by Matt Merritt
This would be fascinating and revealing in any species, but in the case of the cuckoo it’s all the more remarkable because of the fact that the birds – all youngsters making the journey for the first time – had to do so entirely on their own initiative. Cuckoos, of course, never see their real mothers or fathers, having been brought up by unfortunate foster parents such as dunnocks, or meadow pipits, most of which don’t make a sub-Saharan migration; so there’s no chance of these juveniles making the journey as part of a family group – something that happens, for example, with geese. And, as the geo-locators showed, our own cuckoos don’t migrate in flocks, as some of their more exotic relatives do, such as the huge channel-billed cuckoo of Australia and New Guinea.
The prospect of similar, even tinier tracking devices being fitted to very small birds should provide vital information that could shape conservation work for years to come.
And the scope of such projects is absolutely huge. Take the house martin. Even if the average non-birdwatcher might mix it up with the swallow, the swift, and the sand martin, it’s familiar to most of us, not least because of its habit of living under the eaves of houses. In recent years, however, it’s undergone a worrying decline in the UK, and researchers are keen to discover how much our human habits have to do with that. Dryer springs certainly haven’t helped, as the house martins need plenty of wet mud for building their nests, but there’s a suspicion that the major cause is that, in these house-proud times, people aren’t keen on having mud plastered all over their fascia boards. If that is the case, there’s a simple potential solution, as similar and closely related species in North America have long used artificial nests happily.
Amazingly, given that house martins must have lived in close proximity to man since not long after we moved out of caves, we still have no clear idea where they spend the winter. While swallows can end up as far south as Cape Town, and many of our warblers travel to the Sahel, the semi-arid zone of grassland and scrub that divides the Sahara from the savannahs further south, the destination of house martins remains a mystery. The tentative suggestion is that they end up high over the forests of central Africa, enjoying the endless supply of insect food there, but no one really knows for sure. Soon, with the help of new technology, we could put that right, and perhaps discover whether some hitherto unknown factor on the wintering grounds is also affecting populations.
Whether it’s through ringing, geo-tagging, or any other method (in Israel, for example, military radars are used to plot the approach of migrating flocks of cranes and pelicans, to enable food to be provided for them), there’s a point at which the simple act of watching birds becomes something more active, more loaded with intent and the possibility of putting right some of the unintended but immense harm we’ve done to bird populations in the past couple of industrial centuries. And such conservation-minded birding is often, for me, the most rewarding part of the pastime, because it’s an opportunity to appreciate the vast scale of nature, and your own insignificance within it.
As it started, so it ends. Towards the end of April, I’m fitting a hurried hour’s tramp around my favourite local reserve – an old sewage works called Kelham Bridge – into a busy Sunday.
On a small sward of short-cropped grass on the little hill above the reserve, the unmistakable white flash of the wheatear is the first thing I see as I walk up the path. Presumably having enjoyed at least a couple of weeks in which to replenish its reserves, this one’s plumper, neater and altogether more pristine than the waif that dropped into Swithland back in March, and it looks in no hurry to move on.
Wheatears are easy birds to admire, even without taking into consideration their astounding feats of globetrotting. Quite apart from physical beauty, they create the impression of energy and purpose, and of quiet confidence – they’re watchful without ever being too quick to flush at the sight of man.
And then there’s the name. For all that it conjures up the image of golden fields of corn waving in a gentle summer breeze – there’s a ripening wheat field in the distance beyond this bird – the name actually has a much earthier, but no less poetic, derivation.
Wheatears must have been familiar to the Anglo-Saxons from their ancestral homelands of northern Germany and Jutland, and when they arrived in Britain they brought their name for the species (and for many others) with them. They were a warrior race as well as subsistence farmers, and you can’t imagine they had too much time for considering the finer points of bird identification, so they developed the admirable habit of fixing on one striking characteristic and naming with that in mind. In this case, hvit oers. White arse.
