A Sky Full of Birds
Page 22
I watch until the last birds have become tiny specks in the eastern sky, then vanish below the horizon, their clangour faded to a faint rumour above the calls of waders and the growing tinnitus of the awakening world. They’ll probably be back tonight, of course, but they won’t necessarily return in one large movement. The early bird really is the one who gets the early bird.
If geese were all Snettisham had to offer, it would still be utterly worth rising at an unearthly hour and risking hypothermia. But they’re not, and what follows can, depending on your view of gangly, gawky shorebirds, make the pink-feet seem like little more than the competent but essentially commonplace opening act of the greatest show you ever saw.
There’s a little gaggle of birdwatchers around me now. We were all present to see the geese, but strung out along the sea wall at intervals of around thirty yards or so. Being British our natural reserve demands that we gravitate towards each other only very slowly, and seemingly reluctantly, but the extreme cold probably helps encourage our coming together, seeing as how we’re all looking for the slightest excuse to move around and keep warm. Once we do, we start to discuss excitedly what we’ve just seen, like the audience at a West End musical pouring out into the bar at the interval, talking about highlights from the first half and wondering how on earth the cast are going to top that in the second half.
But top it they do. Where they differ from the stars of the stage is that, taken individually, none of these birds is necessarily stellar. It’s just that brought together for the greatest crowd scene of the British birdwatching year, every one of them is unforgettable.
It starts with redshanks. They’re familiar enough to birdwatchers of most types and abilities, their extreme sensitivity to danger (especially in the form of man) having long ago earned them the nickname of ‘warden of the marshes’. Generally solitary, they start to arrow a few feet over the sea wall, flying straight down the slipstream of their mournful, liquid, three-note whistles – by the time you hear it they’re past you.
Golden plovers, too, are birds that still breed in Britain in reasonable numbers, and at least some of those that we see spangling high above the water in the first rays of the risen sun will have made the relatively short journey from the Pennines, or Scotland. In this light they come closer than most to being heavenly bodies, toggling between tiny, almost invisible white dwarfs as they present us with their pale bellies, then exploding into a hundred supernovas of yellow-gold as the flock turns and their backs and wings catch the sun. There are three such groups, with two occasionally combining and then separating again, and they alternate a seemingly aimless wide circling with fast, purposeful flight in our direction, all the time losing height.
Dunlin and knot, on the other hand, are rather less familiar birds, especially for any birder from a landlocked county, like me. In spring and summer they’d be a completely different story, the former resplendent in black waistcoat and rufous back, and the latter a dazzling terracotta shade that outweighs the rather ungainly impression given by its portly outline, as well as fully justifying the species’ American moniker of red knot.
For now, though, both are clouds of dark-grey specks in the distance, like so many midges in summertime. Where the golden plovers are creatures of light, these waders seem to be soaking it up. Their flocks twist and gyre like those fractal screen-saver displays on PCs in the 1990s, threatening to tear apart and disintegrate completely, before suddenly coalescing again and taking on a new form. It’s truly hypnotic, and again it’s easy not to notice that as we watch, they’re getting closer, and lower.
Just as it seems they must run out of mudflat over which to perform their perfectly choreographed moves, there’s an interruption in their aerial dervish dance. A large female peregrine appears from behind us, flying into the wind with powerful strokes that clearly show her flexed carpal joints. She soars for a few metres every now and then, presumably eyeing the immense moveable feast below and ahead, and the flocks tighten and tighten until they’re solid black. The waders know the deep-chested, muscular shape of the raptor for what it is – sudden and violent death – and react accordingly. This, after all, is what flocks are really all about. On its own, not one of those birds would stand a chance against the falcon and her breakneck fury, but together they’re something more intimidating. It takes only a few seconds and then the peregrine decides that discretion is the better part of valour, and starts to drift around the shore towards Lincolnshire, perhaps looking to pick off one of the lone curlews that are studding what’s left of the mud, or else thinking about heading inland to make a breakfast of woodpigeon.
