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

by Lev Parikian

  There are two of them, in broad daylight, perched in a tree at Rainham. They are, of course, oblivious to world events. They don’t even know who Donald Trump is.

  Lucky them.

  It’s two days after the US presidential election, and I’ve felt the need to get away from it all. With concerts piling up this month, I have work to do, music to prepare. This distracts me for a bit, but my concentration levels are low. Birds, as they were back in June, are the obvious answer. The score of Elgar’s Violin Concerto, sitting accusingly on my desk, can wait just one more day.

  There’s been significant rain since my last visit to Rainham a couple of weeks ago, dried pools refilling and wetland birds showing signs of returning. It’s been a dry summer.

  I chat with Howard, RSPB rep, fount of knowledge, and all-round good bloke, at the visitor centre.

  ‘Do you know when we last had measurable rain here?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘June twenty-third. Brexit day.’

  ‘Must be a sign.’

  ‘Definitely a sign.’

  The barn owls, distant daytime ghosts, give me a boost. They’re a long-awaited tick, but I’m also taking them, based on nothing but ignorance and superstition, as a good omen. Where one species of owl is seen, the second must surely follow. Today is definitely going to be short-eared owl day.

  The short-eared owl is an almost absurdly fascinating bird. Its disk of a face, mascara smudge around the eyes, broad, floppy wingbeats and a non-owly propensity to hunt during the day would make it unmistakable, if only it would come out to play. I missed repeated opportunities to see one in the spring, and now, with winter approaching, we’re entering high season. Pity the voles of the Thames estuary.

  I hang around the most likely area of the reserve. One was seen this morning, two yesterday. I wait for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. A front of turbulent air moves in from the river, bringing with it moderate to heavy westerly winds and a light drenching.

  I’ve never been more grateful for extra layers.

  A sparrowhawk puts the wind up a flock of lapwings. It’s a handsome sight, 200 birds getting up and circling, and gives me an opportunity to indulge my most recent obsession, attempting to count large flocks of birds. I say 200; it was probably 400 or more. Or maybe just seventy-five.

  Counting the short-eared owls is more straightforward.

  I’m momentarily distracted by a water pipit, its pale streaked plumage and ‘look at me’ restlessness catching the eye. It lands on the water’s edge and fidgets around, pecking at the mud, tail flicking.

  It’s on my list of must-gets, one of those scarce but common winter visitors, and renders the trip officially a success, so I call it a day. I’m two ticks to the good, and have seen some memorable sights, but somehow feel as if I’ve missed out because of short-you-know-whatted you-know-who.

  Inevitably, as I inch towards the target, new ticks have been harder to come by, and my trips have become ever more focused. I’m still content I’m not breaking my ‘no twitching’ rule. I designate birding days, then choose a place to go. There are no frenzied dashes across the country, no desertion of the family to go and stare at a muddy field in Norfolk for six hours, hoping to see a goose that looks very slightly different from another goose.

  Faced with a tight work schedule, I’ve mapped out the rest of the year, blocking off eleven days of birding, sacrosanct and immune to intrusions. The Berlin Philharmonic calls to ask me to stand in for Sir Simon Rattle at short notice? Ask my friend Toby. I’m birding.

  Eleven days. Twenty-two birds.

  The first day, a visit to Cliffe Pools in north Kent, gave me a distant sighting of a black-necked grebe and a deeper understanding of the true nature of cold and wet. I haven’t had a harder-earned tick all year. But it was only one. Somehow, somewhere, I need to compensate for falling behind the required rate.

  Today I come away from Rainham cherishing the barn owls and water pipit, but cursing the short-eared owls, who, as I walk back to the station, are doubtless emerging from their hiding places with cheeky grins and exchanging the strigine equivalent of a high five.

  Two of my eleven days have gone. I have three ticks. Nineteen to get in nine.

