A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  Today, that’s in the future. Our grouse are content to stake out the arena of their showdowns to come, pacing back and forth carefully and measuring their opponents’ worth, perhaps, in the brightness of their wattles, the whiteness of their undertails, the harsh resonance of their calls, all the time calculating if they’ll be among the winners in March and April. In one respect, at least, black grouse are like birdwatchers, forced to think months ahead all the time.

  Back home in Leicestershire, the only hint that spring is little more than a month away is given by the ravens up at the nearby quarry, who are already back at their sprawling nest, adding twigs to repair the damage caused by winter winds. It’s cold, and snow is forecast, but they might have laid eggs already. It will be a hard struggle, if so, but there’s no more resourceful bird than this biggest of British crows; and there are few birds I enjoy seeing more.

  I make my way down towards the village, pausing at the little viewpoint to look across to a low, blue shadow on the western horizon. Cannock Chase. Incredible as it seems now, capercaillies were reintroduced there in the 1950s. The thought of such huge, conspicuous game birds parading around just beyond the edge of the West Midlands conurbation seems utterly ridiculous, but every now and then I’ll meet an older local birder who can remember being taken to see them as a child. For a minute or two, I imagine them lekking somewhere beneath where Rugeley power station’s cloud plume is currently flowering. At some stage, presumably, there must have been a single remaining male, doing his thing for fewer and fewer females, and then none, and then silence.

  Oppressed a little by this thought, I make my way along what used to be a railway track but is now a footpath hemmed in by trees and hedges, leading to the leisure centre. Beyond a playing field, I have the choice to turn right, across a little stream and back past the cemetery to my house, or left, to walk round the little fishing lake behind the local leisure centre.

  When I was a child, this latter was little more than a large, muddy puddle, part of one of the many open-cast mines or brickworks that dotted the area. When the area was eventually landscaped to form part of the leisure-centre grounds, they deepened the lake, made the banks a bit more solid, and stuck an artificial island, soon garlanded by trees, in the middle.

  Wherever you go in the world, water attracts birds of all types. Waterbirds especially, of course, and it wasn’t long before the lake had its own population of mallards and Canada geese, utterly used to humankind and more than willing to beg for bread and other scraps from whoever came near. The geese, in fact, can be pretty aggressive when they want to be.

  Then, around 1997, when I was twenty-seven, and a year or so after I’d been born again as a birdwatcher, I was walking round the banks of this little lake while on a weekend visit back to the old town. The geese tried their luck, barring my way in a transparent attempt to extort bread, only backing off, with a hiss, at the last moment. Mallards splashed around doing what mallards do, which involves a distinctly Neanderthal approach to courtship (the unfortunate females are sometimes drowned during these distressingly violent episodes). But out on the lake, just at the far end of the island, something quite different was happening.

  Two birds glided gracefully and silently through the water, one a little ahead of the other. Just a little smaller than the mallards, dark-bodied, and with long, elegant necks that instantly set them apart from any of the ducks. I walked towards them, and before I got much closer I could see an even more obvious distinguishing feature. The white face of each bird was topped by black, backswept plumes that they occasionally raised and fanned a little, but which were generally left flat to ruffle a little in the wind, while the finishing touch was the chestnut and black ‘tippets’ that irresistibly called to mind Elizabethan gentlemen, or the elaborate costume of some medieval clergyman.

  Great crested grebes. Because they were pictured in the opening pages of my field guide, I was absolutely familiar with how they looked, but while I’d seen them a few times before, way out in the middle of reservoirs usually, I was utterly unprepared to find them here.

  This was more due to the long hiatus in my birding career than the bird’s actual level of rarity, or rather lack of it. Great crested grebes, you see, had quietly been staging one of British ornithology’s great comebacks. In the Victorian era, they were slaughtered in their tens of thousands for the plumage trade, with a predictably catastrophic effect on numbers. Fortunately, before it was too late, this largest of the western hemisphere’s grebes (a family of highly specialised diving birds) became the focus of what might be the most successful conservation campaign of all time.

  That might sound like an extravagant claim, given that there are still only six thousand or so pairs in the UK. But the successful efforts of a group of mainly well-to-do ladies to save this beautiful creature were to lead to something bigger than they could possibly have imagined. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds was born out of it, and not much more than a century later the RSPB boasts over 1.1 million members. Large areas of the UK are owned and managed by the charity, with all wildlife, not just birds, in mind; its reserves attract new generations of birdwatchers to take up the hobby and the cause; and its members are ignored by politicians at their peril.

  Six thousand pairs isn’t an immense amount, but great crested grebes are never going to be as numerous as, say, mallards. Each pair needs a significant amount of water to provide food for them and their young, and they like their own space. They’re widespread, rather than numerous, but that means that most people in the UK live within easy reach of places where they can be found.

  Significantly, in the last few decades, they’ve spread into the sort of locations that, a century ago, no self-respecting great crested grebe would have even considered. Gravel pits and city centre park ponds are now just as likely to provide a home for these distinctly aristocratic-looking birds as the lakes of stately homes. That’s partly due to population pressure – more birds surviving means that some will have to be a little less fussy about their habitat than in the past. But it’s also, perhaps, a small tribute to the conservation-minded British public. Old industrial sites and purely utilitarian stretches of water are, more often than previously, allowed to develop a certain amount of ‘wildness’. While we could still do a lot better on this count, in the case of the great crested grebe the little we have done brings with it a great bonus for the birdwatcher.

