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

by Lev Parikian

  ‘Interesting area. Probably best not to stop. If you do, take all your valuables with you, including the car.’

  We decide against the long-tailed duck.

  Oare to Shellness is no more than five miles if you’re a bird, but twenty-three by road. It takes nearly an hour. Sheppey seems to have grown. Traffic lights refuse to change. All the slow drivers in north Kent decide they want nothing more than a pootle along the A2500. We pass the turn to the raptor viewpoint. For a moment I want to suggest we go there instead, but Shellness, ten minutes further on, offers the options of both short-eared owl and the fabled Richard’s pipit.

  The approach road to Shellness is 80 per cent suspension-breaking potholes, 20 per cent road. It’s 3.15. Sunset is at 3.51.

  We park. The path is along a raised bank between marshes and open ground. If we don’t see anything near the car park, it could turn into a trek, and time isn’t on our side. There’s still the possibility of a dash to the raptor viewpoint if all else fails, but we’d need to take that option sooner rather than later. We set off, scanning for the Richard’s pipit while also keeping the antennae a-twitch for owl action.

  In the pipit’s favour is its striking upright posture and propensity to call when flying overhead; against it is my suspicion that, despite regular reports to the contrary, no such bird exists.

  In the owl’s favour is Andrew’s assertion that he’s never visited Sheppey without seeing one. I’d hate to be the one to break his winning streak.

  As we walk, I grapple with conflicting inner thoughts. Sensible me is happy with the day’s haul, happy to be out birding, happy to call it a day; impatient, irritable me would gladly kill for a confirmed sighting of a short-eared owl, and tells sensible me to do one.

  When it does appear, we both, for an instant, think it’s a kestrel, a shrouded shape rising from beside the path far ahead. Then it opens its wings further and flollops over the path and onto the scrubby ground beyond, and we know.

  I want to say something pithy, a memorable quote for a memorable moment.

  All I can dredge up is, ‘About bloody time too.’

  We catch up with it and watch it hunting low over the grass. It’s every bit as handsome as I’d hoped. At one point it lands, turns its head and looks directly towards us, the white disc of its face almost glowing in the twilight. Then it’s up again, its loping wingbeats manoeuvring it easily over its hunting ground and out of our lives.

  It’s ten minutes before dusk on 13 December, and I finally have my short-eared owl. 196.

  The Richard’s pipit? I don’t believe such a bird exists.

  Long-tailed duck. Black-throated diver. Scaup. Shore lark. Brambling. Twite. Perm any four from six.

  North Norfolk is grand for birding. It’s also grand for pre-Christmas family mini-breaks, Tessa and Oliver accompanying me on this final leg so as not to miss out on the making of history. Also possibly to temper any potential adverse reaction when the dim-witted avians fail to show their faces.

  Plan A: Titchwell. No leisurely strolls along sunlit beaches today. It’s the shortest day of the year and the wind is bracing underneath slate-grey skies. It’s exactly twenty-nine years since I stood in my childhood home listening to Bach with my father. I hum a series of descending scales in his honour.

  Long-tailed duck, black-throated diver and scaup are around, but I’m ill-equipped to find them. They’re not going to be floating conveniently within binocular range on the freshwater lagoon. Without a scope I, like them, will be all at sea.

  What I need is an RSPB volunteer who is about to go round the reserve, preferably armed with a scope and a willingness to help.

  Hello Richard.

  He’s my second helpful Richard of the month. There must be something about Richards. He’s heading for the beach specifically to count the long-tailed ducks. There are dozens of them, the biggest haul the reserve has had in years.

  It’s so simple. We walk to the dunes, Richard sets up his scope, trains it on a group of birds bobbing on the waves, and invites me to have a look.

  I accept.

  I could have pursued a long-tailed duck into the dodgier parts of north Kent. If ever I needed vindication for the decision not to, here it is. Why chase one when you can have forty without risking injury?

  I thank Richard and relinquish the scope. He’s assailed by other visitors wanting to pick his brains, so I bask in my glory for a few minutes while buying telescopes in my imagination.

  Richard beckons me over. He has something.

  ‘What do you think?’

  A test.

  It sits low in the water, far away, bill very slightly raised. Mostly black and grey, with white flashes on foreneck and rear flank.

  I’m not certain, but guess anyway.

  ‘Black-throated diver?’

  He knows, wanted me to work it out.

  ‘See the white patch near the rear? Diagnostic.’

  Two to go. My goal is so close I can tickle it behind the ear and listen to it purr.

  It’s been almost too easy. All we need now is for the scaup to emerge and then a brambling to be sitting on the bonnet of the car, and our work will be done.

  Not so fast, man cub.

  Brambling and Scaup, a quirky TV comedy-drama just crying out to be made, are absent from RSPB Titchwell.

  Time for Plan B. I’m hoping we won’t need Plans C, D or E.

  It takes time to drive to Holkham, a few miles along the coast, where about twenty shore larks have been hanging out for days. It takes time to park and get our things together. And it takes time to work out exactly where the birds are supposed to be. It’s a big beach, and we don’t want to waste valuable minutes striking out in the wrong direction.