  It’s so tempting to cram another day in, to leave the desk, to think I can get away with it. Apart from anything else, the gentle rhythms of birding offer a pleasing antidote to the energies expended while conducting. But the process of absorbing music is gradual, like learning a language, and while I’m comfortable with my knowledge of some of this month’s repertoire – the music’s contours embedded through years of revisiting and regular performances – there’s enough unfamiliar stuff coming up to keep me tethered to the desk. I need to build strata of familiarity, to reach the stage when I can stand in front of the orchestra, lift my head from the score and engage with the players, rather than flap around in the hope that I’m not making things worse.

  That’s the challenge. Stand in front of a group of musicians and make them play better. How hard can it be?

  It can be impossible.

  Even before you start, you have to decide what you mean by ‘better’. Music, like all art, is subjective. I might insist till I’m blue in the face that Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is ‘better’ than Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, but it’s not going to cut much ice with the average heavy-rock fan. And while one person might be pleased enough with a performance of either in which the notes are in the right place – neatly lined up like toy soldiers – another might say, ‘Who cares about the odd mistake? Let’s hear the passion.’

  Nonetheless, the notes on the page are a good place to start. And assuming that by ‘better’ we mean ‘more together’, ‘more in tune’, ‘more rhythmic’ and so on, then the rehearsal process is often a matter of listening to what’s being played, comparing it with your internalised ideal, and trying to make the former sound as much like the latter as possible. If you can do that without saying a word, so much the better. There are rare conductors who stand almost without moving as the music flows around them, a twitch on the thread enough to summon angels.

  Then there are those who, heady with power, fondly imagine that the glorious sound conjured with an elegant swirl of their baton is entirely of their own making.

  This is a dangerous illusion.

  To the unenlightened public, the conductor’s role is often seen as mysterious, a situation reinforced by an innocent question from an audience member after a concert: ‘So, your movements, do they have, like, some kind of meaning?’

  Touché.

  The conductor makes no sound, yet everything appears to revolve around them. It’s an enticing image, and one enhanced by the cult of personality that has arisen around conductors over the years. No wonder, then, that the downtrodden professional orchestral musician – underpaid, underappreciated and under valued – can grow to hate the conductor on sight.

  In the musical world that is my stock-in-trade, the amateur orchestra, I like to think this hatred is at least diluted by the relative infrequency of rehearsals. If I stood in front of them every day, no doubt resentment would fester. But I can get away with once a week. Just about. And no matter how often I do it, it’s best to be prepared.

  So work comes first, and those nine days are, to my mind, the absolute limit of what I can afford. I intend to use as much of them as possible. The following Thursday I get up at half past ridiculous, aiming to reach Dungeness before dawn. Heavy rain and high winds are forecast, but they’re not due till lunchtime. By then I’m hoping to have seen four new birds, a haul which would bring me below the asking rate of two per trip.

  I clamber up the shingle bank by the power station, pretending to myself and the world that what I really fancy in this turbulent weather is a short burst of seawatching. It’s an exercise in futility, but it feels like a ritual now, undergone every visit I make. There is, as usual, a swirling mass of gulls around the foaming waters of the area known as The Patch. Its proximit
y to a nuclear power station has me asking all sorts of questions to which I’m pretty certain I don’t want to know the answers – but whatever the reasons, the birds seem happy enough to feed there. If I had the patience, and, more pertinently, if I were able to stand upright in the teeth of the wind blowing steadily from the south-east, I’d stick around and test my gull-identification skills. As it is, I pay no more than lip service to the exercise and am soon walking round the perimeter fence on my way back to the car, with half an eye out for the mythical black redstart. Four rock pipits form a guard of honour along the fence. I like rock pipits, the memory of my first, chased along the cliff edge at Portland Bill five months and several aeons ago, still fresh in my mind. But the wind makes me restless, and no matter which way you slice it, a rock pipit isn’t a black redstart.

  I never quite know how long to devote to a bird vigil. I don’t want to spend too much of the visit waiting on a bird that might or might not show its face. On the other hand, it would be perverse not to give it half a chance.