  In winter, the grebes retain their sleek, elegant lines, but that collar-cum-mantle and the extraordinary tufts are nowhere to be seen. The birds occasionally gather in good numbers at such times, especially at sites such as Rutland Water, but by early spring they’re back at their breeding sites.

  They have particular requirements for these. Water up to five metres deep, and at least a hectare of open water per pair, while vegetation around the banks is tolerated as long as the waters aren’t too narrow. The nest is a heap of aquatic vegetation, the majority of it underwater, floating and occasionally tethered to a branch or trunk, and although it’ll be concealed in reeds where possible, on occasion it will be worryingly open and vulnerable.

  The leisure-centre lake, unglamorous as it was, fulfilled all those criteria. First one, then another bird, must have come across it and deemed it suitable, and the pair I saw were probably fairly recent colonists. But life is instantly easier for the birds at such a site than at a large reservoir. The lake’s only big enough for one pair, and its small size means that it would take some finding in the first place, so the male has the luxury of facing no immediate competition. Female grebes, like the females of most bird species, can be fussy nonetheless. They have to be. They need to know that they’re choosing a mate that will pass on good genes, and that will help them to perpetuate their own genes.

  In many species this might be done by assessing the brightness and colour of the male’s plumage. In others it might be by taking note of the relative size of certain parts of the plumage – in swallows, for example, males with long
er tail streamers do better in the reproductive stakes, even though the streamers are a hindrance to them in the business of flying and catching insects. Known as the handicap principle, this works by the female seeing that the males with the longest tails can afford the energy and effort needed to manage such appendages.

  Now, it might be a lie to say that female great crested grebes care nothing for appearances, because both sexes have a handsomeness that borders on the foppish, but when it really comes down to it what she’s looking for is a good dancer. So, for that matter, is the male – everything about this species’ courtship rituals is based around a perfect symmetry that’s unusual in the bird world.

  As I watched, back in 1997, the pair started affirming their interest in each other by swimming face to face just a few inches apart and, ironically enough, shaking their heads. After some of the shakes, they swept their long bills elegantly through the feathers of their wings and back, as if pointing out to their potential mate the luxuriance of their plumage, or threw their heads back; throughout, their collars were puffed out into genuine ruffs. They might have been going through these moves for a few days already, weeks even, and it’s the most frequently seen part of this bird’s repertoire of courtship rituals.

  What follows generally needs a bit of luck or a lot of persistence to see. I turned away from the lake a moment to look for the source of an unfamiliar contact call, and by the time I looked back only one bird was left. Or was it? The water in front of it rippled with disturbance, and the second grebe suddenly emerged in an upright posture that reminded me of nothing so much as a penguin, before pirouetting right in front of the other bird’s face. That’s a pretty neat trick, especially when you’re used to seeing the far less sophisticated approach of mallards, but it’s nothing to what came next.

  The birds parted, and headed for the area around the island, disappearing beneath the water in turn. I amused myself by trying to guess where each would break the surface next, but tired of it, and started preparing to move on.

  Then they were both visible again, maybe thirty yards apart. The clean lines of their heads and bills were marred somewhat by the tangle of green, dripping weed that each had pulled out from the lake-bottom, but grebes know how to turn an unpromising prop to their advantage. They turned towards each other and started swimming at considerable speed.

  Just as it appeared a collision was inevitable, each of them rose into a sharply vertical posture, white breast to white breast, presenting the underwater vegetation to the other with the eternal optimism of the hopeful lover.

  I know. Anthropomorphism is a sin, but it’s hard to resist when it comes to great crested grebes. Maybe it’s the very concept of birds dancing, the pavane-like nature of their processional courtship curiously appropriate to their Elizabethan appearance. Or maybe it’s the fact that, as previously mentioned, both male and female have to make an effort, and that appeals to us in these enlightened times. Being able to see a performance such as theirs on the most unpromising of waterholes just adds to its beauty and sheer strangeness. Out in the wilds you come to expect that sort of thing. Confronted with it round the back of a corrugated steel leisure centre and two small business parks, on a drizzly Wednesday morning, you can be briefly convinced that all the luck in the world is running your way.

  Finally, there’s a second great pleasure that comes from finding that great crested grebes are nesting on your local lake. It would be pushing it a little to call it spectacular, as such, but it very definitely scores highly on the cute-o-meter (and don’t believe even the most steely-eyed twitcher when they say that they don’t do cute). The baby grebes, when they hatch, are tiny, fuzzy, black-and-white striped creatures, which resemble nothing quite so much as a mint humbug that’s been left in a coat pocket too long and has picked up all the fluff of a dozen tumble-dryers. And if that isn’t enough to reduce you to a bleary-eyed, cooing lump of jelly, their handsome parents also have the endearing habit of swimming around with the photogenic youngsters nestling on their backs. Grebes are the gift that just keeps on giving.

