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

by Lev Parikian

  A man stood by a telescope, all beard and gloom. He told us with grave pleasure that the bird hadn’t moved all morning, nor was it likely to, as the day before it had only moved to fly further away. Cowed by the density and expanse of his facial hair, and the grim relish he seemed to take in giving the bad news, I was too shy to ask if I could look through his telescope. He didn’t offer, so after fifteen minutes, and one last unavailing peer through my now discredited binoculars, I reluctantly allowed my mother to take me and my disappointment home.

  My strategy has been founded on a successful trip to Scotland, but time is short. Oliver and I have flown up early, while Tessa will drive up to meet us in Edinburgh, visiting friends on the way. But this boys’ jolly has to be run to a tight and considerate schedule. Not only must I cram as much birding into our three days as possible, I can’t neglect my duties as a parent. Oliver’s as game as a capercaillie – especially if raptors are on offer – but this is my obsession, not his, and I worry that a diet of wall-to-wall birding is a tough sentence to inflict on even the most willing of eleven-year-olds. There’s a karting track not far from our B&B, and Speyside offers some mouthwatering cycling opportunities, so I’m hoping we can knock off the necessary birds each morning before embarking on more child-friendly activities later on.

  It’s the hope that kills you.

  Scotland is important because it has several birds I’m not going to see anywhere else, and this period before my patch of work in Edinburgh is my only window of opportunity. A successful trip will bring ten ticks. So far I have two.

  The first came easy as winking. A short drive from the B&B to RSPB Loch Garten, an even shorter walk to the osprey centre, a squint through a telescope. A few hundred yards away, sitting atop a specially built platform like an ill-fitting turban, is the ospreys’ nest, a mass of sticks big enough to accommodate an ostrich. The bird perched in the middle of it is large, but still dwarfed by the nest. It stands tall, alert, a noble sight, unique amongst raptors in surviving almost entirely on fish. We’re lucky to catch them at home and not on one of their regular forays to the fly-through at the local salmon farm.

  The return of the osprey to Britain is one of the success stories of the conservation movement. Hounded to extinction in the nineteenth century by hunters and egg collectors,* its return in the 1950s was tentative at first, with a single breeding record in 1954. It’s the curse of a rare bird that its eggs become more valuable the rarer it gets, and the commitment of illegal collectors has to be anticipated and outstripped by those devoted to conservation rather than destruction. Ranged against the eggers was a small and dedicated team of volunteers from the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club, who ran a determined campaign, protecting the site with barbed wire and guarding it round the clock. Despite this, there were many setbacks and progress was slow, not helped by the pesticides that did so much to destroy the British raptor population after the war.† By the time I was of an age to be interested, the Loch Garten ospreys were famous, figureheads of a growing Scottish population, and visited by thousands each year. Since then, the toehold has turned into a firm grip, with over 200 known pairs in Scotland and a small population in England. These aren’t the only ospreys I could see this year, but they’re the easiest, and this visit to the bird’s spiritual home feels like a pilgrimage.

  From the visitor centre we walk into the forest in search of smaller and more elusive prey. The early portents are ominous. The Abernethy Forest, this summer morning, is a welcoming place, the trees tall and widely spaced enough to allow the soft dappling of the sun to fall gently on the pine-cone-bespecked ground. Through the trees we can see glimpses of Loch Garten, its presence lending the place the idyllic quality I always associate with a nearby body of water. It’s almost soporifically tranquil.

  But it’s too damn quiet for my liking.

  What I’m after is a particular sound, a gentle and cheery trilling from the treetops. It’s the advertising call of the crested tit, Scotland’s perkiest bird. Cousin of the familiar great and blue, the crested tit is aptly named, the feathery crest on its head lending added appeal. But first you need to see it, and this is problematic, as it prefers to flit around in the upper reaches of the canopy than to mix it with humans and other ne’er-do-wells down below. And this morning even hearing one seems a pipe dream.