  There’s also the issue of where to concentrate the effort. The power station isn’t small, and the bird could turn up anywhere in the surrounding area of scrubby land. Or it might be hunkered down behind one of the outbuildings in the restricted zone. Whether staying in one place or roaming, you run the risk of the bird playing silly buggers, dogging your every move behind your back while carrying a placard bearing the legend ‘This idiot couldn’t spot an ostrich in a shoebox’.

  After twenty minutes I call it off, traipsing dejectedly back to the car and driving the short distance inland to the RSPB reserve in search of kindlier birds.

  There are three, in particular, I’m counting on. All have been knocking about the place for a while, displaying various degrees of spotability, The first, the ring-necked duck, is the most straightforward. In one of those confusing quirks of the birding world, identification can be secured not by a ring around its neck, but around its bill. This bird has been hanging around for weeks with the coots and tufted ducks on the pond by the entrance to the reserve, and showing no sign of leaving.

  I pull in, get out, binocular up, and there it is. Literally a sitting duck, similar to but easily distinguishable from the dozen or so tufties surrounding it.

  This is more like it.

  Half an hour later, I’m back in the slough of despond without even a teaspoon to dig me out. This is very much less like it again.

  It’s not the steady wind, nor the flurries of rain, nor even the gradual loss of feeling in my gloved fingers. It’s the dastardly game of ‘Still You Don’t See Me’ that I’m playing with a long-eared owl. This isn’t one of those desperate searches across swathes of countryside, or a patient vigil in a hide waiting for a bird that isn’t there. Reliable witnesses have reported this owl. It’s roosting in bushes across the pond by the visitor centre, disguising itself superbly as a collection of leaves. I’m beginning to wish I’d warmed up by doing a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of the Sahara. With the wind whipping around my neck, and gusty showers beginning to develop, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to focus on the task, but it won’t do to give up now. The bird is there.

  There comes a moment, after hours of not finding Wally, when you do find him, and you then wonder why the hell it took you so long, I mean he’s there, just look at his unmissable hat and his goofy grin. So it is with the long-eared owl. A blink, a slight shift of the head, a movement just different enough from the rustling of the leaves for me to notice it, and now my binoculars are drawn to it like a magnet and there it is, deep in the bush, dozing the day away, oblivious to my burst of happiness. I would break into a celebratory song and dance routine, but I’ve just been joined by two other birders, and I don’t want to scare them or the bird away. Also my tongue is frozen to the roof of my mouth and I can’t feel my feet.

  The nearest hide is just yards away, and I dive in there, if only to shelter from the growing weather.

  I exchange hellos with the single occupant, a burly man who, hunched over his telescope, dwarfs it as if it were a toy. Normally we’d leave it at that, but over the next couple of minutes he seems continually on the point of saying something, several times half-turning towards me but then apparently thinking better of it. Eventually it spills out of him in a welter of frustration.

  ‘I’ve had this bird in front of me for forty-five minutes, and I can’t work it out. Is it a Caspian gull?’

  His faith is touching. I issue due warning about my lack of expertise, but offer to help in any way I can, and fire up the trusty Collins app. It’s the Minsmere Mediterranean gull all over again, except this time I’m in the game, not a hapless bystander.

  The app has several illustrations of Caspian gulls in different plumages. I examine them while he talks me through the salient features of the bird in front of us, and then I study the bird itself. It’s standing up to its knees in water in a group of a dozen birds, all of which seem to be herring gulls in various stages of development. They act as handy comparison.

  I try hard to avoid my habitual brain meltdown when confronted with a mess of confusing plumages. The bird’s not going anywhere. We can take our time.

  What we’re looking for is a slightly flatter forehead, a more upright posture, a less hooky bill and an absence of streaking about the head. In all four categories our bird scores about seven out of ten. As far as I can tell you could argue it either way, but seriously, what do I know? I can understand why my companion was all of a twitter.

  As we masticate our findings, the door opens and we’re joined by a third man. He bustles into the hide with a faintly proprietorial air.

  ‘Morning. Caspian still around?’

  Bench guy and I exchange a look.

  ‘We think so,’ I offer, ‘but any help appreciated.’

  He sits next to me, raises binoculars. The logo on his binoculars is worn from years of use. He smells slightly of peppermint. We describe the bird in question, and he falls silent, concentrating.

