A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  They’re not always in a hurry to get going, and even in those days when the nearest breeding birds were in Scotland, there was always a chance that a birder in another part of Britain would see an osprey during their spring and autumn migrations, as both the Scottish birds and those passing through from Scandinavia stop off to rest and fish whenever necessary. They don’t need to eat from a larder the size of Rutland Water either – even very small bodies of water can attract their attention.

  A few years ago, when most of my weekends were taken up with that most English of pastimes, village cricket, I was sitting with a teammate outside our pavilion. Our ground, flanked on one side by the town of Coalville (and specifically the factory that once made Action Man and Star Wars action figures), and on the other by the spoil heap of the old Snibston Colliery, generally attracted nothing more remarkable than a lot of pied wagtails and woodpigeons, but on this occasion we could see a couple of green woodpeckers snaffling ants in the short grass. I went to fetch some binoculars from the car to get a closer look, and a long-winged, pale shape soared out of the colliery compound and headed towards us. We both watched, open-mouthed, as an osprey flew no more than thirty feet above us, glancing down just once to take in the little cluster of white-clad figures, before finally settling on the trees around a little fishing lake at the back of the ground. In truth the pool looked barely more than a puddle to us, but it kept the raptor happy and well fed for a couple of days, before it continued on its odyssey.

  The sighting marked another of those happy accidents, those chance encounters that make birdwatching so endlessly interesting and, yes, thrilling. You can make such occurrences more likely, and ensure you’ll recognise them for what they are, by simply putting in the hours in the field, identifying and re-identifying the same, familiar species, on some occasions seeing next to nothing; but in the end such sightings still depend on luck, a certain breath of good fortune in the wind. Even if it’s nothing as obviously remarkable as a fishing osprey, the chances are you will encounter something memorable – the way chaffinches turn into flycatchers to make the most of clouds of gnats, for example, darting out from treetop perches to launch themselves into the insect buffet, or the endlessly innovative riffing of a song thrush in full voice.

  Birdfair, it suddenly occurs to me, works in the same way. You can do all your research beforehand and go there with a list as long as your arm, of products to try and destinations to talk about, and holidays to book, and causes to sign up to, and people to see and speak to – but you’ll always come away carrying something you didn’t expect, nestling in your rucksack or just turning over gently at the back of your mind.

  I go through my own haul from the day. Details of how to stay on Britain’s bird observatories, those coastal waystations that monitor the relentless push and pull of the tides of migration. An invitation to attend the United States’ first-ever national bird fair. A second-hand copy of Simpson and Day’s Field Guide to the Birds of Australia (for £4, how could I resist?). And a conversation with an old birder from my own neck of the woods, whose memories of breeding curlews fifty years ago throw new light on my own recent observations. These experiences help make light work of the dusty, footsore walk back into Oakham, and the heavy-lidded drowse homewards on the train, where the morning’s babel of languages repeats itself, more quietly but with the good humour, if anything, deepened.

  And then, as we near Leicester, travelling down the floodplain of the Wreake, there’s a murmur of excitement, and necks are craned in the direction of a large flying silhouette that experience suggests might be a heron but hope turns into another osprey.

  It is! There are enough binoculars to hand to make identification possible, even in the failing light, and you can feel the question emanating from every birdwatching mind in the carriage: is this some traveller from the far north, or one of the Rutland birds, its long journey triggered by a change in the light too subtle for our own eyes to notice?

  We sit and watch as our own quietly contented worlds intersect one last time, as the osprey trails us at its own pace, following the train south into night, into the next day and who knows what awaits it.

  9 Skyfall

  ‘There! Right in front of us!’

  The man to my right is talking in that tone of voice peculiar to birdwatchers, in which you try to communicate urgency and excitement without become so loud or so shrill that you frighten off the birds themselves. In this case, he’s also having to deal with a particularly slow-on-the-uptake birder. Namely, me.