  I’ve also got an ear out for the metallic chipping call of the crossbill, another aptly named species, whose eponymous appendage renders it superbly adapted to prising the kernels out of pine cones, presumably so it can rustle up a quick pesto alla Genovese.

  But there’s no sign of either. No sign of anything much. This is not unusual. For all the times when the air seems thick with birds, and the moments of excitement engendered by a special sighting, it’s easy to forget how much time birdwatching is spent not birdwatching. You never know which way it’s going to fall. Part of the attraction is the anticipation. What are we going to see today?

  In this case, not much.

  Oh me of little faith. We complete our tour of the forest and walk back along the road, resigned to failure, and there’s the sound, right above us. Several of them, calling to each other excitedly, high in the canopy. Perhaps they’re humanwatching.

  The details of the ensuing search, the craning of necks, the scanning of a treescape that will have me dreaming of pine needles for nights to come, the false hope, the frustrated cursing and the eventual triumph, these details need not detain us. We find the crested tits, we enjoy the fleeting views we have of them, and then we leave them to their business and go about ours.

  I could insist. I could wield the might of executive parental power and just tell him we’re going hiking up a mountain in search of a bird that looks like a rock, is hard to see, and might not be there anyway.

  Or I could agree to the bike ride.

  The guy at the bike-rental place gives us a hand-drawn map, on which he has marked his recommended route along the trails of Glenmore Forest. I surprise him by saying we’re happy to take the longer and more difficult route. He makes a mark on the map, a little blob of green highlighter.

  ‘That’s a pretty special place. You might want to go there.’

  A London cyclist associates any ride with verbal abuse and a heightened risk of death, so to go on a mountain trail, where the air is clear and the biggest threat to your life is from an allergic reaction to stunning landscapes, constitutes a delicious form of freedom.

  We sail up hills, skid round corners, splash through streams. Oliver leaves me floundering on the climbs, his power-to-weight ratio making a mockery of mine. I wreak my revenge on the descents, powered by bulk and gravity.

  We stop at the special place. It’s as memorable as he indicated, a small loch hidden halfway up a hill, backed by a steep slope with scree at the bottom and conifers dotted on its surface. To the left, a V of open sky. A magical place, made more so by the deep green of the water that gives the loch its name.* We perch on a rock and eat sandwiches. There are no birds here, but it doesn’t matter. Given the choice of this and chasing ptarmigan across the windblown Cairngorms, even I have to admit which I’d choose. And maybe there’ll be time later to head to the moors and knock off a red grouse or a dotterel.

  We continue our ride, trying to interpret the rough map, and reach a stiff climb to the top of a hill from where we’ll begin what looks like a precipitous final descent. The forest is more regimented here, sections of clearing giving way to dense and extensive areas of spruce. It’s as we’re about to start the descent that we hear it. There’s anguish in the call, a short high-pitched mew echoing hauntingly across the forest. It’s repeated a second later, then again as the bird, a large raptor, enters stage left.

  Instinct tells me what it is, but I need to be sure. I go through the process of elimination, surprising myself with the speed and depth of my knowledge.

  Not a falcon. Too big.

  Not an eagle or kite. Too small.

  Not a harrier. The shape’s all wrong. A
nd the habitat.

  Osprey? Nah. Right size, wrong shape. Ditto the buzzards.

  It’s the right shape for a sparrowhawk, with a bulky and compact front body, no discernible neck, and a long tail. But it can’t be. It’s the size of a buzzard. And it can’t be a buzzard, for reasons already stated.

  My mental database of raptors has sixteen species in it. I’ve been through fifteen and eliminated them all.

  This has to be a goshawk.

  It’s neither vanishingly rare nor boringly abundant, the goshawk – but I’d deemed the likelihood of seeing one as ‘slim to none’, its scarcity matched by its elusiveness. Quite apart from the splendour of this single bird in an empty sky, in pure list terms it’s a big bonus, such a surprise it almost counts as two ticks.

  As the sighting sinks in, I become aware of an unnatural stillness to my right. Oliver has stopped his bike and is watching as the bird glides overhead.

