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

by Lev Parikian

  I remember my first buzzard sighting as if it was this morning. It’s hard-wired into my memory, not just for the bird’s proximity, but also because it triggered another, different kind of first.

  We are on a family holiday in the Jura mountains on the France/Switzerland border. My father drives happily round hairpin turns that remind him of his Cyprus childhood, seemingly oblivious to the steep ravines beside the road. My mother prays silently in the passenger seat. My brother and I sit in the back seat, me naming every bird I see, him responding with a sullen ‘shoot it’. I’m twelve, so a natural irritant to an older brother. He’s sixteen, and therefore unimpressed by most things, especially annoying younger brothers with a bird fixation.

  Our one piece of common ground is Monty Python, which we quote incessantly, flitting from one sketch to another randomly and without preamble, neither of us needing any explanation of context.

  ‘I’d like to have an argument please. Jackdaw.’

  ‘Shoot it. Certainly, sir. Do you want the full argument, or were you thinking of taking a course?’

  ‘Don’t give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings! Song thrush.’

  ‘Shoot it. I think it’s slightly more runny than you’ll like it, sir.’

  ‘Woodpigeon. It’s a stiff! It’s shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibule!’

  ‘Shoot it. I don’t care how bleep runny it is.’

  Our lucky, lucky parents.

  The ‘bleep’ is a matter of necessity, neither of us quite having the confidence to swear in front of our parents, despite overwhelming evidence that my mother, at least, is no stranger to the joys of verbal profanity. It was from her lips that I first heard what I still consider the rudest word in the English language.

  Christmas Eve, 1972. The milkman, instead of delivering the specified sixteen pints of gold top, twelve cartons of double cream and enough butter to sink the navy of a small seafaring nation, has deliberately fobbed us off with a pint of semi-skimmed and two tubs of strawberry-flavoured Ski. As I sit at the kitchen table I become vaguely aware of some sort of whirlwind streaking through the room and out of the back door. It’s an image I recall many years later when John Simpson reports seeing a cruise missile ‘fly down the street and turn left at the traffic lights’ on BBC news.

  But this isn’t a cruise missile. It’s far more dangerous than that.

  My mum, on the warpath.

  It’s a few seconds later that I hear the very bad word.

  Poor milkman. We never saw him again.

  Despite this, Step and I are still shy of the bad words.

  Until the buzzard.

  It curtails our Pythoning activities. It curtails everything. It does this by flying up from the sheer cliff to the left of the car, veering across in front of us and keeping pace with us at a distance of no more than five yards. It’s a majestic and unforgettable sight. It even manages to halt the relentless flow of Python.

  ‘Fuck me sideways.’

  The words, not entirely appropriate for one of such tender years, slip unbidden from my innocent twelve-year-old lips. My parents, I think, are so shocked they forget to tell me off. And so a lifetime of unfettered profanity begins.

  The buzzard flies on ahead of us after a few seconds, and then down into the ravine and out of sight. And today, whenever I see one, I silently repeat those three words in homage to my younger, better self.

  The lure of the nightjar is strong, and Ashdown Forest on a Saturday evening isn’t a long drive from south London. One more try. Oh, go on then.

  I go down early. A couple of hours in the late afternoon sun, maybe mopping up a crossbill or even a turtle dove, an hour of nightjar vigil, then home. I might even snaffle a woodcock if I’m lucky.

  This time I’m alone, without the responsibility of keeping an eleven-year-old entertained and dry, but also without the guidance of my mentor. What could possibly go wrong?

  As if to underline the futility of my endeavour, six birds, little brown dots against an early evening sky, fling their mocking calls at me like bullets before bouncing out of view in the middle distance. Linnets. Or goldfinches. Or greenfinches. Not crossbills. I don’t think.

  Look, I don’t know, OK? They were small and brown and vindictive. That’s all I’ve got.

