an attempt to gain the best positions in the lek, usually those closest to the centre. As a bird grows older, it generally has more chance of attaining this coveted spot. When you’re a black grouse, experience counts for everything.

  If the spectacle lacks the brilliant colour that you get with similar birds abroad, such as the two cock-of-the-rock species in South America, or the Raggiana birds-of-paradise in New Guinea, it’s all the more impressive for being so open. There’s no craning the neck to look into treetops, or around massive tree trunks, where black grouse are concerned.

  For six months, then, this lek could be the focus of their every waking moment, and once the females arrive things really gather pace. Males dash to and fro to meet multiple opponents, and although full-blooded fights don’t always result, the movement and the noise can be astonishing, with their ‘rook-oo’ call carrying loud and clear across the moors.

  Female black grouse, it’s fair to say, don’t necessarily go for the nice guys. Fighting often seems to attract them, as does mating, to the extent that they’ll often rush to a male who has just copulated with another female. Some males, every year, will miss out, and all that effort will come to nothing. Once it’s over, the males have nothing to do with the nesting, incubation and feeding of the young, so presumably they have plenty of time to reflect on their experiences and vow to do better next time around.