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

by Lev Parikian

  A bird sings in the distance. I ask Andrew what it is. He looks at me slightly askance.

  ‘Song thrush.’

  Ah yes. Silly me. I’ve heard loads of song thrushes this spring. I’m nearly on first-name terms with the one in Norwood Grove. So why didn’t I recognise this one?

  There’s a phenomenon, familiar to conductors, called podium deafness. It works like this. When sitting in an auditorium observing someone else’s rehearsal you’re an aural genius.

  ‘Second flute’s flat. Bass trombone’s late. Inside fourth desk second violins just played C sharp instead of C natural.’

  But standing on the podium, baton in hand and the weight of responsibility on your shoulders, confidence evaporates and all you hear is a raging white noise occasionally punctuated by something that might or might not be an oboe. If mistakes are made, all your brain can formulate is the vaguest thought that something, somewhere, has gone wrong. Beyond that all is mush. So you intensify your expression of passionate immersion, make a sweeping gesture with your left hand, and shout at the third horn for a non-existent missed entry. That’s conducting.

  If I’ve got used to podium deafness over the years, I still suffer from its birding equivalent. Andrew has pointed out redstarts, tree pipits and a marsh tit, all familiar to me from pictures and recordings. I’ve seen the birds, heard them, observed and enjoyed them, and nodded sagely while noting them in my book. But I am nothing in this unfamiliar environment without the expertise of others. In truth, I’ve flailed in Andrew’s wake, adrift on a sea of novelty. They’re all ticks, but I can’t help feeling they’re plastic ticks, as cheap, shoddy and fake as a Bolex watch.

  For all my undoubted effort, it’s clear I’m entirely dependent on my mentor. But isn’t that what mentors are for? He’s showing me a way of doing things, of being alert but relaxed, that only comes with experience. I’ve never seen any of these birds before. Why on earth do I expect to recognise them straight off the bat?

  It’s all part of a familiar pattern. Wanting to be the expert, dazzling others with my knowledge, and plunged into paroxysms of gloom when I fail. Better, surely, to be the one who wants to learn?

  I shake these negative thoughts from my head and concentrate on the acres of gorse all around, hoping to discern the flutterings of a Dartford warbler in the shaggy depths.

  ‘There’s your redpoll, Lev.’

  I wheel round. He’s pointing upwards. I scan the skies, trying to locate the source of the staccato chattering that alerted him to the passing presence of these little finches, and eventually find three dots bouncing out of sight over the brow of the hill.

  Trying to retain a snapshot of the sight and sound of the birds as they passed overhead, I add common redpoll to the list.

  As we make towards the car with one eye on the clouds and the other on warbler-watch, it becomes clear we’re not going to avoid the tender ministrations of the English summer. The smattering has turned into a dogged mizzle which looks like being just the support act. After a while, acutely aware of the increasing dampness of my son and heir, I call a halt. If we kick on we should make it back before the rain really takes hold.

  There’s only one thing wrong with this plan. I’m in charge of the map.

  The confidence with which I lead us to the path on the right is matched only by the inaccuracy of my navigation. We tramp off, unaware we’re heading in completely the wrong direction. Andrew and Oliver trust me. Why shouldn’t they? I’m a conductor.

  There comes a moment during a rainy day in England when the rain shelves any pretence that it’s a passing shower and sets in for the long haul. ‘Think you’re wet?’ it seems to say. ‘Think again.’ And then it rolls up its sleeves and gives of its best, applying itself to the task of delivering a countywide drenching with the attention to detail of a true professional. The idea that it doesn’t bear you a personal grudge is a pathetic fallacy.

  We reach the drenching stage a mile from the car, and it’s quickly replaced by a veritable Crocodile Dundee of rain production.

  ‘That’s not rain,’ it declares. ‘THIS is rain.’

  The intensification of the soaking means I consult the map less often than I should, and this leads to an inevitable straying from the righteous path. Only when we hit a road do I decide to look again, and realisation dawns.

  They take it well, all things considered.