  Suddenly, I see exactly what he means. A small, cryptically patterned bird is on the closely cropped ground just in front of a tussock of grass. The instant that it comes into focus in my binoculars I can see that it’s a wryneck, a type of woodpecker now extinct in Britain as a breeding species, but which still pops up regularly on migration.

  There’s silence as we take in what we’re seeing. I’ve seen these birds before in the UK, fleetingly, and I’ve had half-decent views in Hungary, but I’ve never seen one this clearly, or for so long. It resolutely refuses to do its neck-twisting threat display, where it transforms from bird into reptile before your very eyes, but that’s no matter. It’s clearly relaxed and feeding well on the ants around its feet, and so everybody’s happy.

  Being something of an outsider to the whole process of finding and identifying rare birds, I fail to defend myself to the exasperated man next to me, so I’ll do it here. Put simply, the wryneck is a lot smaller than I’d expected, even having seen one before. You’re thinking of a woodpecker, but you get something barely bigger than a bullfinch. Rather like famous people, birds are almost invariably smaller in real life than they appear in books or on TV.

  Of course field guides always provide measurements to compare species, and some try to show the relative sizes of species on the same page. But despite their best efforts, nearly every birder sets out into the field with unrealistic expectations. I have a friend who says, only half-jokingly, that avocets never fail to disappoint him, because his books have led him to expect something the size of a crane. He’s got a point: because waders tend to have long legs in proportion to their body size, you’re geared to see something much larger than they actually are.

  There’s also the question of what we’re used to. For many of us, or at least those not living close to wader hotspots, the one member of the family we grow up seeing regularly is the lapwing, despite recent declines. We then start to think of that as the default wader, and judge the size of all others by it. But the lapwing is actually a fairly large wader; the much more diminutive dunlin might be a much better yardstick to use. The same applies with ducks. When we are children, mallards and ducks are pretty much synonymous for us, and so we grow up failing to notice that mallards are actually one of the largest members of the duck family in Britain.

  The thing is, it’s a weekend for this sort of realisation. Rarity-chasing, or twitching as it’s better known, has a bad name in some parts of the birdwatching community, and sometimes perhaps deservedly so, but the quest to see rarer species also has a lot to teach every birder …

  Yorkshiremen are famously not shy of singing the praises of the Broad Acres, so it’s strange they should be quite so reticent about one of its greatest glories.

  Or perhaps not. Here I am, surrounded by largely treeless agricultural land on either side of an unremarkable road. There’s a village, and a cafe, and then the fields fall away and I’m travelling down a long spit of sand stitched together with marram grass. I slow the car instinctively, both to take in the view, with birds wheeling away to either side, and because I get the distinct feeling I might simply slip into the waves at any moment.

  It might seem as though this place – Spurn Point – would be of interest only to geography students, as a classic example of longshore drift, in which the waters of the North Sea wash material from further up the east coast and deposit it in the relatively sheltered waters at the entrance of the Humber estuary. But for birdwatcher
s, it’s been the scene of some of Britain’s most notable sightings, and perhaps more importantly the country’s most memorable ‘falls’, the term given to large numbers of migrant birds being deposited on our shores by weather systems.

  Its importance for birds comes about partly because of its position. All headlands, spits and islands tend to be good places to look for migrants, because birds arriving off the sea naturally head towards the nearest and most obvious bit of dry land, while those working their way along a coast look for the shortest crossings of any estuaries or stretches of open sea. In autumn, as birds from northern England and Scotland, Iceland, Greenland and the Arctic move south, and those from Scandinavia, the Baltic and further east work their way south and west, Spurn can become a bottleneck, catching and funnelling birds down its length, as it gropes towards where, as Philip Larkin put it, ‘sky and Lincolnshire and water meet’.