  Before I descend into an impenetrable slough of despond, I’m saved by another bird. I remember it from the previous visit. Andrew and I had almost given up on seeing it when a couple of flurries of activity alerted us first to its presence, and then almost immediately to its absence. It had done what all birds do when they see me: dive under cover and wait until the coast is clear. But Andrew exerted his god-like powers of birdery on it, and it emerged, eventually perching on top of a spruce like a Christmas angel for a few minutes before flying off to taunt someone else.

  This one is treating me to a display of vocalisation and acrobatics that catches the attention from a hundred yards away. I inch towards it, hoping it will ignore my presence and continue with the show. As its song sinks in, it triggers long-lost memories in my brain, and before I know it I’m humming the piccolo part from figure four of the third movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie.

  My first year as a percussionist at the Royal Academy of Music involved total immersion in an unfamiliar world. Not only was I called upon to do more practice than I’d ever imagined possible, it became painfully clear how narrow my musical education had been so far. It wasn’t just that I’d never played any of this music before – I’d never even heard of the composers. It was a strange and disgraceful dereliction of my duty as a wannabe professional musician. So when I was told that we would be participating in a festival of music by Olivier Messiaen, one of the major musical figures of the twentieth century, my reaction was one of blank incomprehension, followed by a hasty trip to the Academy’s record library.

  The music I listened to in the following days, and performed a few weeks later, was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Why had nobody told me about this stuff? It mixed dense and complex harmonies with oriental and exotic sounds from outside the canon of Western classical music I’d grown up listening to. There were moments of chaos, savagery, angularity, peaceful beauty and delicious ecstasy, all underpinned with an overt spiritual quality that spoke even to my uncompromisingly heathen soul.

  Most important in my appreciation of Messiaen, though, was his use of shedloads of percussion. Xylophones, gongs, drums, cymbals, wood blocks, bells, shakers, wind machines and much more, even instruments of his own invention, like the geophone.* His philosophy towards percussionists was admirable: ‘Keep them busy. At least it’ll stop them going to the pub.’

  For one used to sitting at the back and occasionally going ting, this opened up a new world of possibility, but there was another aspect of this music I found just as beguiling.

  Messiaen had a fascination with birds, and would spend hours roaming the countryside with a notebook, transcribing the songs he heard. He incorporated these sounds into his music, even devoting whole pieces (for example Catalogue d’Oiseaux and Oiseaux Exotiques) to capturing the sound world and atmosphere evoked by birdsong, sometimes weaving his transcriptions into the fabric of the music, sometimes allowing them to stand alone, shorn of accompaniment.

  This bird is a woodlark, and its distinctive fluting song, with a descending pattern that induces a faint melancholy in the listener, makes it a Messiaen bird. In the snippet it reminds me of, Messiaen used it as one of several layers of sound, each pursuing their own course regardless of the others, but somehow intersecting to produce an entrancing soundscape. Those few bars are on a loop in my head as I make the connection between the piccolo in the orchestra and the bird in front of me. An earworm from a woodlark. There’s a title of a piece of music in there somewhere.

  The one I saw with Andrew seemed content to perch on its tree, but this one is determined to give me a proper display. It sits atop a gorse bush, bounces across to a
neighbouring one, then takes off, climbing half-high before sailing down like a paper aeroplane and landing on the first bush again, all the while giving out its plaintive song. It’s a magical piece of theatre. I near as dammit applaud.

  If only I could say the same for the cricket match I stumble upon ten minutes later. It’s the kind of thing I’ve participated in countless times, an admirable display of sporting incompetence in which error is met with blunder, countered by catastrophe, and then topped with laughable ineptitude.

  But it’s a cricket match, so I stop and watch. After ten minutes I revise my assessment that the game is unworthy of applause. Collective uselessness of this order is a rare thing, and can only be the result of many hours of hard graft. I offer the players a silent ‘bravo’ and continue on my way.

  Forty-five sweaty minutes later, I’m beginning to think I should have stayed for the end of the match. I’ve walked along a stream in the woods below, hoping to spot a grey wagtail. But there are none. I’ve tripped over equal numbers of tree roots and protruding rocks, and the detour has yielded nothing more than a talkative wren and a confiding robin. Cherished birds, both of them, but no more exciting than the ones I can watch from the comfort of my own kitchen.

