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

by Lev Parikian

He’s lean of body, keen of intent. He has an air of expertise, and the focus of his expression is matched only by the rapidity of his speech and its utter incomprehensibility to me.

  ‘Youlkinfrboparscull?’

  There are those who talk, and those who gabble. He’s in the second group, and executes his skills with the ease of a professional gabbler.

  He looks at me as if the fate of galaxies hangs on my response.

  I have to say something. If only I knew what. I feel like a contestant on University Challenge, the one at the end who goes through the whole programme in silence, losing the thread of half the questions after five words and, on the rare occasions they have some idea, unable to catch the attention of their captain.

  Before I can ask him to repeat himself, he’s pointing at the black-headed gulls.

  ‘Js’there. Je’blag.’

  Right then. There’s something there, but I don’t know what. It’s probably masquerading as a black-headed gull, which would explain the ‘scull’ bit. All I need to do is work out what ‘bopar’ means. It doesn’t resemble the name of any of the regular gulls, but if it were regular he wouldn’t be pointing it out. So it must be a rarity. I scour my memory for irregular gulls. My knowledge is scant. I’ve put gull recognition on the ‘deal with later, preferably never’ pile. I know a few, though, and try to mangle names into ‘bopar’. Glaucous? Iceland? Caspian? Sabine’s?

  ‘I’m so sorry. Say it again?’

  ‘Boparscull. Righ’there. Bla’biw.’

  Black bill. It’s a start. I scan again, and there, looking every bit like a black-headed gull that’s dipped its hooter into a cup of tar, is the bird in question.

  So now I have the bird. I take a photo of it, just in case. I can always work it out later with the help of bird guides. But part of me thinks that’s cheating. I want to pass this test.

  At its best, birding is a happy combination of Where’s Wally?, Guess Who?, and The Krypton Factor.* This endeavour lacks the physical challenge of the latter, but is laden with fraught intellectual hurdles. The possibility of asking him to repeat himself yet again is too humiliating, as well as rude, so I’m on my own, in the rare position of having seen a bird I know isn’t on my list, but lacking the resources to define it.

  I hide myself behind my binoculars, and slow down what he said, filling in syllables.

  Brogue paths gull?

  Bone palms gull?

  Below par gull?

  Blown apart gull?

  Aha.

  Deep in the recesses of my sun-and-motorway-addled brain stirs a memory, the residue of idle scrolling through the ‘gulls’ section of the Collins app.

  Bonaparte’s Gull. Pretty rare, an American bird that has for reasons best known to itself made its way across the expanse of water separating our continents. I don’t, in truth, have much idea what it looks like, but I’d be willing to bet it has a bla’biw.

  I turn to thank my mysterious companion, but he’s disappeared, replaced by a newcomer, an amiable cove with steel-rimmed spectacles and a bland smile.

  ‘Anything about?’

  ‘Well, apparently that bird there is a Bonaparte’s gull.’

  As I speak, pointing confidently towards the bird, there’s a flurry of activity, as of a hundred gulls and lapwings flying away from an approaching predator. The sparrowhawk appears seconds later. It’s too late. They’ve all gone.

  Story of my life. I offer my bespectacled friend an apologetic grimace and move on.

  ‘Seen it yet?’

  There are three possible answers: ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ and ‘Seen what exactly?’ There’s an assumption there, as if the only reason you could be where you are is to see one particular thing. If this were one of those twitches that occur from time to time when a rare bird randomly plops itself down in someone’s back garden, then yes, you’d be safe in assuming that a person with an intent look and a telescope wouldn’t be there by accident. But we’re on a bird reserve. ‘It’ could be almost anything.

  Clearly I’ve missed something. My afternoon of birding has got in the way of my obsessive checking of reported sightings.

  I have, as the end of the year hurtles towards me, succumbed and downloaded the BirdGuides app, which places news of unusual sightings in my pocket. It’s not that I’m planning to charter a plane and fly to Shetland at a moment’s notice should news trickle in of Britain’s first record of a Siberian accentor. It’s more a sign of a peculiar fascination with people who have a peculiar fascination with rarities. I wonder how twitchers plan their lives, what it feels like to be dominated by birds in that particular way.