  ‘Goshawk,’ I whisper. ‘It must be a goshawk.’

  He’s transfixed, letting out a small ‘Wow’ under his breath.

  Nature programmes spoil us, raising expectations with the brilliance of their execution. When you’ve seen footage of an osprey catching a fish, talons grasping, wings splayed and straining to control the descent, the splash of the water, the drama of the hit, and then the power of the bird as it lifts off, reaching for the sky with strong wings while clinging to the writhing fish, the reality of a distant bird perched on a post doing nothing but pass the time of day could seem mundane.

  But this is what you don’t get when you’re slumped on your sofa staring goggle-eyed at a peregrine smashing into a pigeon in slow motion. This unexpected encounter lasts about twenty seconds. We don’t see the bird in high definition, and it’s accompanied by no more pulsating a soundtrack than its own call and the faint rustling of wind in the trees. We couldn’t have anticipated it, and if we’d arrived a minute earlier or later we’d have missed it. And we certainly can’t catch up with it on iPlayer. But it’s ours, a moment shared, and for some reason we feel we’ve earned it. We can recall it in later weeks, months and years with the simple words ‘Remember the goshawk?’ – a bond no amount of fancy footage can emulate.

  It flies away from us, giving the occasional flap and then gliding levelly over the trees, before, with one last call, in search of something we can’t provide, it disappears from view.

  And now Oliver’s off, catching me unaware and getting a twenty-yard head start before I’ve got my feet onto the pedals.

  ‘See you at the bottom!’ he calls over his shoulder.

  I crouch over the handlebars and give chase. Halfway down, by an opening in the trees that gives out onto a broad expanse of loch, I nearly catch him. But then I glimpse a flotilla of birds on the water and screech to a halt, allowing him to sail to the finishing line unchallenged while I indulge myself. They’re mallards, coots, a couple of little grebes. The usual rubbish. But obscurely satisfying. And as I look at them, my mind replays the goshawk’s journey across our sightline.

  I could have insisted. I could have dragged Oliver onto the slopes to look at a bird imitating a rock.

  Virtue has its reward.

  The goshawk, for all its emotional impact, is just one tick. It doesn’t make up for the grouse, capercaillie, Slavonian grebe, black guillemot, ptarmigan, dotterel, eagles, goldeneye and crossbill, all of them on the ‘might see in Scotland’ list, and now moved in bulk to another, entitled ‘didn’t see in Scotland’.

  The truth is, we were there at the wrong time of year. I knew this. I knew about black grouse and capercaillie leks – the courtship displays of these extraordinary birds, which take place in spring; I knew that ptarmigan inhabit only the higher peaks and that access is limited in summer; and I knew that, whatever the season, you can’t just turn up with a pair of binoculars and a hopeful smile and expect eagles to appear out of thin air.

  Except that sometimes, with some birds, you can.

  I didn’t see a dipper as a child. The stream at the bottom of our garden was more a muddy trickle, good for building dams and dirtying trousers, but not for dippers. The nearest river, a tributary of the Thames, was just half a mile away, but it, in turn, was too wide and slow. A visit to friends, who lived in a converted water mill with a resident pair, furnished nothing but a peaceful hour sitting on the riverbank and a complete absence of dippers.

  This year, after two failures, it’s high on my list of must-sees. The first, back in May, was an early-morning foray from the Dorset glampsite to a local spot known for their presence. It was an entirely pleasant experience, yielding a close encounter with two deer which eyed me warily from a safe distance across a wildflower-filled meadow, but the dipper was absent. And our impromptu bike ride on Skye took us past several fast-flowing streams, the bird’s favoured habitat. But again, the telltale whirring of wings, flash of white on the breast and bobbing action that gives the bird its name evaded my scrutiny.

