Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? 200 birds, 12 months, 1 lapsed birdwatcher

by Lev Parikian

  Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps he was pecked to death by a mob of lapwings as a child and has been traumatised ever since. Or perhaps he’s secretly enraptured by them but doesn’t want to show it.

  Nonetheless, I make a silent vow never to submit to complacency, never to lose the sense of wonder at the glories of the everyday, that childish feeling of awe and discovery that fuelled my heinous sprint at the bar-tailed godwits all those years ago.

  Hunger soon gets the better of me and I head for the cafe. As I pass a patch of reeds, I hear a high-pitched reeling from its depths. There’s a grasshopper warbler in there, but it’s too well hidden, and I’m too hungry. As I continue, I wrestle with two questions. Should I retrace my steps and find my lugubrious companion to tell him about it? And does it, heard but not seen, count towards my target?

  I’ve just reached the answers ‘no’ and ‘yes’ when a distinctive shape flies over my left shoulder and perches on a bush twenty yards ahead of me. Neither pigeon nor hawk, crow nor kestrel, it stops me in my tracks. A cuckoo, many times heard but never seen, the sound of my childhood made flesh, breaking cover for just a few seconds before fleeing to the woods.

  That one definitely counts. Happy birthday to me.

  April ticks (68)

  WWT Barnes, RSPB Minsmere, RSPB Rainham Marshes, RSPB Dungeness, Brent Reservoir

  Jackdaw Corvus monedula, Greylag Goose Anser anser, Shelduck Tadorna tadorna, Gadwall Anas strepera, Teal Anas crecca, Shoveler Anas clypeata, Red-legged Partridge Alectoris rufa, Pheasant Phasianus colchicus, Little Egret Egretta garzetta, Little Grebe Tachybaptus ruficollis, Great Crested Grebe Podiceps cristatus, Marsh Harrier Circus aeruginosus, Sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus, Avocet Recurvirostra avosetta, Oystercatcher Haematopus ostralegus, Black-tailed Godwit Limosa limosa, Dunlin Calidris alpina, Redshank Tringa totanus, Jack Snipe Lymnocryptes minimus, Mediterranean Gull Larus melanocephalus, Lesser Black-backed Gull Larus fuscus, Herring Gull Larus argentatus, Great Black-backed Gull Larus marinus, Coal Tit Periparus ater, Sand Martin Riparia riparia, Swallow Hirundo rustica, Chiffchaff Phylloscopus collybita, Kestrel Falco tinnunculus, Bittern Botaurus stellaris, Ringed Plover Charadrius hiaticula, Turnstone Arenaria interpres, Knot Calidris canutus, Bearded Tit Panurus biarmicus, Stonechat Saxicola rubicola, Greenfinch Chloris chloris, Buzzard Buteo buteo, Egyptian Goose Alopochen aegyptiaca, Pintail Anas acuta, Pochard Aythya ferina, Little Ringed Plover Charadrius dubius, Kingfisher Alcedo atthis, Firecrest Regulus ignicapilla, Cetti’s Warbler Cettia cetti, Willow Warbler Phylloscopus trochilus, Blackcap Sylvia atricapilla, Pied Wagtail Motacilla alba, Sedge Warbler Acrocephalus schoenobaenus, Wheatear Oenanthe oenanthe, Reed Bunting Emberiza schoeniclus, Common Gull Larus canus, Collared Dove Streptopelia decaocto, Skylark Alauda arvensis, Meadow Pipit Anthus pratensis, Little Gull Hydrocoloeus minutus, Green Sandpiper Tringa ochropus, Snipe Gallinago gallinago, Yellow-browed warbler Phylloscopus inornatus, Hobby Falco subbuteo, Whimbrel Numenius phaeopus, Whitethroat Sylvia communis, House Martin Delichon urbicum, Whinchat Saxicola rubetra, Cuckoo Cuculus canorus, Swift Apus apus, Reed Warbler Acrocephalus scirpaceus, Yellow Wagtail Motacilla flava, Linnet Linaria cannabina, Grasshopper Warbler Locustella naevia (heard)

  Year total: 108

  Notes

  * And yes, I know it’s much safer than clipping your toenails or buying a Toffee Crisp from a vending machine. Just allow me this one irrational phobia, OK? Oh, and spiders.

  * This, unlike WHIFLAMM, is an actual thing, corroborated by scientists and everything.

  MAY 2016

  The swifts are back.