The peregrine’s departure is the signal that the dunlin, golden plovers and especially knots have been waiting for. Birds are unravelled from the larger tangle by invisible forces of kinship, habit and hunger, and are spun out into long thin strands above our heads, before finally snagging on some invisible hook just beyond the gravel pits and falling to earth. But others are emboldened to strike out on their own, perhaps deciding that a faster, more direct approach is needed to secure the best positions at the roost. As we stand birds start to skim lower and lower over our heads, sometimes so close that we feel the draught from their wings as they rush by. Our ears are filled with the strange music – melancholy and yet so urgent that it’s life-affirming – of shorebirds calling to each other to remain in contact. Who knows? Calling to the whole world to tell it that they’ve survived another winter night.
This little squall of birds gathers pace, until you feel as though you could grab a couple simply by raising your outstretched hands above your head. It’s a moment to be glad that you made the effort to get up so early and, birds’ digestive systems being what they are, relieved that you wore a hat, but most of all it’s time to be astonished by the sheer size and scale and the power of crowds.
When, finally, the amount of incoming birds lessens and then stops almost entirely, we make our way to the hide overlooking the nearest gravel pit. After the immense relief at being out of the stinging wind has worn off, and we’ve begun thinking about using our binoculars again, we’re jabbering away once more, so much so that none of us registers exactly what is before us. No one actually says ‘where have they all gone to’, but we’re all thinking it, and it’s only when that oystercatcher starts barging his way to the front that we realise we’re looking at a landscape made up entirely of birds. While the water’s empty enough, pretty well every inch of solid ground in sight is occupied by a wader of one sort or another.
That takes some getting your head around, and again I start marvelling at the fact that this is all happening, not in some distant, remote and picturesque location, but round the back of a humdrum caravan park just a couple of miles from the main roads and filling stations, retail parks and housing estates of the modern world.
Then it strikes me. However deliciously thrilling that juxtaposition is for us – the grandeur of untamed nature next to the gentle, unchanging banality of everyday life – for the birds this is nothing special at all. The waders will have cared nothing for the fact that their own movements were synchronous with those of the geese. The geese likewise. This immense gathering is, to the average knot or dunlin, no more significant than any other. They’re used to flying in flocks, feeding in flocks, and breeding in close proximity, and the timing of tides and sunrises are utterly irrelevant. For them the location is neither unspoiled nor man-made, just a huge, muddy fly-through takeaway with adjoining waiting areas to be used for as long as necessary until the next biological imperative wings them halfway across the country, or continent, or world.
And that, perhaps, is the single thing that makes birdwatching so endlessly involving. However much we can predict behaviour based on careful study and past experience, there’s no getting away from the fact that every bird is an individual, sentient being with its own motives and particular habits and routines. And while each of them is also affected by mankind’s behaviour – above all the destruction of vast swath
es of habitat – many are also capable of adapting to new circumstances, or else of arranging their lives so that they intersect with man’s only when it’s absolutely necessary. The power of flight, of course, gives them more freedom than just about any other creature on the planet and it also invests each encounter with every bird with an aura of good fortune.
Those intersections are what continue to delight me, after getting on for forty years of birding. More than that, they astonish me, in the genuine sense of the word. Even a sighting of a familiar bird – a song thrush riffing from the top of the garden rowan, say – feels like a gift once you take into account that it had so many other places it could be, and so many other things it could be doing. Multiply that feeling and that possibility by tens, and hundreds, and thousands, as so many of the experiences in this book have done, and you can start to feel like the luckiest person on the planet.