  If birdwatching instantly teaches us something about time, the seasons and the artificiality of man’s calendar, it quickly follows that up by convincing us that everything we know about geography is wrong. Britain, we’re always being told, is a small island; however, while it’s true we have neither the area nor the extreme variation in habitat of, say, the United States, we have more than enough to spring surprise after surprise. When I started work at Bird Watching magazine, for example, in an office block perched on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens, I was astonished to find that marsh harriers, a bird that I’ve seen only once at home, less than fifty miles away, were ten a penny there.

  Nowhere did such diversity of habitat become more obvious than on my first winter trip to northern Scotland. We spent a day birdwatching along the Moray coast, between Inverness and Lossiemouth, and despite fierce, stingingly cold winds, saw all manner of wonderful birds. There were sleek divers of all shapes and sizes, riding low in the water and butting the waves like the battle fleets that once steamed out of Invergordon. Fire-eyed Slavonian grebes, subtly beautiful and mysterious even in their non-breeding plumage. Great rafts of eiders, their rather clumsy, clunky appearance completely at odds with the image of supreme softness their name instantly conjures. Gannets wheeling and diving at the far edge of sight. I drank in the experience of finally seeing, in the flesh, page after page of my field guide brought to life, pages that I’d never needed in my Midlands hometown.

  As the light started to fade, we stared down our scopes into the wide expanse of Findhorn Bay, its mudflats twinkling yellow then white as a dense mass of golden plovers turned away from the wind. Other waders picked their way around the water’s edge, a few pintails swam in the shallows, and gulls loafed, as gulls do. It was a good way to end a great day, but the excitement wasn’t yet over, or at least not for our guide, Alex.

  He began to make the sort of noises that birdwatchers do when something really exciting comes along. A sort of low-frequency muttering, accompanied by increasingly frantic movements of his binoculars and scope. I and the other two birdwatchers with us tensed, wondering which rarity was going to be announced to us imminently. King eider? Brünnich’s guillemot? Maybe even a white-billed diver?

  ‘Got it!’ said Alex, glancing up at us with a look of quiet triumph. The tension was unbearable, but the silence remained unbroken. I decided to take matters into my own hands, and put my eye to the scope.

  There, picked out in all the gloriously crisp, sharp detail that the best Austrian optics can provide, was a single great crested grebe. Its plainer winter plumage did it no favours, and for a moment I was wondering just what else had sparked Alex’s excitement. And then I understood. Up here, the grebes are scarce enough to qualify as a great bonus tick to round off a highly productive day.

  The incident set me thinking about the whole concept of ticking off lists of the birds we see, but mainly about how what we think of as Britain’s birding landscape is in reality a mosaic of different habitats and eco-systems, inextricably linked and ever-changing, yet separate and distinct at the same time. It could, conceivably, leave you dispirited at how you’ll ever get to grips with the variety of wildlife that’s out there. Or – and I can’t recommend this highly enough – it could convince you that getting to know your own little corner of the world inside out is a worthy aspiration for any naturalist, and one that will take you at least a lifetime to fulfil.

  2 Bowing with the Beautiful

  I dream of birds. Sometimes, the experience is so vivid that I wake excited at the myriad new and strange species I’ve seen, only to face disappointment, moments later, when realising they were merely a strange trick of the memory.

  That said, it has occurred to me that I could always keep a list of the birds I’ve seen purely in dreams. The most memorable, I think, were the flock of half-a-dozen black wheatears – a gorgeously dapper species found in the Iberian peninsula – th
at turned up in a back garden similar, but not identical, to my parents’. The unlikeliness of such an encounter made no impression on my subconscious. Neither did the subsequent appearance, in the same garden, of a full-sized polar bear. I finally woke with a start, and with the melancholy feeling that a great sighting had escaped me.

  But a different type of bird dream comes to me, too. It can start in February, on still, windless nights, but it really makes itself known in April, when warmer temperatures make sleeping with the window open possible, or even necessary.

  It can start when sunrise is still little more than an idea. Somewhere in the east, the sky’s lowest fringes are just beginning to bleach out, although you’d be hard pressed to tell if that was down to the coming sun, or the sodium glow of the cities of the East Midlands.

  A thin, silvery voice speaks to my sleeping self of forests and rivers, of heath and hedgerow, of park and garden and the unloved, unlooked-for spaces that punctuate our everyday lives. I hear it and straight away I’m wondering, and wandering in search of its source. I know the voice belongs to a bird, striking up its song, but I know nothing of what it is, or what it’s trying to say to me. I only know that it has the beauty distinctive to anything that is utterly and indefatigably itself, and that I want to hear it more loudly and clearly, and see the singer.

  But the instant I move off after it, there’s another voice, and another, similar yet distinctive, and then finally another altogether, a stronger, more confident, but melodious and soft voice. It’s as if this voice is speaking a different language to the first, although perhaps one that shares a common origin. Welsh to the former’s Breton, perhaps. And then it too is joined by another similar voice, and another, and all the voices heard so far are raised a notch higher as a fifth, sixth, seventh and seventeenth song-language join the babel of tongues battling to be heard.