Over many centuries, this became eroded to something like the current name, before the delicate sensibilities of Victorian naturalists brought a final smoothing away of any lingering bawdiness. A wheat field, at any time of year, is actually a pretty unlikely place to find them. A nearby sheep pasture, on the other hand, as here, is perfect.
I turn to go, wondering where this particular bird’s final destination might be, and as I do, the most instantly recognisable birdsong in the western world rings out somewhere along the valley. The resonant, querulous song of the cuckoo, a call with only one meaning.
Spring.
4 Fleeing the Waters
From where I’m standing, it’s the shallow, pencilled V of a child’s drawing, but far from being the anonymous, generic bird of such scribbles, it’s instantly recognisable to every one of us gathered along the edge of the rain-slicked road that fronts a seemingly unremarkable expanse of windswept saltmarsh. It hugs the contours of the ground exactly, rising or falling mere millimetres in response to every tussock of rough grass, every murky channel and rivulet, the flat disc of its face always turned towards the waterlogged earth.
When it nears us on the pavement, it turns and banks slightly, and the flash of a bright white rump tells us what we already knew. It’s a hen harrier, a female or juvenile. They lack the striking pale grey plumage of the male, being a streaky dark brown, but they lose nothing by comparison where grace and elegance are concerned. And they’re every bit as difficult to find, with the result that birdwatchers relish every encounter with them.
Back in the eighteenth century, the females and juveniles of this species, and the females and juveniles of the closely related Montagu’s harrier (a more southern European bird, which breeds in Britain in tiny numbers), were considered part of the same species: the ‘ringtail harrier’, with the males similarly grouped together as a second species, the ‘ash-coloured harrier’. They were finally separated by the naturalist George Montagu, who noticed not only the small but significant differences in plumage and structure, but also that the Montagu’s harrier was a bird of open grasslands (and occasionally standing crops), while the hen harrier was a creature of the uplands.
And that’s where naturalists started noticing a problem. Much of Britain’s moorland is used for rearing and shooting grouse, and increasingly, moving towards modern times, these have been large-scale, driven shoots, in which relatively large numbers of people pay a lot of money to pick off a lot of birds. Hen harriers, which do take a certain amount of young grouse, but which also prey heavily on rodents and small birds, are seen as the enemy by some, perhaps most, estates, and so have faced persecution from gamekeepers. The opposing argument is that the habitat management and conservation work that the grouse require are beneficial to the harriers too – and on the face of it there’s something in that – but the absurdly low number of hen harriers found around areas of intensive grouse shooting would seem to give the lie to that particular theory.
Every time I see a hen harrier, and it’s not often these days, all this runs through my mind. And so it does today, as the bird banks away from me, its attention fixed so firmly on the watery world beneath it that it pays me no more heed than it does one of the fence posts.
As it glides away, other shapes, dark blurs over the outer reaches of the marsh, start to come into focus. Heart-faced barn owls, three of
them, white against the distant sea as they ghost towards us, buoyant on the stiff breeze. Short-eared owls, the orange patches on the underside of their long wings flashing every time they flap, their yellow eyes blazing fire at us when our scopes catch their gazes. A merlin, smallest of British birds of prey, motionless for a moment on a fence post, then bouncing low above the ground in imitation of a thrush. A peregrine, too, happy to abandon the glamour of its high-velocity dive for once, instead hunting by ambush like a sparrowhawk, chasing waders flushed by the rising waters. More hen harriers, ringtails all, sadly. A few grey herons stand sentinel, presumably reflecting that the waters still have a couple of feet to rise before they need to worry. Above us, buzzards soar and kestrels hover, as only they can, and carrion crows, magpies and an assortment of gulls, the supreme opportunists of the avian world, swirl overhead or perch prominently.
They’re not the only predators out there. We spot a stoat weaving through the grass towards us, the black tip of its tail quivering every time it pauses. Excitement, perhaps, or more likely cold, because its slicked-down coat suggests it’s had a close call where the onrushing waters are concerned.