  Fans of Winnie-the-Pooh will know that the best way to get somewhere when confronted with a flood is to turn your umbrella upside down, climb inside it, and paddle your way across the forest to wherever it is you want to go, whether it’s to rescue a Piglet or to return your long-suffering child to an environment where he can breathe without the risk of drowning.

  We have no umbrella. Shanks’s pony it is.

  I try to imagine how I would have reacted to the afternoon’s events at the age of eleven, and come to the swift conclusion that the young man walking with resigned good humour by my side deserves a treat when we get home. I put a consoling arm round his shoulder.

  ‘Nearly there.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad. You just squeezed a river down my back.’

  The perils of compassionate parenting.

  We reach the car, nostalgic for a time when every movement didn’t induce a torrent of splashing. There we assess the wisdom of continuing our day as planned.

  Ashdown Forest, good for bears of little brain and terminally depressed donkeys, is also one of the key spots in the south of England for a particular crepuscular summertime bird, and it’s pivotal to my plans for the day.

  The composition of my 200 birds has been fluid. If I fail to see any of those seafaring bullies, the skuas, for example, it won’t be a disaster, because I should be able to make up the numbers elsewhere. But there are some whose presence on the final list I’m regarding as non-negotiable, and not just because of the numbers. Some birds have an aura about them, something that sets them apart from the run of ordinary things. The golden eagle is one; the bittern another. I would argue, too, for the inclusion of the relatively common kingfisher – any sighting of this bullet of iridescence is imprinted on the synapses for later recall.

  Firmly on my Aura of Greatness list is a bird that used to be known, for all the wrong reasons, as the goatsucker.* Its scientific name, Caprimulgus europaeus, retains the link.† Nocturnal, mysterious, its appearance more giant moth than bird, the nightjar is in a category of its own, neither owl nor raptor. Perhaps that weirdness is part of the attraction. Being nocturnal, it holds a natural fascination for the diurnal human brain. Creatures of the night are almost by definition sinister, lurking in the shadows of our darkest fears. And the nightjar’s song only adds to the mystique. Where other birds have song or calls that are recognisable as such, the nightjar has its own sound, a rattling and continuous reeling known as ‘churring’. I’ve been brooding about the nightjar for weeks, my desperation to see one having to be kept in continual check. It needs to be a warm midsummer evening, and you need to go to a specific spot where they’re known to be found, usually on the edge of a forest clearing. They generally appear shortly before night descends and makes further sighting impossible, so there’s a window of about an hour. Right time, right place, right conditions. My opportunities will be few, and even then there’s no guarantee I’ll see one.

  Rain, for nightjar sightings, is bad news.

  We sit in the car and consider our options. The forecast says the rain will clear. But the forecast said light showers earlier, so my faith in it is shaky.

  After twenty minutes of gentle steaming, I heed the prevailing mood and, like an umpire calling off play for the day an hour after everyone else knew it was inevitable, announce that we’re going home.

  Birds vs family. Family wins. There will be other nightjars. There had better be.

  Mao Zedong was a delusional old cove, as illustrated by his bizarre vendetta against a humble bird which had been part of China’s culture for centuries.

  Passer montanus,
the tree sparrow. One of the ultimate ‘little brown jobs’.

  In 1958 the Great Leader decreed that all the tree sparrows in the country be killed. This wasn’t just a whim. He’d thought it through. Sparrows, he reasoned, ate too much grain. Get rid of them, and the people would be able to realise the fruits of their labour.

  To be fair, it wasn’t just sparrows. Also targeted in the Four Pests Campaign were rats, mosquitoes and flies. If only he’d restricted it to just the three pests, nobody would have batted an eyelid. But sparrows?

  When you have a population of 600 million people on hand to obey your every wish, the extermination of a whole species moves from the realm of ‘lunatic’ to ‘lunatic, but it might just work’. Birds were shot, nests destroyed, eggs broken and nestlings killed. People went out every evening, banging pots and pans to stop the birds from roosting, with the result that the exhausted birds dropped out of the skies like dead sparrows. The Chinese sparrow population plummeted.