  Two of them scream over the terrace as I’m hanging out the laundry, Maverick and Iceman, writhing in and out of each other’s slipstream, slicing through the atmosphere so close to my head I can hear, for a split second, the miniature whoosh of their displaced air.

  Summer isn’t summer without swifts. I saw one at Rainham, a lone harbinger, on my birthday, but in my head it didn’t quite count, the excitement reserved for the moment we hear the screech of our own birds circling overhead then swooping into the eaves and out again in a flurry, never stopping, evolved for nothing but flight.

  Their season is short. If you see one in Britain in April, you’re lucky. Throughout May they arrive with a flourish, their excitable screaming and extravagant aerial displays enlivening the skies for the next three months. And then, one day in August, they’re gone, leaving a sickle-shaped hole in our lives. In those short months I will drink them in as deeply as I can, standing on the terrace with a gormless look on my face as they swoop and sweep and glide and flutter, a top-class aerial ballet company performing at no cost to the taxpayer.

  We had swifts when I was a child, but mostly we had swallows, which arrived a few weeks earlier and more surreptitiously. It was their departure, advertised for days beforehand by the gradual build-up of chattering birds on telephone wires, that sticks in the mind, a memory as much a part of my childhood as blue tits pecking through the foil to get to the top of the milk.

  But while the swallows were abundant in 1970s Oxfordshire, they’re not really city birds. So for us now it’s swifts all the way.

  I count twenty of them circling high over Streatham Common one Saturday morning early in May. As I stand, head tilted back, revelling in their display, I become aware of a bundle of energy approaching on the path.

  He’s eight or so, wildly overexcited, carrying a pair of purple binoculars and a colourful bird guide. Five paces behind, his mother, weary, amused, has the air of someone who’s wondering where the cafe is. I know how they both feel. I’ve spent a contented hour roaming the common. Sun and birds are out, the air full of the sights, sounds and smells of spring. All is well with the world. But now I need coffee.

  I’ve just spent ten minutes watching a nuthatch feed its young. They’ve nested in one of the boxes in the little wood, and as I stand underneath I can hear wheedling cheeps as the parent whirrs back and forth acceding to the chicks’ demands. Occasionally, if it’s away for too long, a chick pops its nose out, wondering where the food is. Even from a distance the adult bird looks haggard, flown off its wings by the demands of parenthood. How it must long for the day they fledge and it can kick back with a vat of pistachios and a cold beer.

  The mother of the young boy has a similarly careworn air, but she’s indulgent, obviously pleased by her son’s mania, and presumably relieved he’s chosen to spend the morning outdoors rather than staring at a screen.

  ‘Look, Mum! Great tit!’

  He shows her the bird with an extravagant wave of his binoculars. A great tit does indeed flit past us into a bush. The boy whirls round again, pointing.

  ‘Robin!’

  His overt enthusiasm is a pleasing contrast to the demeanour of most birders I’ve encountered, a valuable reminder of why we do it. He’s clearly unaware that his shouting and flailing are more likely to drive the birds away than attract them, but his excitement is infectious. Just once I’d like to see an adult birder let out an involuntary, ‘SHIT! DID YOU SEE THAT?’ And I like to think, underneath their impassive exteriors, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

  He sees my binoculars.

  ‘Are you birdwatching?’ Flattering awe. I smile at them both.

  ‘I am. Beautiful bird, the great tit, isn’t it?’

  He scowls.

  ‘It’s the bully of the feeder.’ He’s admonishing both me and the bird.

  Duly chastened, I change the subject.

  ‘Hey, you know what I’ve just seen?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A nuthatch.’

  He’s wide-eyed, looking through his book. But it only lists the commonest birds, and the nuthatch, abundant enough but not everyday, isn’t there. I bring out my phone, show him a picture. He’s beside himself.

  ‘Look, Mum! A nuthatch!’ he screams, as a blue tit zips past. A mistle thrush emerges from the undergrowth, its alarm call reminiscent of the teleprinter from Grandstand in 1976, and I fear the lad
might explode. He’s unstoppable now, naming all the birds in the vicinity with equal fervour and inaccuracy.

  ‘Lovely to see such enthusiasm,’ I say to his mother.

  ‘He’s obsessed. I can’t keep up.’

  I point up the path.