And first one, then two foxes emerge from behind a large tussock, and start picking their way through the pools and rivulets that the advancing tide is creating. For a moment, it looks as though one of them has marooned itself and will be forced to swim for it. It pauses atop a hummock, swiftly glancing all around. Not for nothing do foxes have a reputation for wiliness and resourcefulness, however. Having quickly sized up the situation, it makes an extravagant leap, briefly splashing down on a just-covered tussock, and another jump to reach a thin strand of dry land. Relieved at its escape, it makes haste in our direction, without looking back at the easy meals it might be leaving behind, or maybe it has already eaten well enough.
Because that’s what this is all about. For every predator, in winter and spring especially, each day is a constant struggle to solve a single calorific equation, and what happens at this otherwise unremarkable stretch of coastline a few times each year presents them with an opportunity to short-circuit the whole system and tap into a sudden, natural glut. For us standing here, it’s a chance to see some often-shy species at close quarters, while considering the way we view the relationship between hunter and hunted.
A lot of Britain’s best birdwatching spots are saltmarshes, or contain saltmarsh, or adjoin saltmarshes. Among them, Parkgate, on the Wirral coast of the Dee estuary, doesn’t at first appear to be anything out of the ordinary. In fact, it appears a good deal less interesting than most.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the Wirral, of course, notwithstanding the rather unflattering description of its inhabitants given by the anonymous poet who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the fourteenth century:
The wilderness of Wirral:
few lived there
Who loved with a good heart
Either God or man
No, these days, it’s a thoroughly salubrious place to be, with pleasant towns, villages and suburbs, prestigious golf courses, and a wealth of good bird habitats. The Dee estuary coast has marshes, mudflats and therefore plenty of waders; the blunt tip of land is a great spot to look for passing seabirds; and in autumn the Mersey shore is sometimes the place to see large numbers of Leach’s petrels, miniature albatrosses skimming and almost dancing on the water – they’re funnelled into the estuary when gales strike just as they’re migrating south down Britain’s west coasts.
All good, but what makes Parkgate stand out? You can’t get right out into the midst of the marsh, as you can at some reserves, where boardwalks, raised paths and hides have long allowed birders a closer view. At Parkgate, you do your viewing from the promenade, or from the Old Baths car park, because to venture onto the marsh at any time of year would risk disturbing – ‘putting up’, to use a phrase which birdwatchers have, rather curiously, borrowed from the shooting fraternity – every bird out there. These could number, at certain times, hundreds upon thousands of waders and wildfowl. Moreover, leaving the safety of the tarmac would also put you at risk of another thing that makes Parkgate so fascinating. Its tides.
Britain as a whole has some of the highest tidal ranges in the world, one of the reasons we’re such a popular destination for those waders and wildfowl. Twice every twenty-four hours the ocean uncovers wide acres of mudflat and saltmarsh newly replenished with all kinds of sea creatures, from fish, crustaceans and the like, to tiny micro-organisms.
Now, any high tide, anywhere, is generally good for birdwatching, because it tends to force birds that would otherwise stay way out on the shore or estuary to come in much closer to dry ground. And any high tide at Parkgate is good, because the Dee estuary and the Wirral are a bird-rich area anyway, and Parkgate has a wide tidal range. But a few times a year, and especially when a high spring tide arrives, it’s the stage for a truly extraordinary wildlife spectacle. And that’s what’s happening today.
First, as with every tide, it moves the birds. A thin smoke of waders lifts from the far edges of the marsh, and drifts upriver and inland. The interest of the peregrines is piqued, but they’re willing to wait on this occasion. Next come the starlings, reed buntings, a mixed flock of finches, and a miscellany of other small birds, dashing towards the promenade, keeping low. This time a merlin follows, and three meadow pipits streak away just ahead of it. Two veer right, the other goes left, and for a split-second it must lose sight of the falcon, which follows and comes up from below to snatch it in mid-air. Ducks, geese and other wildfowl, showing the sort of sangfroid that can be afforded by confident and habitual swimmers, move rather more slowly up the saltmarsh, finally stopping to graze when they reach a spot as yet untouched by the sea. Over on the far right edge, a water rail picks its way from one little island to another, its bright red bill revealing its presence, all its usual caution gone.