  But my surroundings this afternoon, at RSPB Titchwell Marsh in Norfolk, have been so serenely agreeable, and the bird activity so varied and interesting, I haven’t given rarities a second’s thought. The abundance of birdlife, the warmth of the autumn sun, the breadth of the beach, the firmness of the sand and the salt tang of sea air on the tongue – all combine to render things oojah-cum-spiff in my birding universe.

  It’s not even as if I’ve racked up mountains of ticks. Once again I’ve found myself less motivated by the acquisition of new species than by the general oohness of the experience, but I have, almost incidentally, added two birds to my list.

  On the reserve are hundreds of dunlin, the default small wader, and just a couple of curlew sandpipers. The latter is similar enough to the former to make identification tricky, but I regard it as a challenge to my burgeoning skills, and after a few false starts manage to nail one of them down on the freshwater lagoon. Flushed with success, I reward myself with a walk on the beach, never a chore in Norfolk. It brings me to a flock of small waders whose behaviour betrays their identity as surely as any aspect of plumage or build.

  Your sanderling, see, is a scuttler. Pitter-pattering their way up and down the sand like so many wind-up toys, the rhythm of their wanderings dictated by the ebb and flow of the waves, they nuzzle their short bills into the sand in search of tiny crustaceans. Their window of opportunity is short. As the water recedes, their prey burrow back down and out of their grasp, and they have to wait a few seconds before trying again.

  It’s a hypnotic sight. Scuttle, nuzzle, retreat, wait. Scuttle, nuzzle, retreat, wait. They must be successful some of the time, but the impression they give is of constant and narrow failure, doomed to an unending ten-second cycle, like Sisyphus on fast-forward.

  I could, and nearly do, watch them all afternoon, but time is getting on, and I’m keen to assemble myself near the salt marshes for marsh harriers returning to roost. The day is, incredibly, getting more pleasant as it wears on, and there’s a particular September late-afternoon warmth to the light which imparts a quality of just-rightness that would have Goldilocks purring.

  As I saunter past the striking Parrinder Hide, with its luxury views across the reserve, a friendly birder stops me. Have I seen it?

  ‘It’ turns out to be a pectoral sandpiper, showing well. The hide is just there, ten yards away. It would be rude not to. I allow myself five minutes out of the sunshine to find it.

  The Collins app lists no fewer than twenty birds with the word ‘sandpiper’ in their name, enough to turn my brain to mush. The majority are irregular or rare vagrants to Europe, and it’s into this category that the pectoral sandpiper falls. My hasty research reveals it to be distressingly similar to the ruff. The text doesn’t help much more. Bird guides do this. A typical entry might be reinterpreted thus: ‘Brown. Medium-sized. Similar to that other bird you never recognise, but with a minutely distinguishing feature you won’t be able to see under most conditions.’

  The good thing about a twitch, though, as I’ve gathered from the more cynical members of the fraternity, is you don’t even have to identify the bird. You just follow the direction of the scopes, ask someone to show it to you, tick it and leave.

  I like to think I have a bit more moral fibre than that. But then we all like to think that, don’t we?

  It’s crowded enough in the hide
to call to mind a twitching version, complete with spotting scopes on tripods, of the cabin scene from the Marx Brothers’ A Night At The Opera. There are seven of them, all trained on one distant spot across the water. Low murmuring is the order of the day. I duck between the scopes and position myself as well as I can. A kindly birder with an exorbitant-looking Swarovski scope is explaining to his companion where to find the elusive bird.

  ‘Got it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK, it’s just gone behind the snipe.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘See the third bush from the left, just in front of the gap in the trees in the far distance?’

  ‘No, hold on.’

  ‘Go fifteen yards to the right of that. No wait, it’s moved.’

  ‘Hang on, I think I’ve got the wrong snipe.’

  ‘Well, anyway, it’s not there any more. Gone behind that bush.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one to the left of… you found the snipe yet?’

  ‘I think so. Is it standing on the little spit on the left?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The, hold on, first, second, third one in from those lapwings.’

  ‘Hang on… no, not that one. The snipe I’m looking at is to the right of them, further back.’

