A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  Waxwings and their will-they, won’t-they routine are an essential part of the birdwatching year and, in a good year, most parts of Britain stand a reasonable chance of playing host to their flocks.

  Other exotic visitors are rather harder to find, either because of their shy and retiring nature, or because they have, as yet, tended to remain within a few relatively small parts of these islands. It could be said that they’re no longer truly visitors, having long since made the move permanent. But I’m not talking about birds that have naturally colonised Britain, whether as a result of a warming climate or because of other factors, such as habitat change, which invite an extension of their range. Little egrets would be the prime example of this category of bird. Only twenty-five years ago seeing one would have triggered a twitch of nationwide proportions, but these days it’s possible to see dozens at any sizeable water body, south of the Humber, at least. Indeed, go to a suitable roost site, such as the National Wetland Centre, Llanelli, and you can watch the banks of the Burry Inlet turn snow-white in high summer as the elegant invaders arrive for the night.

  They won’t be the last incomers, either. Two close relatives, the larger great white egret and the smaller but gregarious cattle egret, have arrived in ever-increasing numbers in recent years, along with night herons and little bitterns. It might seem paradoxical that herons and egrets are pursuing their expansion plans with such unbridled enthusiasm at a time when we’re being told that our wetland habitats are in danger of disappearing entirely, but in fact there’s no logical disconnect. The more specialist birds, such as the little bittern, have tended to drop in at reserves, while the more generalist species – step forward, the cattle egret – are far from tied to actual wetland. A damp field full of sheep or, as their name suggests, cows, is all the encouragement they need.

  No, I’m thinking instead of a couple of species that have grasped the inadvertent helping hand offered them by man, and almost bitten it off. Both are capable of adding a swatch of colour to the dullest of late autumn days, but both, as you’ll see, are capable of arousing suspicion and even hostility. Both, in the weeks after my waxwing encounter, cross my path when I least expect it …

  I’m walking in a large but little-watched reserve a couple of miles from home one morning, kicking my way through drifts of oak leaves and generally enjoying the colours and smells of a deciduous wood as winter sets in. I’ve already seen green and great spotted woodpeckers bouncing between stands of trees, and little flocks of siskins and lesser redpolls performing their casual gymnastics in a small patch of alders. The prospect of a woodcock or two in the main area of oaks is also appealing, and I start walking besides the drystone wall that forms its perimeter, looking for the little gap you can slip through onto one of the main paths.

  Just before I reach the gap, there’s a point at which a small stream passes through a culvert under the wall. For no particular reason (I’ve never seen anything there before), I stop and peer over the stones, to where the stream is pooling into little more than a large puddle. And if I’m surprised, then it’s fair to say that what momentarily takes me aback gives every impression of being taken just as unawares itself. It’s a bird, of course. But, were it not for the fact that it quickly recovers its composure enough to lift from the water and fly away between the trees at speed, I’d be hard pressed to say if it was a thing of flesh and blood or the most astonishing piece of origami ever created.

  Mandarin ducks, or the males at least, really need to be seen to be believed. List their features – a bright red bill, a white crescent through and above the eye, brown-red face and long ‘whiskers’, purple breast, ruddy flanks and two orange ‘sails’ on its rear – and you get some idea of what an astonishing melange they are. On paper, it shouldn’t work, but the male mandarin manages to be both beautiful and dignified in all his oriental finery.

  The name comes from the impression created by those chestnut ‘whiskers’ – not unlike the mandarins of the courts of the Chinese emperors – and in the normal course of things the bird’s home area is restricted to China, Taiwan, Japan, a small part of Russia, and the two Koreas. Pretty much across that range, though, it has suffered declines as a result of its particular requirements. Foremost among these is tree cavities for nesting, and when deforestation is the order of the day such nest-holes are at a premium. Except in Japan, where a population of around five thousand pairs remains, mandarins are being slowly squeezed out of their homes.

  Which is where Britain comes in. First brought to Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, a pair finally bred at London Zoo in 1834, but it wasn’t until nearly a hundred years later that they really started to put down roots. Aviculturist Alfred Ezra kept mandarins as part of his own collection, but also attempted releases in a bid to establish it as a British breeding bird. Escapes from other collections added to the potential breeding stock, to the extent that breeding birds can now be found everywhere from Dorset to north-east Scotland and Northern Ireland. As well as being tree-nesters, mandarins like dense cover around the nest, and bodies of water with plenty of overhanging vegetation, so the lakes and reservoirs of Surrey and Berkshire have been their areas of densest population. At the last count, there were around seven thousand of the birds in the UK.

  There are small populations on the Continent, too, with Berlin’s city-centre Tiergarten as good a place as any to get really close-up views. If you have to put a label on these birds, then ‘feral’ fits the bill. They’re self-sustaining and supporting (although, like many ducks, they will sometimes overcome their shyness to accept food from man), but they certainly wouldn’t have got here naturally.