  As I emerge from the woods and back towards the car, I have my reward.

  It’s a willow warbler, the kind of summer bird an experienced birder would barely give a second glance. But I’ve identified it from its song, and this is still a rare enough occurrence to give my confidence a bit of a boost.

  And then there’s the song itself.

  This willow warbler’s song is a thing of great and melancholy beauty. Soft in tone, its shape resembles the song of a chaffinch,* but one crossbred with Marvin the Paranoid Android. After a reasonably lively opening few notes, it takes on a plaintive quality as it descends, conveying indefinable feelings of regret and loneliness. But then at the end there’s an ornament, a skip in the step, a moment of uplift, the unexpected Jaffa Cake hiding beneath the Rich Tea in the biscuit tin of life.

  This willow warbler seems happy to share its thoughts with me for fifteen minutes, so I head for my appointment with the nightjar in chipper mood.

  According to local knowledge, there’s a particular bench from which the birds can be observed, and I’m heading for it when I run into a trim and organised-looking man, mild, about my age, and wearing a pair of binoculars slung round his neck. Call it a hunch, but I think he might be a birder.

  He seems to know where he’s heading, and doesn’t object to my tagging along, but neither of us is particularly inclined towards conversation. I maintain my aversion to the ‘Anything about?’ gambit, and in any case it wouldn’t be appropriate. We both know what’s about. There’s no need to declare an interest. It’s implicit from our very presence.

  So there’s a nod of greeting, no more, and we make our way to the likely spot and wait for the nightjar to show its moth-like face.

  We wait. And we wait. And we wait. Vladimir and Estragon, working our way through Act Two.

  Dusk descends, taking away the details of the surrounding heath and wood by stealth. Before us is a broad expanse of bracken and gorse. Beyond, the dark woods, vaguely threatening. The air isn’t uncomfortably cold, but neither is it balmy, and I’m glad to have kept my coat on. Nightjar prefer to display on warm evenings, and I suspect early on that this endeavour is a busted flush.

  I’m diverted by the appearance of a bird just above the treeline. It has a distinctive dumpy shape, a comparatively long bill, and its outline is stark against the dusky sky. It’s flying fast and straight, and in a second it’s gone.

  Woodcock. Tick.

  As it disappears, I hear the faintest sound, an impossibly distant high-pitched purr. Estragon hears it at the same time, and we look towards it, cupping our ears.

  It’s not until you do this that you realise how effective an amplifier a cupped hand can be. What was almost inaudible now becomes merely very faint indeed. And then, just as we get a handle on it, it dims and stops. I’m half inclined to walk towards it, but the chances of tracking it down are slim. With a shrug we settle back down to the wait, hoping the sound will set off another, closer one. Our efforts are hindered by the insistent trillings of at least two song thrushes.*

  The minutes pass, as they do. It becomes obvious our wait will be in vain. It’s a good time to remind myself that birding is never a waste of time. At the very least I’ve had a nice walk in attractive surroundings. It feels like scant consolation.

  At about twenty to ten we unanimously decide to call it a night, although I do another lap before returning to the car, just in case the nightjar was waiting for Estragon to leave before making its appearance. The moon is up, veiled behind thin cloud. An invisible stonechat flits among the bracken. Tsip-clink, tsip-clink.

  I linger for a minute in the car park, hoping against hope for a low-flying nightjar to come and surprise me. But there’s nothing except me and the emptiness of the forest, silent in the moonlight.

  On 24 June I wake with a sore head. The previous evening’s concert was a success, but tiring. My efforts to assuage this tiredness with several doses of a magical grape-based elixir appear to have been unsuccessful.

  The main news item of the day doesn’t help. The Great British Public has, Lord love ’em, voted by a narrow margin to leave the EU.

  I’ve noticed in recent weeks that my instinctive reaction to moments of difficulty has been to grab the binoculars and head for the nearest green space. The therapeutic effects of birding are enhanced by the physical exercise, and my brain, occupied by the effort of finding and identifying birds, is diverted from thoughts of doom and despair.