  But birding hotspots also tend to benefit from a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. If they’re well known for attracting rare birds, then they also attract birdwatchers, and the more pairs of eyes there are ‘working’ them on a daily basis, the better the chances of the rare and scarce birds that pass through being spotted and logged. Spurn certainly falls into that category, as does somewhere like Cley on the north Norfolk coast, where several of Britain’s best birdwatchers live. The Isles of Scilly, off Cornwall, once shared a similar reputation and attracted large numbers of birders each autumn, but visitor numbers have dropped in recent years because of a perception that the best transatlantic vagrants are being found further north, in the Western Isles or on Orkney and Shetland. That may be true, but it might also be down to more birders searching the latter, and less searching Scilly. It’s a virtuous/vicious circle effect, and it’s hard to extract the true nature of just how bird-rich any site is from it.

  Similarly, some fantastic birdwatching spots, particularly those that are perceived as being aimed at the beginner or casual birdwatcher, probably don’t get monitored as closely as they might: both Rutland Water and the RSPB’s family-friendly but never disappointing reserve at Titchwell in Norfolk fall into this category. The tendency to overlook these sites might sometimes be the result of a sort of snobbishness among the more expert birders, but it’s more likely due to the perception that such places are already well covered, when in fact they’re not. In other words, everyone assumes that all the best birds each day will have been found by someone else, and promptly heads off to find their own somewhere else.

  Spurn’s popularity, however, endures, defying fad and fashion and the awesome power of the North Sea. A storm surge on 5 December 2013 was just the most recent example of the latter; in the later medieval period the sea claimed victory over two thriving towns along the peninsula. Ravenspurn was where Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) landed in 1399 on his way to depose Richard II, while Edward IV arrived there in 1471 after going into temporary exile in the Netherlands. In times of old, nearby Ravenser Odd was a more important port than Kingston-upon-Hull, further along the estuary, but today both live on only as names in books, while Hull is a major city.

  The December 2013 surge turned the Point into an island temporarily (in fact, it becomes one for a couple of hours on every particularly big tide) and washed away a road that was itself a temporary replacement for the previously eroded track. Fortunately for birders, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, the owners of the site, have received support in restoring and maintaining it from both the RNLI, who built many of the buildings on the Point, and Spurn Bird Observatory, who monitor the birds passing through. And, importantly, Associated British Ports maintain a communications tower there for piloting ships in and out of the Humber estuary; all of which means that permanent loss of the road isn’t an option, and there are plans to create a purpose-built visitor centre.

  Nothing at Spurn, then, sits still. Not the organisations that own and run and maintain it; not the North Sea, remaking the maps and charts twice a day; and not the indomitable vegetation, working to make permanent what would otherwise be very temporary. The whole peninsula would, without man’s intervention, move steadily westwards, and even with our help it’s barely holding its ground.

  And yet, the second lesson I learn here today, or relearn, I should say, is that sitting still is perhaps the most vital part of birdwatching. That seems odd. Twitching and rarity-watching are, after all, about dashing round the country in pursuit of birds, aren’t they? Well, yes, sometimes, but if you’re at a location like Spurn, where the birds are funnelled down a narrow strip of land, or anywhere else where there’s a high concentration of birds, then the less you move the better.

  Today I find a slightly sheltered spot on the south-eastern tip of the Point, among the marram grass, with the intention of photographing whatever comes my way. I’m no photographer, truth be told, but I get a lot of enjoyment out of taking ‘record shots’, pictures that are never going to win any awards for artistic achievement but which trigger fond memories of notable sightings during nostalgic winter evenings.

  So I lie there on my side, with a view of the sea and the estuary’s mouth and the flat, low expanse of Lincolnshire beyond. Even without the birds it would be a great place to watch the world go by, but once I remember to look behind me, too, at the low, wind-blown thicket of sea buckthorn, the birds start to arrive.

  Whinchats. Lively birds the size of a robin, with broad eye stripes and a rusty, rufous stain to the breast. I see them only rarely at home, and declines have made them scarce in most parts of the UK, but for fifteen minutes there seems to be one on every bush, post and fence. I snap away with the camera, and scribble as many notes as I can, and then I look up, and they’re gone.