  ‘If you go up there you’ll reach a fenced area. Just past that on the right there’s a tall tree with a nest box halfway up. That’s where the nuthatches are.’ To the boy I say, ‘Have fun.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he replies. And he’s off, bouncing up the path. Despite his inadvisable waving and shouting, there are birds aplenty knocking about the place, more than I’ve seen at any time that morning.

  I go home for my coffee. The future of birding is in safe hands.

  I’m buoyed by my role, however brief, as mentor to the next generation, but I’m under no illusions. I need mentoring myself.

  Tempting though it is, with my total topping 100, to think the battle is half won, I’m not kidding myself. Most of those birds were easy fodder. All I had to do was turn up and point my binoculars out of a hide. The months ahead present a tantalisingly short window to see our summer visitors, and while some will be commonplace, plenty are more elusive, and their identification will require skills I don’t yet possess. Despite my deep-seated vein of independence, I realise I must swallow my pride and enlist help from older and wiser heads.

  Andrew isn’t older, but he is by some distance wiser. He took my woeful ignorance of the robin’s song with laconic good humour, and now he’s agreed to show me a couple of favourite haunts. I present myself outside a PC World in Walthamstow one Sunday morning, and we drive to the Norfolk/Suffolk border, in search of cranes, stone-curlews and, in my case, enlightenment.

  RSPB Lakenheath Fen was converted in 1995 from arable farmland back to the kind of wetland habitat that used to be dominant in this part of the world. It’s been a spectacular success, wetland birds falling over themselves to breed here. They include cranes, graceful and elegant birds, as tall as an eight-year-old but with a bigger wingspan. The crane disappeared as a breeding bird in this country 400 years ago, victim of hunting and diminishing habitat. But recently it’s established toeholds, in Somerset thanks to a reintroduction programme, and in East Anglia of its own accord. Lakenheath has other attractions, but secretly I’m holding out for cranes.

  My hopes are immediately dealt a blow.

  ‘If you see them, they’ll probably be very distant.’

  I take the RSPB lady’s use of the word ‘distant’ to mean ‘far away’, rather than ‘stand-offish’. Having lowered our expectations, she gives us a map of the reserve and a list of recent sightings, many of them familiar from Minsmere. My eye alights on the word ‘garganey’. Like the gadwall, this is an unflashy duck, its plumage a subtle mix of grey, black, brown and white, the distinguishing feature of the male a white crescent which runs down the nape from above the eye. Underrated bird. Scarce. Worth seeking out.

  The difference between Andrew’s and my levels of expertise is highlighted within a minute. As we crunch our way along the gravel path, Andrew, while apparently concentrating on my thrilling tales of ornithological derring-do, interrupts to point out the song of a blackcap.

  I stop, concentrating. Sure enough, in the distance there’s a jumbled song I hadn’t even heard, let alone identified. We were walking. Talking. The scrunch of the gravel obscured all other sounds, and conversation left no room for background listening. But Andrew seems always tuned in to both landscape and soundscape. It’s a matter of awareness. Useful though my recordings have been, they’re like practising conducting in front of a mirror. There’s no substitute for hands-on experience.

  We come to a separation of the paths with a view across a broad stretch of water interspersed with the inevitable reed beds. The sky, Tupperware-grey now the early sun has yielded to unthreatening high cloud, remains large, the flatness of the landscape inviting the eye across it. Some of the commoner birds float across the water. Coots, Canada geese, mallards. Amongst them is an unflashy bird, white crescent stripe running from its eye and tapering as it slides into the browns and greys of the bird’s plumage.

  Bonus garganey.

  An early tick is like an early goal in a football match – it injects energy and purpose, the anticipation of a good day. How misguided. The cranes fail to appear, and no matter how pleasant the walk and abundant the birdlife on offer, there remains the tiniest needy tug at the back of my mind as we drive the short distance to Weeting Heath.

  News of the stone-curlews sounds hauntingly familiar.

  ‘I’m afraid they’re quite distant today.’

  I’ve never been more grateful to have an expert with me. An expert with a telescope.

  The stone-curlew viewing hide is a short walk from the visitor centre, overlooking an expanse of rough grass with gentle hills in the distance. I scan the horizon through my binoculars, knowing they’re not strong enough but doing it anyway. Rook, stone, rook, rook, stone, grass, more rooks, nothing but bloody rooks, their stout black shapes stubbornly not morphing into anything resembling a stone-curlew.

  ‘They’ve just gone over the brow,’ a gentleman offers.