I’m reminded that, in my experience, water rails might be Britain’s most schizophrenic birds. For the vast majority of the time, they’re extremely difficult to spot, remaining completely hidden in reed beds and other waterside vegetation. The only reason you know they’re there is their disgruntled, pig-like squealing, or the occasional glimpse of a bird creeping from one stand of reeds to another. But when extreme circumstances intervene, that all changes. Once, when visiting Titchwell RSPB in Norfolk during a cold snap that had frozen parts of the lagoons and reed beds, I stood on the path and watched as a water rail probed around in some mud so close to me that I could barely focus my binoculars on it. During another cold spell, at my local reserve, another showed up at similarly close quarters, pecking around under the feeders just outside one of the hides. When a rat, trying to take advantage of the fallen grain and seed, ventured a little too close, the water rail speared it neatly, and started trying to make a meal of it. And then there’s the story of one at Parkgate a few years ago, which took refuge in the rucksack of one of the birdwatchers lined up on the promenade …
But back to the present. Next, the mammals appear. Rabbits, of course, are easily spotted and not at all unexpected, but then a whole hidden stratum of the eco-system arrives – creatures that we know must exist in large numbers to support the raptors and owls and foxes and herons and other predators, but that most of us, including those who spend large parts of their life out in the field, rarely ever have an opportunity to see. Voles and shrews and mice and the occasional rat. In the normal course of things, these rodents live in the upper part of the saltmarsh that the sea never reaches; but the exceptional spring tides can reach the road itself, and at such times there’s nothing for them to do but flee further and further inland. If this means running the gauntlet of the assembled predators, not to mention the gathered birdwatchers and photographers, then so be it.
So I watch and watch as the tide gets nearer, while another tide, with sea-sleeked fur, runs a few yards ahead of it. When the latter reaches the wall, finally, the survivors scramble up and past us and, incredibly, brave a fur
ther dash across the road towards the nearest cover.
It is astonishing but it’s also, I’m surprised to find, genuinely distressing. I say surprised because a lifetime of birdwatching should teach the truth of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s phrase ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’, while a liking for the work of another Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, also tends to destroy any vestiges of sentimentality about nature. Out in the field, you see kestrels snatch voles, buzzards take rabbits. Even when a sparrowhawk ambushes a favourite robin on your garden feeders, or a heron grabs a still-fluffy duckling from under the beak of its distressed mother, you reflect that it’s just the way things have to be.
But at Parkgate, the predation is on such a scale, is so relentless, that you start to want to intervene. It’s like watching Saving Private Ryan while being beaten over the head with a copy of Hughes’s Collected Poems (and he was extremely prolific). You couldn’t do anything, of course, because chances are that most of the terrified creatures would be even more terrified of you if you approached them, but you do start wondering if you couldn’t scoop up a few, at least. For the first time in my birdwatching life I find myself emphatically on the side of the hunted.
Birdwatchers tend to like raptors, you see. Perhaps it’s exaggerated in Britain, where for centuries numbers were kept artificially low by gamekeepers, and where large birds of prey are still few and far between. But whatever the reason, they’re without doubt the stars of the birding scene.
I’m no different. There was the osprey in a school project that played a part in interesting me in birdwatching, and the kestrel that I watched hovering over the lane near our house every time my parents took us kids out walking. But I’d forgotten, until now, that from the age of about nine, right through my teenage years, the walls of my bedroom were covered not with pop stars, or football teams, or film actors and actresses, but with five huge posters bearing drawings of different species of eagle. It wasn’t that I didn’t like pop music or sport or girls, you understand (and thinking about it, perhaps a single small Leicester City poster and another of batting genius David Gower were there too), and it wasn’t that my parents were old fuddy-duddies who insisted I put something educational on the walls. No, it was entirely my choice, and it had everything to do with the aura projected by the birds.