Index
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
Athelney, Isle of xviii, xix
Attenborough Nature Reserve 141
Bass Rock 80
Bempton Cliffs RSPB 96
Berwick-upon-Tweed 186–7
blackbird 25, 43, 201
blackcap 28, 43, 136
bullfinch 27
bunting, corn 209
bunting, reed 59
buzzard xiii, xx, 57
capercaillie 3, 7
chaffinch 6, 27
Charnwood Forest 25, 112, 198
chiffchaff 27
crow, carrion xx, 57, 160, 163–4
cuckoo 51, 54
curlew 26, 213
curlew, slender-billed 185
dove, stock xiii
duck, tufted 41
dunlin 205, 218–19
egret, little 195
eider 16
Esher Rugby Club 203
Farne Islands 90
fieldfare xx
flycatcher, pied 137
fulmar 84, 88
gannet 16, 82, 84–7, 96
godwit, black-tailed 44, 178
goldeneye 205
goose, Canada 10, 143
goose, pink-footed 186, 212, 214–15
Gracedieu Woods 24
grebe, great crested 1, 10–11, 13, 15, 17
grebe, Slavonian 16
greenfinch 27
grouse, black 6–8
guillemot 84, 88
guillemot, black 88
gull, black-headed xx, 69, 98, 213
harrier, hen 55–6
harrier, marsh, xx, 209
heron, grey 6, 57
heron, squacco 141
hoopoe 139
jackdaw xx, 156, 158, 160, 163
kestrel xiii, 57
kite, red 104–108
kittiwake 68, 70–2, 73–9, 88
Knepp Castle Estate 33, 37
knot 206, 218–19
lapwing xx, xxi, 209
mallard xx, 10, 14, 178, 180, 205
mandarin 197–8, 200
martin, house 51–2
merlin 56, 59
moorhen xx
Nethy Bridge 2
Newborough Warren 165–170
nightingale 31–7
Oakham 115–16
osprey xv, 124–8, 130
Ouse Washes 172–4
owl, barn 37, 56, 65, 209, 213
owl, short-eared 56
owl, tawny 37
oystercatcher xv, 205
Pagham Harbour 47
parakeet, ring-necked 201–4
Parkgate RSPB 58
peregrine 56, 59, 100–6, 110–14, 218
pigeon, feral 98–100, 109–10
pintail 16, 205
pipit, meadow 59
plover, golden xxi, 16, 209, 217, 219
pochard 178, 180
puffin 84, 88–9
rail, water 60
Rathlin Island 87
raven 6, 9, 160–2, 163, 165–70
razorbill 84, 88
redshank 205, 213, 217
redstart 47, 136, 142
redwing xx
robin 6, 21, 25, 31
rook xx, 156, 158–60, 162, 163–4
Rutland Water 12, 117–28
scaup, lesser 39–40
shrike, red-backed 137
Snettisham 206–7, 212–13
Somerset Levels xiv, 145
sparrowhawk 201
Spurn Point 133–6, 141
starling xii, 59, 144–55
Stokenchurch 107
swallow 13, 42
swan, Bewick’s 174–6, 180, 183–4
swan, mute 181–3, 186–8
swan, whooper 171–5, 177–80, 183
Swithland Reservoir 39
Tate Modern 98, 111
teal xx
tern, little 46
tern, Arctic 92–3
thrush, mistle 191
thrush, song 25
tit, great 27
tit, long-tailed 1, 138
wagtail, yellow 48
warbler, garden 28, 136
warbler, icterine 136
warbler, marsh 26
warbler, willow 28, 48–9, 136
waxwing 190–5
wheatear 41, 45, 53–4, 73
whinchat 136, 142
whitethroat 28, 136
wigeon xx
Welney 173–5, 177
woodpecker, green 138
woodpigeon xiii, 201
wryneck 131, 137
York 109–11
Acknowledgements
For help and inspiration, thanks are due to: Bird Watching magazine, the RSPB, the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, the British Trust for Ornithology, Alison Brackenbury, the Grant Arms in Grantown-on-Spey, Heatherlea Birdwatching Holidays, Knepp Castle Estate, the Wildlife Trusts, Leicestershire and Rutland Ornithological Society, Nine Arches Press, Tim Appleton, Stuart Winter, David Lindo, Rutland Osprey Project, Rick and Elis Simpson, David Morley, John Miles, Mark Cocker, Conor Jameson, Paul Brook, Swarovski Optik, Neil Glenn, Waveney River Centre.
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Copyright © Matt Merritt 2016
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First published in the United Kingdom by Rider in 2016
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781846044793