  ‘Oh, that one. Right.’

  ‘Well, the pectoral sandpiper is just behind, no hang on, it’s moved again.’

  In my head I convert these lines into the drawling delivery of vintage-era Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and have to suppress a snort of laughter. But I also know how difficult it is to describe the exact position of a bird in a landscape of similarities. And I too am keen to see it, if only to discover what all the fuss is about. I log in to the directions being offered behind me. They’ve managed to settle the seething issue of which snipe the sandpiper is hiding behind, and just as I find it, a small grey-brown bird with a lightly streaked breast and white belly pops out into view. Obligingly enough, the snipe continues to the right and I have an uninterrupted view of the pectoral sandpiper. I barely knew what one was three minutes ago, but now I’m an expert, just like everyone else in the hide, whose excited little exclamations confirm that this is the pectoral sandpiper I’m looking for.

  Honestly, though, and without any disrespect to the vibrant pectoral sandpiper community, it looks like a ruff. There’s a ruff, just there, about twenty yards away, riffling around in the mud. This bird looks like that, but much further away. Its attraction lies in its rarity. I get that, but objectively, given the choice of admiring the ruff or the pectoral sandpiper, the ruff would win, and not just because it’s closer. There’s a freshness to the ruff, the light edges of its individual wing and back feathers forming a strong and crisp scalloped pattern. The pectoral sandpiper looks knackered, as is its right, having flown all the way from America. And what of the snipe, the bird everyone was hoping would budge over so they could look at something more interesting? Or any of the shoveler, teal, wigeon, herons, kestrels, pheasants, jays, swallows, chiffchaffs, blackbirds, robins, lapwings, pied wagtails, little egrets, mallards, goldfinches, woodpigeon, rooks, carrion crows, oystercatchers, cormorants, ringed plovers, redshanks, grey plover, turnstone, bearded tits, moorhens, coots and gadwall (underrated bird) I’ve seen on the reserve that day?

  Well, they’re lovely too.

  Most of all, they’re outside, which is where I want to be, the hide’s lack of air and light, on this bright and sunny day, discouraging an extended stay. That anyone would willingly spend more than ten minutes in here on a day like this, when there’s so much to enjoy in the glowing late afternoon sunshine outside, seems to me little short of lunacy. But who am I to judge? I did, after all, opt to nip in there just for the tick.

  I retrace my steps from earlier, keen to make the most of the remains of the day and enjoying the warm sunlight as it slants across the beach.

  Just below the dune, a flash of movement. A small, upright bird, black eye-stripe prominent, hopping across the sand. It’s a wheatear. Clearly in the mood for company, it remains within viewing distance, leading me across the flat sands and hopping up onto the ruins of a WWII bunker to enable striking photos of it silhouetted against the sea and the offshore wind farm in the hazy distance.

  It won’t be here much longer, off to central Africa for the winter in the next few weeks. These journeys, so casually referred to, remain one of the wonders of the birding year. I try to get my head round it by visualising it taking off from the beach, tracing its journey in fast-forward across land and sea, over mountain and valley, guided by an internal satnav that makes Google Earth seem like a crumpled, sixteenth-century chart with Hic sunt dracones written on it.

  It’s as if I decided to walk to the moon and back.*

  I think of this and millions of journeys like it, encircling the globe in an annual web of miracles. As if summoned by these thoughts, and determined to blow my mind even further out of its skull, a butterfly, pale cream against the deep blue sky, flutters over my shoulder and heads out to sea. I watch it avidly, fixing on its flickering traces with the naked eye and then the binoculars until it’s an etch-a-sketch dot, then a speck, then gone completely. Go well, frail creature. Try not to get eaten by a skua.

  September ticks (11)

  Fingringhoe Wick, Oare Marshes, Beddington Farmlands, RSPB Titchwell Marsh, RSPB Frampton Marsh, Compton Abbas

  Spotted Redshank Tringa erythropus, Grey Plover Pluvialis squatarola, Golden Plover Pluvialis apricaria, Little Stint Calidris minuta, Bonaparte’s Gull Croicocephalus philadelphia, Spotted Flycatcher Muscicapa striata, Sanderling Calidris alba, Curlew Sandpiper Calidris ferruginea, Pectoral Sandpiper Calidris melanotos, Brent Goose Branta bernicla, Tawny Owl Strix aluco (heard)

  Year total: 165

  Notes

  * Two glamping trips in a year. I’m a middle-class cliché.