  So I watch this glorious creature disappear at speed between the trees, its aerial agility almost as impressive as its exotic looks. My patch, Charnwood Forest, has long played host to a small population, with flocks of thirty or so occasionally reported from a handful of sites. But I’ve always found them hard to track down, because perhaps the most remarkable thing of all about the mandarin is just how difficult they can be to spot, even when they’re right in front of you sporting their full ‘look at me’ outfit.

  Their predilection for habitats with overhanging greenery contributes to their elusiveness: they’ll happily stay tucked in close to the banks the whole time, and the easiest time to see them is often late summer, when falling water levels force them out into the centre of lakes. But by that time, the male has lost some of his finery and resembles his less showy (though still neat and striking) mate.

  After coming across the mandarin, a funny thing happens. It happens a lot in birdwatching now I come to think of it. No sooner do you spot one difficult-to-find bird than they seem to pop up everywhere you look. If you take a moment to think it through, there’s really nothing strange about it. For a start, once you’ve seen a bird in the flesh (or in the feather) you get your eye in – to borrow a cricketing phrase. However good a field guide is, it can’t entirely capture the essence of a bird, because it’s dealing with them as still lives; but once you see how they move, feed, fly, how their feathers flare or fade according to storm and season, you’ll know them when you see them again. And there’s a second, perhaps even more important reason: take a memorable and inspiring sighting of any species, and you’re immediately subconsciously looking to repeat it again and again, to recapture that initial thrill. This might be a vain hope, of course, but it’s an entirely natural and human one.

  Just three days after seeing that lone male, I’m visiting friends who live in that borderland where London meets the Home Counties. The area is a curious mixture of the decidedly utilitarian, the tastefully landscaped, and the defiantly natural, with business parks separated from commuter estates by golf courses, heaths and commons and high beech hangers. When we take a long but leisurely Sunday lunchtime walk to the pub, we’re accompanied by both the constant tinnitus of the M25 and the distant cawing of rooks.

  We’re walking along a lane between two smallish lakes when our attention is drawn to a fl
otilla of birds drifting slowly out from the wooded shore of the nearest lake. Presumably two fishermen setting up on the bank are what has moved them, and as they start to come nearer we can finally see them for what they are.

  In low winter sunshine filtering through oaks and beeches the bright and contrasting colours of the males act like the dazzle-pattern used to camouflage First World War warships, rendering them remarkably inconspicuous; but those orange sails on the rears of the males are nevertheless distinctive, giving them a shape irresistibly reminiscent of the sort of paper boats made by children. Mandarins again, in their British stronghold, a stronghold that remains important on a world scale, even though sizeable new populations of the bird have recently been found in China.

  We stand and watch as this little squadron, maybe twenty-strong, makes its way towards a small wooded island, seeking out the cover that they love. They’re so impossibly ornate, intricately patterned and simply foreign that I find myself wondering why everyone in sight – the fishermen, the dog-walkers and the Sunday strollers – isn’t standing and staring open-mouthed, or pointing at them in rapt admiration. Maybe people would be if these were the birds of a captive collection, or zoo, but they’re effectively just as wild as the blackbirds and robins in the nearby bushes (more so, maybe, given that the latter happily visit gardens to receive free handouts from humans), and as such they go about their business no differently from every other bird out there. If they’re special then they certainly don’t think so.

  And that’s what makes them worth seeing again and again. They manage to be jarringly out of place and completely at home, dabbling around the muddy margins with the teal and the mallard. What those other ducks think about these floating pagodas in their midst is anybody’s guess, but it’s fair to assume that the shock of their appearance has long since worn off.

  I’ve mentioned the ability of birds to transport us in both time and space before – and the experience now, of being carried away to the Far East in the time it takes to whisk up a Yorkshire pudding, would be more than enough for most Sundays. But before my walking companions and I get so much as a whiff of roast potatoes in our nostrils, we’re taken on a further Asian detour. It starts with a sparrowhawk, soaring lazily over a copse close to the road. As always this bird provokes panic among the smaller passerines. There’s the insistent ticking of a wren, the hysterical warning cackle of a blackbird, and the clatter of woodpigeons’ wings as they make their noisy escape.

  Then, as we look up in reaction to all the hubbub, the entire top of a beech tree seems to detach itself, with what seemed to be long, thin branches blooming into bright-green leaves in seconds. Ten, twenty, thirty and then some long-tailed, pointed-winged darts flash down towards us, flaring bright green as they catch the sunlight, their ‘ak, ak, ak’ calls accelerating into a single maelstrom of fear and excitement in perfect harmony with the gathering speed of their escape flight.

  Ring-necked parakeets. If mandarins appear like the creation of a designer who just didn’t know when to stop, they are at least recognisably ducks, and so perhaps, in the mind of the casual or non-birdwatcher, not all that different from the dabblers at the pond in the park. Parakeets, however, are quite unlike anything native to these islands, with their large, bright-red, hooked bills marking them out unmistakably as members of a family we’d otherwise expect to see in a cage, or perched on a Hollywood pirate’s shoulder.