  Now I’m in Edinburgh, licking my wounds after failing to find so much as an eagle feather on Skye, and juggling birding with a busy conducting schedule on an orchestral summer course in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle. Tomorrow we go to Bass Rock in search of seabirds, but my dipper research suggests they can be found nearby on the Water of Leith, which flows through the north part of central Edinburgh and intersects with my daily walk to rehearsals. Apart from anything else, this stretch of the river is dramatically picturesque, running through a deep ravine in the middle of Scotland’s first city.

  All birds have something special about them. Whether it’s the nuthatch’s capacity for downwards tree-walks, the blue tit’s knack for hanging upside-down from a fat ball, the spoonbill’s fabulously comedic hooter, the eye-boggling sexual habits of the dunnock,* or the ring-necked parakeet’s remarkable ability to be an utter bastard – you’ll find barely a species that can’t proclaim with some justification that they’re unique in some small way.

  It’s the dipper’s aquatic skills that set it apart. Not content with sitting on rocks waiting for prey to jump out of the water into its mouth, it adopts a more dynamic approach to hunting. Short, strong wings, solid bones, an oversized preen gland producing copious amounts of oils to coat its dense plumage – all contribute to the dipper’s ability to propel itself to the riverbed to catch its prey. This activity is described by nearly all the guides as ‘flying underwater’, but I’ve decided, more correctly but less glamorously, to call it ‘swimming’. It’s an impressive and unique trick for a songbird, as is the dipper’s supplementary ability, once on the riverbed, to walk along it.

  I’m prepared to search for this bird, and have allowed an extra hour on my morning walk to rehearsal. The journey from our digs in Stockbridge to the rehearsal hall in the shadow of the castle takes about forty-five minutes, and I use this time to go through the music in my head, anticipating possible problems and planning the course of the morning’s activities. Edinburgh isn’t flat, and the physical exercise means I arrive energised and ready to go. I’m hoping the mood of quiet contemplation engendered by the waterside walk will enhance this positivity and give the rehearsal an extra zing, rather than completely knackering me and leaving me good for nothing except sitting with a thousand-mile stare nursing a flat white and a cardamom bun.

  I drop down the steps onto the riverside path, hopeful rather than confident I’m on the right track. The Water of Leith is twenty-five miles long. The odds against there being a dipper on this short stretch must be ooh look, there’s a dipper.

  The unexpectedness of the sight and the stillness of the bird make me think it must be plastic, placed there for reasons unknown by some ornithological prankster. But then it shifts slightly, blinks, and gives a flick of its tail. In four days, Usain Bolt will win the Olympic 100-metres title in 9.81 seconds. It’s taken me about that long to find this dipper, an unprecedentedly quick success. But having seen it, I yearn for more. I want it to perform. Its unwillingness to do so is disappointing, but does at least sav
e me the usual ducking and diving while I try to catch sight of it. It sits on a rock in the middle of the stream, white breast gleaming in the early-morning sun, a beacon of stillness in the shushing tumble of the water around it. Suddenly, with another flick of the tail, it’s off, its low whirring flight just above the water making it clear why in some circles it’s known as the water wren.

  Without haste I follow it along the river. It stays a distance ahead of me, always in sight, finally alighting on another rock, where it resumes its impersonation of one of those street artists who don’t move until you put a coin in the hat and whose deductible expenses presumably comprise gallons of gold paint and little else.

  I can see why this is prime dipper territory. The terrain is rocky, the water fast-flowing. It’s the kind of place you might also find grey wagtails. These small and slim birds, grey above and yellow below, often betray their presence with a constant energetic pumping of their long tails. Unlike the dipper, they mostly stay out of the water, the extent of their derring-do the occasional foray into the shallows for insects and small invertebrates. They’ve eluded me all year, and my pessimistic side sees no reason why today should be any ooh look, there’s a grey wagtail.

  Here’s the world-famous birder, seeing all the birds before breakfast.

  Watching these contrasting birds, with their different approaches to survival in the same habitat, occupies me long enough that I’m not ridiculously early for my rehearsal, and puts me in optimistic mood for the next day’s family boat trip to Bass Rock.