  The fatal flaw in this Baldrickian plan soon became apparent. Sparrows don’t just eat grain. They also eat insects. Locusts, for example. The catastrophic effect of removing an entire link from the food chain would have been obvious to any remotely attentive eight-year-old, but that wasn’t Mao’s style. Locusts swarmed, crops failed, and the Great Leap Forward became the Great Chinese Famine, which accounted for the small matter of between 20 and 45 million deaths from starvation.

  Dictators, eh? Tsk.

  It’s almost the definition of irony that the tree sparrow was one of two species suggested in the early 2000s as China’s national bird.*

  For anyone over fifty and even vaguely interested, the tree sparrow and its cousin, house, will be familiar birds. The reason you have to be over fifty is that they’ve declined by over 90 per cent since the late 1960s. It’s widely thought that this decline is the result of agricultural policy – hedgerows were cleared, scrubby bits beside fields spruced up, old trees removed, farming techniques became more efficient. By the time the adverse effects of these policies became apparent, the damage was done, and the tree sparrow is now on the Birds of Conservation Concern red list.*

  From the top of the hill on Beddington Farmlands in south London, you feel as if you can reach out and touch the famous IKEA chimneys of the Purley Way. It’s not St Paul’s or the Angel of the North, but it’ll do. By contrast, the large refuse incinerator being built on the edge of the site won’t do at all, and the sludge beds next to the sewage farm on the other side, while good for birds, are best viewed from a distance.

  This 400-acre mixed habitat site also includes lakes, reed beds, scrubland, meadows and shallow pools. Its attraction to me is partly that it’s near where I live, but also that it’s home to a tenacious breeding population of tree sparrows. It’s a permit-only site, so I’ve signed up to a guided walk in the hope that some of them will present themselves to my eager scrutiny.

  We’re a small but select group, of mixed ages and genders. Peter, our guide – younger and more dashing than I’d expected – leads us to a vantage point above two lagoons, one of which is home to the largest daytime roost of herons in the London area. The sight of thirty or more of these prehistoric-looking birds lends the lagoon a hint of the primordial swamp.

  It’s sunny, breezy, June-y. An agitated gull flies over, followed by a bird of prey. I’m still sketchy on birds of prey,† so defer an attempt at identification. They disappear over the brow of the hill, combat still ongoing, the gull easily repelling the shambolic efforts of the raptor. Peter laughs.

  ‘That’ll be one of the Sutton peregrines. Juvenile. Not quite got the hang of it yet.’

  I’ve never seen a bungling raptor. The possibility hadn’t occurred to me. The ones I’ve seen have been full of quiet menace: marsh harriers coasting low and slow over reed beds, kestrels balanced on the air above an unsuspecting vole, buzzards soaring on thermals, scanning the landscape for movement. The peregrine is sold to us as a killing machine, the emphasis on speed and ruthless efficiency. But this one’s like a gawky teenager. It can fly all right, but it’s being outwitted and outsped by a black-headed gull. Fine bird, the black-headed gull, but you wouldn’t normally back it against a peregrine. But it stands to reason that the ability to stoop at 200 miles an hour and pluck a pigeon out of mid-air, while partly intuitive, might require some honing.

  No sooner has the peregrine disappeared than Peter draws our attention to something fast-moving and distant behind us. Two bird-like birds, flying like birds, with the distinctive shape of birds. While I’m upgrading my identification from ‘some kind of bird’ to ‘some kind of small or medium-sized bird’, Peter has identified them as ruffs, fired off a burst of photographs, and is examining the results on the camera’s screen.

  ‘There you go. See the distinctive flight shape? And the wing-bars.’

  Just as I thought. Definitely some kind of bird.