  On this occasion I opt for a rambling walk to Dulwich Park. The birds, oblivious to national events, continue with their lives as if nothing has happened, basking in the warm sunshine. A hybrid mallard jumps up onto the broad wooden railings on the bridge over the pond and stands no more than a foot away from me. The iridescence of its purple-green head is offset by striking marblings and vermiculations on its body. I’m particularly taken by the contrast between its purple speculum* and the subtle sworls of brown and grey around it. Undeterred by my scrutiny, it eyeballs me boldly. Its nostrils, halfway up its mustard-yellow bill, match the staring intensity of its eyes, to disconcerting effect. It has a tiny bit of down stuck in its bill. Its extreme proximity and the relentlessness of its unblinking gaze make it look, frankly, unhinged.

  I briefly consider asking if it’s interested in running for public office. Then I walk home, spirits very slightly lifted.

  June ticks (11)

  Ashdown Forest, Beddington Farmlands

  Marsh Tit Poecile palustris, Common Redpoll Acanthis flammea, Tree Pipit Anthus trivialis, Siskin Spinus spinus, Redstart Phoeni-curus phoenicurus, Woodlark Lullula arborea, Treecreeper Certhia familiaris, Tree Sparrow Passer montanus, Ruff Calidris pugnax, Peregrine Falco peregrinus, Woodcock Scolopax rusticola

  Year total: 135

  Notes

  * This is not strictly true. You’re never too old for Winnie-the-Pooh, but you can be too eleven. When it comes to beautiful things of childhood, there is an age of least appreciation, and eleven is on its cusp. It could be argued, in fact, that eleven is both too old and too young for W-t-P.

  * You hang around goats long enough, you get a bad name, even if all you’re doing is hunting moths.

  † Capra = nanny goat; mulgere = to milk. Pay attention at the back, will you?

  * It lost out to the red-crowned crane, whose scientific name, Grus japonensis, proved equally controversial.

  * There has recently been a tiny revival in the population and range, thanks in great part to cooperation between conservation groups and farmers.

  † Yes, OK, and on all other kinds of bird too. Thank you for your input.

  * It’s also my childhood hero and great England wicketkeeper Alan Knott’s highest Test score. I do have a life. Honest I do.

  * But still decl
ining, by the way. Don’t think you’re getting off that easily.

  * Take a large drum. Fill the bottom with lead shot. Swirl it around to invoke the sound of the shifting and cracking earth.

  * The song of the chaffinch is often compared to a fast bowler running to the crease and then delivering the ball, but this is useless to me unless I know which bowler. Fred Trueman? Colin Croft? Wasim Akram? I lean towards Jimmy Anderson, but that’s just me.

  * Oh sure, now I recognise them.

  * This is the coloured patch you can see on a duck’s wing. It’s a word I’ve just learned and I’m eager to use it as often as possible.

  JULY 2016

  He means well, I remind myself every five minutes or so. He’s evidently detected in me a kindred spirit, some sort of meeting of the souls, and from the moment I enter the hide he settles into a stream of verbalising that is more cosy monologue than cosy chat. But no amount of meaning well can compensate for the torpor induced by his voice. For forty-five lifetimes, or perhaps they were minutes, I’ve listened to a litany of bird sightings from a visit to Minsmere earlier in the year, delivered in a grinding monotone that had me wanting to claw my eyes out just five lifetimes in.

  But if I claw my eyes out I’ll miss the kingfisher.

  July has been slow. When planning my year, I naively assumed two weeks on the Isle of Wight would rack up big numbers. My disastrous conversation with Chris was fresh in my memory, even at three years’ distance.

  The Isle of Wight is grand for birding. Loads of different habitats.

  While I’m happy with the 135 I’ve clocked up so far, I’m hopeful I can add a dozen or more while we’re here. A birding bonanza – a bird-nanza, if you will.

  In my imagination they’ll be falling out of the bushes to oblige, and I’ve emailed Chris to ask if he might take me to some good spots.