  The vividness of their greens and reds, the alien nature of their silhouette, means that your first sight of one above the grey streets of suburban England almost always inspires initial disbelief, turning to joy, chilling into a gnawing fear. Surely, you think, such a wonderfully colourful, elegant creature, a swift sliver of the tropical forest, can’t last long in our damp, cold climate? Surely it can only be a matter of time before the mists and gales of a British winter arrive to snuff out this vibrant, verdant bolt from the blue?

  That’s where appearances can be very deceptive. As a species, the ring-necked (or sometimes, rose-ringed) parakeet is found everywhere from Senegal to Burma, with the subspecies here in Britain being a native of the Indian subcontinent. There, it weathers both the harsh conditions of the Himalayan foothills, as well as rampant deforestation and habitat loss, not to mention air pollution. You’d imagine, after conditions like those, a few squally showers on the Beaconsfield bypass are very little cause for concern.

  There are all sorts of rather romantic stories about how parakeets came to be roaming wild in the jungles of the Home Counties, the two favourites being that they were released after being used to give tropical colour to the classic Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn movie The African Queen, partly filmed at Isleworth Studios, Middlesex, in 1951; or that Jimi Hendrix released two on Carnaby Street in 1967.

  It would be nice to equate the parakeets with two of the last great stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, or to think of them as living, breathing symbols of peace, love and freedom – and you certainly shouldn’t let me stop you doing so – but the truth is, sadly, rather more prosaic. There were isolated records of the bird from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, presumably escapees that had originally been brought back from the far reaches of the Empire, but there were no records of breeding until the late 1960s or early 1970s, and even then it was another twenty years before the population really started to expand. Over the same period, parakeets started to appear around other European cities as well, suggesting that the real reason for their presence was the carelessness of certain cage-bird owners, or perhaps even deliberate releases. There seem to have been further points of genesis for the UK population, too: parakeets that have slowly established themselves in cities such as Birmingham and Manchester are likely to have nothing at all to do with the London-based birds.

  Coming up with a population figure is hard – some estimates are as low as eight thousand pairs, while others range upwards of fifty thousand birds. Given the size of some of the London roosts, it’s probably nearer the latter. Esher Rugby Club, for example, has long been known as the place to go to see these raucous, roistering creatures bickering and bantering as they settle down for the night, with over six thousand birds at a time using it as their base for commuting throughout the metropolis; while my friend David Lindo, the Urban Birder of TV fame, talks of roosts of two thousand or so at his home patch of Wormwood Scrubs. That, in its way, is even more extraordinary, given that on a clear evening the shining towers and shards of central London look close enough to touch from the Scrubs’ central high ground; to see a mass of parakeets flashing across the London Eye, or the Post Office Tower, is to experience a sudden dizzying cognitive dissonance, as though two widely separated points on the planet had suddenly become coexistent.

  But it’s Sunday lunchtime and I’ve done all the dizzying I want to do this side of an Australian Shiraz. I watch our little flock of bright-green fly high, wide and handsome, not to mention fast, before descending again towards distant gardens. These, and the British public’s willingness to feed garden birds, have been a major cause of their success; and there’s heated debate as to whether the parakeets are having an impact on native species, particularly fellow hole-dwellers such as woodpeckers. The jury’s still out, and I can’t help hoping that they manage to avoid the fate of another escapee and colonist, the ruddy duck, which is all but gone from the UK after a controversial cull designed to protect the white-headed ducks of Spain. The fact that there was little evidence that British ducks were going over there and hybridising, and that, if they did, it would have been easier to cull them in Spain, didn’t deter Defra, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

  Were the parakeets to be culled, we’d lose a lot more than just their bright colours and their hugely evocative calls (they’re another favourite of TV and film producers). We’d be doing a disservice, I think, to some of nature’s great survivors, and losing sight of the fact that practically no species in the modern world lives in isolation from mankind and the good and ill we b
ring with us. Why does the fact that the parakeets and mandarins were brought here make them any less ‘natural’ than the waxwings with their reliance on our supermarkets and car parks, or even emblematic British species such as the skylark or blackbird, beneficiaries of our clearance of forests and creation of cultivated areas? Isn’t it better to accept that, sometimes, we’re also responsible for happy accidents? No one wants an unrestrained traffic of alien species into sensitive habitats, but we play God at our peril, and we’d do well to remember that no one can foresee all the consequences of any given action.

  14 Silver Linings

  In the half-light of dawn the only birds to be seen are half-a-dozen oystercatchers, hunched here and there on the far bank of the gravel pit. The black and white plumage that gave them their folk-name of ‘sea-pie’ makes them stand out in virtually any context, and just for good measure each of them has a bill that resembles nothing so much as the carrot used for a snowman’s nose.

  Snowmen. There’ll be a few of them before the day is through, inland at least, because the wind has turned round and is blowing straight out of the north. With nothing to get in its way between the Arctic and the north Norfolk coast, it goes to work, defining the phrase ‘chilled to the bone’. Back along the sea wall, and among the caravans and chalets back towards the main road, nothing’s moving. Anyone with a choice in the matter will be staying in bed a couple of hours longer.