  We continue towards tree sparrow central, and I take stock. I have two bonus ticks, taking my total for the year to 134. It’ll be a rum do if I don’t see another ruff or peregrine before the year’s up, but it’s nice to have them under the belt. Now, if I can see these tree sparrows it’ll leave me on 135, which as everyone knows is a number inextricably associated with Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins and his historic last-frame break in the 1982 World Snooker Championships final.*

  If you ever find yourself looking for a tree sparrow on a 400-acre site, the thing to remember is that one of them is very big and the other is very small. This realisation hits me as we trudge around the area where the birds are supposed to be. A whitethroat pops up and serenades us. Lovely bird, the whitethroat. Enchanting song, fascinating behaviour. Now piss off and don’t come back unless it’s with a tree sparrow.

  Despite the growing body of evidence to the contrary, I still have a fond fantasy of arriving at a site and being greeted by a line of birds, perched out in the open, in good light, their features exactly resembling the ones so painstakingly represented in the field guides. In these fantasies the birds serve at my pleasure, tailoring the activities of their day according to my whim. So the possibility of not seeing any tree sparrows today simply hasn’t occurred to me. But as time passes without a whiff of a sighting, I have to accept it as not just a possibility but a likelihood. Accordingly I seize on any small bird as a possible tree sparrow. The merest hint of a flitting shadow in the corner of my eye has me wheeling round and scanning the rank vegetation that surrounds us, even though I know the bird was a blue tit. I try my best to hide this desperate behaviour from the others, who are showing signs of wanting to move on. For them, the stakes are low. Tree sparrows or no, they’ve had an enjoyable and informative morning. Peter is vastly knowledgeable about things besides birds: trees, grasses, wild flowers, butterflies, moths, everything. It’s knowledge worn lightly, shared as a matter of course, but what I really want him to do right now is conjure up a tree sparrow.

  One of my companions, an older lady, is making ‘shall we leave?’ noises, the occasional ‘Well…’ and ‘So…’ accompanied by a vague drifting down the hill towards the exit and home and tea. She’s had enough, hoping we’ll all take the hint and drift away with her.

  This won’t do.

  ‘Are you mad? Nobody leaves until we’ve seen these tree sparrows, you imbecilic poltroon.’

  The words form in my head, but I’m saved from myself by an ‘Ah!’ from Peter to my left. I follow the direction of his pointed finger with my binoculars until they alight on a small, dumpy, stout-billed silhouette. The light is good enough to discern the diagnostic black cheek patch and red-brown crown which separate it from the commoner* house sparrow. As we watch, it’s joined by two more. They jazz around for a few seconds, almost as if they know they have an audience, then disappear into the depths of the bush.

  We’re done. We can go.

  The sight of the tree sparrows brings home just how vulnerable these birds are. If I wanted to see one as a child I went into the garden, and now here I am, on
a fenced site in south London, so desperate for a sighting I’m on the verge of abusing a stranger. That such a common bird should decline so sharply in a lifetime should be unthinkable. It makes me wonder what a 1950s birder would say if they were around now.

  ‘What have you done with the sparrows? And the yellowhammers? And the corn buntings? And the grey partridges? And the turtle doves? And the pretty much everything? Where are all our birds?’

  ‘Ah, yes. We wondered if you’d notice. Well, we’ve sort of, you know, killed them off. Sorry about that.’

  It’s almost impossible to address this subject without coming across as a gloomy and earnest eco-warrior thumping a well-worn tub. But it’s also essential to do so. The birds, the bees, the insects, the flowers, the trees, the absolutely bloody everything, they all need our help. We are, after all, the cause of their problems. And it’s no longer acceptable to sit around doing nothing. Joining one of the conservation organisations listed at the end of this book would be a start. The bare minimum, some would say.

  There’s no doubt wildlife is in trouble, most of it man-made, but, misty-eyed optimist that I am, I like to find the good news amidst the torrent of bad. There are birds, more than you might imagine, whose populations have increased and spread in the same time. I’ve seen more marsh harriers in the last month than were alive in Britain in the 1970s. Little egrets and Cetti’s warblers are now regular sightings where before they were scarce or non-existent. And nowadays if I go out birding and don’t see a buzzard – a prospect back then as remote and unattainable as Grace Kelly – I write a letter of complaint to my MP.