  About a hundred yards from the hide the ground slopes gently away. The stone-curlews are nesting just beyond that ridge, laying their eggs in a bare scrape on the ground among the occasional stones that give them their name. Camouflage is all-important for both bird and egg, vital protection against predators. This leads me to wonder why they choose to nest out in the open. Doubtless there are sound evolutionary reasons, but it does seem mildly perverse.

  These birds are picky. They like chalky, stony ground with short-clipped grass to ensure an abundance of their favoured diet of little scrabbly things like woodlice and millipedes. It’s a habitat nurtured by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, with the help of a willing army of sheep and rabbits. With the changes in farming practice and gradual loss of natural habitats, the stone-curlew, along with dozens of other birds, has declined in this country. Depressing though this is, it’s heartening there are people who care enough to try to halt the decline.

  Andrew touches my shoulder.

  ‘Got one in the scope.’

  I want to find them myself. It’s like struggling with a crossword clue that someone else has already got – I’m torn between desperation to know the answer and an almost equal urge to prove myself. But my binoculars aren’t up to the task. I look. Even through the scope the birds are indistinct, this very lack of clarity somehow making the sight more moving, like footage of the moon landing. Barely visible just above the ridge, a brown blob, its eye and bill a yellow dot and dash, moves slightly towards us. It stops, turns, is met by a twin blob. Their paths intersect briefly, then move apart. If I concentrate really hard I can make out more detail, and then, just as I think I have the bird in my sights, it moves. I step away from the scope.

  I don’t quite know why I’m so moved by them. Maybe it’s their appearance, slender legs and startled look coupling with a notably yellow eye to lend them a certain vulnerability. Maybe it’s the thought of the work that’s gone into preserving their status as a British breeding bird. Or perhaps it’s because we’ve had to work a little to see them. There are dozens of rooks between us and the stone-curlews. They’re interesting, intelligent, attractive birds in their own right, the blackness of their plumage showing a purple gloss when caught in a certain light. But their abundance renders them, today at least, comparatively insignificant. I can see a rook any time. The stone-curlew is different. I doubt I’ll see another this year.

  I spend a couple of minutes admiring a rook to redress the balance.

  The stone-curlews trundle over the brow of the hill. We’ve had a good sight of them, but it’s time to go home. We pick up our stuff and leave.

  It’s an ambitious schedule, dependent on train connections. A day trip from London to a bird reserve is rarely straightforward by public transport. But I have the day off, Tessa needs the car for work, and faint he
art never made birder. And so I find myself sailing through the north Kent countryside on my Brompton one sunny morning. I wish I could say that I do so without a care in the world, a warm spring wind whistling through my hair and a song on my lips. But my ill-fitting helmet itches, third gear gets stuck, and the Tesco vans of the Hoo Peninsula seem hell-bent on nudging me into every ditch in the area. It’s a relief to arrive at the reserve, padlock the bike to a post, and start my circuit.

  The RSPB reserve at Cliffe Pools, a mix of saline and freshwater lagoons, grassland, salt marsh and scrub, isn’t one of those with a tea room and gift shop. There’s a car park, but otherwise it’s just you and the great outdoors. I like this. It makes me feel like a member of the hard core, eschewing the namby-pamby creature comforts of life.

  But twenty minutes in I could murder a flat white.

  The path is long, with no visible end. To the right, fields, greylag geese grazing in the distance. To the left, an expanse of water, the occasional coot floating aimlessly on its surface. A kestrel glides over, hovers for a few seconds, decides against it and veers off in search of richer pickings. The song of warblers from the bushes competes unavailingly with the exuberant croakings of marsh frogs from the ditches lining the path. A stoat emerges, glances disdainfully in my direction, then trots calmly ahead of me, rightly confident it could take me down mano-a-mano should the need arise. It ducks under a fence and loses itself in a field.

  If I’ve learned anything about this game, it’s a modicum of patience. My first glance at the large area of bushes to my left yields no more than an unending vista of hawthorn and bramble, but rather than assuming there’s nothing there, I stop, consider my options, and head up the narrow path into denser undergrowth. I force myself to walk slowly, senses on full alert. I’m alive to every twitch and rustle. A scurrying at knee level. My head jerks round, but it’s gone. A flurry to my right, flickering leaves, a trembling of branches. A shadow dives into the impenetrable depths. A cheep from... where exactly? No idea. Another cheep, an answering chirp, activity everywhere, but none of it doing what I want it to, which is to sit down in front of me in order of height, and bloody well shut up while I work out what they are.