  They’re soon replaced by a couple of male redstarts, and then a steady stream of warblers – willow, garden, blackcap and whitethroat, and another that only days later, after poring over my bad photos, do I identify as an icterine warbler, a regular but still noteworthy passage migrant here. There are three pied flycatchers, their smart black and white plumage of the spring browned and dulled by their busy summer. I’m too undisciplined in my observations to actually note where they’re going: do they quickly gain height before making the jump across the Humber, then make their way further down the east coast, or do they work their way west and make the crossing where the river is narrower? Every time I decide to follow one little group, something else comes along to grab my attention. Another wryneck, and then a juvenile red-backed shrike. These ‘butcher birds’ – so-called because of their habit of impaling prey on thorns, to be eaten later – became extinct as breeders in the UK a few years back, but might just be creeping back in and raising young in a few scattered, and highly secret, southern locations.

  This isn’t the sort of day that’s going to go down in Spurn folklore, when twitchers are drawn in as to a magnet, and yet it’s quietly remarkable for any birder who, like myself, does most of their watching in a relatively small and ordinary inland patch. There are the numbers, for a start. I’ve already mentioned the whinchats, more in five minutes than I’d seen in five years, and the pied flycatchers, which continue to trickle through in twos and threes all day. But what’s really incredible is how close they come. It’s a photographer’s dream. Even a bad photographer’s dream.

  In part, the birds might be so fearless because many of them arrive tired and in need of food and rest, and so they have little choice but to ignore the presence of humans. A lot of it, though, I realise, is down to me sitting there, not moving. An upright human signals danger to most birds (there’s a reason why farmers used scarecrows), but reduce your profile and stay still, and they soon see you as far less of a threat. It’s something I’ve noticed before when birdwatching from all sorts of boats, and oddly you often get the same effect from a vehicle, as long as you’re driving slowly. Other birders assure me that riding a horse is better than either – the presence of a large herbivore clearly reassures birds considerably. But, for whatever reason, I’d forgotten until today just how effectiv
e keeping a low profile can be, and the rediscovery is every bit as much of a delight as seeing the likes of the shrike.

  In fact, having relearned this lesson, I put it into practice near home a few days later. Not only do green woodpeckers and long-tailed tits settle in a tree just a couple of feet over my head, but a fox emerges from nearby scrub, shows mild surprise at my presence, then pads past unconcerned, like someone’s dog out for a walk in the park.

  There’s another reason for the confiding nature of these migrants too, I suspect. Many are young birds, hatched earlier this year, and so many of them haven’t had a chance to develop the wariness of humans on which their survival might, unfortunately, ultimately depend. Each time a little group of these juveniles passes through, I feel a sudden anxiety, a desire to keep them safe from the dangers that will assail them as they head into the distant south, assuaged a little by the thought that here, at least, they’re among friends – as long as you don’t count the sparrowhawk that periodically soars over the road, or the peregrine someone pointed out over the mudflats earlier.

  I’ve already said I don’t really consider myself a twitcher. For one thing, the long hours on the road don’t appeal, nor does the thought of chasing all over the country in pursuit of birds that might not be there when you arrive. As I look around on this early autumn day, I realise this makes me something of a minority. Most of the birders here seem to be keen listers, and whenever I pass a little group, all the talk seems to be of the latest rarity they’ve seen, or very often the next one they’re going to see.

  It’s this last aspect of twitching that sometimes troubles me. I can understand the feeling of delight and novelty at seeing a bird you’ve never seen in Britain before, even when it’s a species that you’ve spotted easily elsewhere in the world. However many hoopoes you’ve seen while on holiday in Majorca, for instance, there’s a delicious thrill when you’re scanning a bit of coastal grassland and see a flash of orange, black and white resolve into this glorious bird, fanning its elaborate headdress as it lands. Seeing such a bird on the mundane surroundings of your own local patch, or even in a more unfamiliar but still distinctively British location, feels rather like spotting a Hollywood megastar in your local pub. Your own everyday world, narrow and flat and muted in colour as it can be, is suddenly touched with the glamour of something exotic. Even more importantly, you’re reminded that everything doesn’t proceed in a strictly textbook fashion. Anything can happen, and you have the proof in front of you.