  We wait. And wait. After an age, he lowers the bins.

  ‘Yup. Third-winter male. Not the one I saw earlier, either.’

  Strange, the trickle of euphoria on hearing the news. I’m at a loss to explain it. It’s just a bird. More, it’s a bloody gull.

  But it’s also a tick. Three today. I’m back on level terms.

  Rainham.

  Nothing.

  Bastards.

  I say ‘nothing’. I’ve seen fifty species. Six months ago this would have represented untold riches. Today, in the universe of ‘just going out to do some birding’, that’s still the case. But in the parallel ‘must see sixteen more birds otherwise I’ll bally well explode’ universe, they’re far from satisfactory. I nurse my grievance and a coffee in the visitor centre.

  Howard, freed from duties around the reserve, is in chatty form. He raises his head from the scope set up overlooking the river.

  ‘Anyone want to see a common scoter?’

  Yes please.

  I join him by the scope, as casual as a Boden catalogue.

  ‘Hold on, it’s gone.’

  Bloody hell.

  ‘Ah, there it is again.’

  Even through the telescope it’s dim and shady, sitting in the middle of the river far away. As I watch, it relocates about twenty yards downstream, clearly recognisable as a female common scoter because of its shape, white on the head and the speed of its wingbeats.

  That’s what Howard says, anyway.

  Melanitta nigra, you are my 185th bird of the year. You can stay.

  I’m pinning a lot on the Isle of Sheppey. It’s a heavy burden, but I know it can take it. From everything I’ve read and heard, in winter on Sheppey you can barely move for birds.

  Some months ago, with remarkable and unaccustomed foresight, I enlisted the help of a professional. Somehow I knew that come the end of November I would need someone who could tell me where to go and when, and once there, could help me pinpoint exactly what I was looking for and at.
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  David lives for birds. He thinks nothing of ten hours on a freezing hillside surveying bird numbers. That is, after all, his job. It also helps that he clearly loves it, the enthusiasm bubbling out of him like water out of an alpine spring.

  Within minutes of our meeting it’s clear I’m in safe hands. He’s already pointed out three species I wouldn’t have recognised, based on staccato chipping sounds and a disappearing shadow. I’m aware that my admiration is at least partly the natural regard of any apprentice for the master, but have never been more grateful for outside help. There’s something reassuring about being in the company of a really good birder. You feel you can relax, safe in the knowledge that if a blue tit sneezes half a mile away you won’t miss it.

  In this case, though, it’s not blue tits I’m after.

  David has formulated a plan for the day, revolving around the late-morning high tide at Shellness, on the eastern tip of the island. If all goes to plan I’ll be several ticks to the good by the time we return to the raptor viewpoint for dusk, when birds of prey will be as good as swooping out of the sky and taking the hats off our heads.

  The thing about plans is they sometimes come off. Almost.

  The day is grey, cold, windy, cold and cold. I’m wearing five layers. It feels a couple short. The birds, however, seem immune, and if David is inconvenienced by it, he doesn’t let it show. Just me, then.

  As we tour the island it becomes even clearer how indispensable David is to my plans. By myself I might have driven past the field that contains the bush that contains forty corn buntings, but he sees them a mile off and we stop awhile to watch them, busy as all get out, a hive of jabbering and flitting.

  A story often told is of the decline of bird populations, and the corn bunting is a prime example, its former abundance curtailed by the denuding of the farmland on which it thrives. These ones seem happy enough, but it’s a comment on the bird’s decline that it’s taken me this long to see one.

  I like to think that, even if I’d missed the corn buntings, the white-fronted geese would have caught my eye. They’re mingling with a flock of greylags, grazing in a field. These winter visitors from Siberia, at first glance similar to the greylags, are quickly recognisable by size, the streaky black patches on their underbellies, and the eponymous white front, this in fact being the forehead rather than the chest. My confusion over the different kinds of geese is gradually beginning to sort itself out, and looking at them through David’s scope, I’m confident I’d know this bird again.