  † Some people call them Fred Astaire movies, but she famously did everything he did backwards and in heels, so I reckon it’s time to redress the balance.

  * Like a superstitious actor I’ve decided never to refer to them again by name.

  † Other sporting metaphors are available.

  * I might even say ‘bird-like’ if my idea of what that means hadn’t been overturned during recent months.

  * I didn’t.

  * Ennui the First.

  * Old. They’re old.

  * A word, incidentally, that to this day has me throwing things at walls when grown people who should bally well know better pronounce it ‘Scalectrix’. Seriously, how hard can it be?

  * Younger readers: ask your parents.

  * I haven’t done the maths, or at least I have tried to do the maths, but my mind can’t deal with more than four zeros. Anyway, that’s what it feels like.

  OCTOBER 2016

  I should be at home, writing programme notes, devising concert series, planning rehearsal schedules, replying to emails, doing the laundry. Anything but driving down the M2 to Dungeness.

  But if I’m a feckless employee I’m an even more lenient boss – the ideal small office task force in a handy one-person bundle. So when boss me gives employee me the day off, employee me hands over all the admin to secretary me, who instantly makes the executive decision to do it later. Because when fourteen great white egrets assemble in one place, and you don’t know how long they’re going to stick around, you want to get there as soon as possible. It’s not a twitch, I tell myself. I was going birding today anyway. My reply is swift and withering: say that often enough and you might start believing it.

  It’s the latest in a mini-series of snatched opportunities. I’d love to get fifteen birds in October, and the more I can accumulate before the pivotal trip to Northumberland in half-term, the better.

  The egrets are worth the visit. Snow-white herons with S-bend necks, they stand in plain view of the hide, and I admire them for longer than strictly necessary, drinking in their purity and profoundly grateful I’m not subjected to
an attack from the lethal orange bayonets adorning their slender heads. 166.

  Closer to home, I embrace a local site, previously neglected. South Norwood Country Park is no more glamorous than it sounds, but it’s a good size, with varied habitats and a well-populated lake. There I see a water rail early one Sunday morning. Evasive bird, the water rail, the moorhen’s reclusive cousin, appearing in its grey and brown suit only for feast days and funerals. It’s like an apparition, the briefest glimpse in the shadows as I scan the fringes of the lake. When I look back five seconds later, it’s gone. I bow in obeisance to it for even that fleeting audience. I’ve looked for one every time I’ve been near a reed bed, which has been often. They’ve been notable only for their absence. The glamour spots, your Minsmeres, your Dungenesses, your Rainhams, have yielded nothing in the way of railery. I thought I heard one at Titchwell, but, unsure and bound by my infrangible code of honour, didn’t list it. Now I’ve seen one on my doorstep. 167.

  Rainham, deficient in the water rail department, does at least give me a ring ouzel. It’s a generous gift, as befits my birding epicentre. Similar to the blackbird, but with a distinctive white crescent bib, it’s a mountain breeder, but drops in on the lowlands during migration. This one, maybe inspired by the vibrant architecture of the visitor centre, cavorts in a bush with a brazen cockiness, as if to say, ‘You’ve come to see me, haven’t you? Me me me.’

  I agree, doff my imaginary cap and move on. 168.

  The growing urgency of my quest has led to intensified surveillance of rare bird sightings. When a yellow-legged gull is reported on Regent’s Park lake, I utter a sound, half exultant whoop and half hollow groan. The whoop because, you know, ticks, and the groan because, you know, gulls.

  For four years in my youth Regent’s Park was home turf, round the corner from the Royal Academy of Music, where I was studying beer and kebabs, with music as a second subject. Whenever my musical workload became too much I’d take myself off for a walk round the park. I went there a lot. And now the power of geographical association means whenever I’m near the area my mind is flooded with a jumble of memories. Today is no different, but this memory is very specific.