  Holkham beach is gloomier and colder than when Gwyneth Paltrow walked across it in the closing credits for Shakespeare in Love. There’s a broad area before you get to the beach proper, an expanse of firm mud interspersed with patches of scrubby grass.

  We’re greeted by a flurry of twittering finchy doo-dahs, quick to fright and flight, lifting off in a rush and landing a safe distance away.

  Hang on.

  Were those twite? They’re finchy. And twittery. The more I think about it, the more they fit the bill. It’s the flight call that clinches it. Twittery. Finchy.

  I tick them in a state of heightened excitement. If we see the shore larks we’ll be done. You can keep your scaup, your brambling. Shore lark would be a perfect way to finish it off. Foaming pints all round.

  There’s a tall, rangy figure in the middle distance, next to a telescope on a tripod, looking dunewards. He’s either an incompetent spy or a birder.

  He’s a birder. And the couple of dozen little brown jobs with patches of yellow on their heads, snuffling around in the grass thirty yards beyond him, are shore larks.

  200.

  A rush of euphoria overtakes me. I approach the rangy gentleman. He has a long beard, a friendly smile, bad teeth.

  ‘Gorgeous, eh?’

  His accent is proper Norfolk, not the half-baked version people do that sounds like bad West Country and we think is Norfolk-y because they’ve added ‘m’beauty’ to the end of every sentence.

  I agree. They’re gorgeous.

  From nowhere, I’m overwhelmed by doubt. It’s not the kind of doubt that creeps up on you. It arrives in my head fully formed. And once it’s there, I have to know.

  ‘Any twite around today?’

  ‘Well, there’s a flock of linnets back by the boardwalk. Probably a couple of twite in there, but good luck picking them out.’

  Ah, knackers.

  Classic confirmation bias. I knew twite were around, saw a flock of twitterfinches, jumped to the conclusion. For those two minutes, so desperate was I for the 200, I expunged the linnet’s existence from my mind.

  Even if there were twite in that flock, I can’t count them. That would be wronger than a desiccated coconut omelette.

  199.

  Knackers.
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  I resist the urge to bean my temporary companion over the topknot with my binoculars, and snarl at my family instead.

  Stupid stupid birds. What a ridiculous way to spend your time.

  We return to Titchwell. Marsh harriers come in to roost, five, ten, fifteen of them, gliding and swooping over the reed beds. They hold centre stage, but there are additional attractions all around. Golden plover – 300? I can’t count, don’t, on this occasion, want to – head in from the east; lapwings circle, wingbeats more languid than their cousins’; off to the right, starlings, silhouettes unmistakable against the darkening sky – three groups, maybe a couple of thousand in total, conjoining for a mini-murmuration, a teasing glimpse of impossible geometry before they flop down into the beds, miraculously unanimous.

  They’re magnificent, every last one of them. Tessa and Oliver, despite the cold, despite the wind, despite the creeping darkness, stay and watch to the end, transfixed.

  Would it be too much to ask for the scaup as well?

  Yes it would.

  Tessa’s birthday is 22 December. My present to her is not dragging her out birding. It’s the least I can do.

  It’s the perfect winter’s day. Sun. Sky. Frost. A walk is obligatory. So is hot chocolate. The walk takes us to Felbrigg Hall, twenty minutes from the rented cottage. Big house, big grounds, big lake.

  I take the binoculars, just in case. Plan C. A little owl is known to live there. Brambling have been seen.

  Not by me.

  It’s not a good ball. India are on their way to their highest ever score in Tests and a crushing victory, but that’s by the by. At any stage of the game it would be a bad ball. But bad balls sometimes take wickets.

  K. L. Rahul, the Indian batsman, scoops it tamely to the fielder at cover point. His innings is over. He squats on his haunches, bereft. After an age, he creeps like snail unwillingly to the pavilion, shrouded in anguish and disbelief. He has scored 199 runs. It’s been a superb performance, the highest score of his young career, a pinnacle of achievement. Yet he reacts as if he’s just accidentally shot his beloved pet canary.

  If he’d scored nineteen, say, or forty, such a dramatic reaction would be considered over the top. But everyone watching understands.

  It’s uniquely cricketing, this logic, that having done so well you’re still deemed in some obscure way to have failed. It’s the allure of the landmark.

  The possibility that I will, after a twelve-month of blood, sweat and feathers, be left stranded one short of my target, is agonising.

  Maybe it’s not just a cricketing thing.

  No matter that I’ve regained contact with the sights, sounds and smells of the natural world, discovered new parts of the country, and been for more family mini-breaks in a year than in the whole of the previous decade. No matter that I’ve become fitter, lost weight, met new people and relearned how to learn. No matter that I’ve revisited my youth, made myself soggy with nostalgia, and found new perspective on the meaning of parenthood, as well as the importance of carpe-ing the diem.

  Just one more. Please.

  I consider emergency backup plans. There’s a rose-coloured starling loitering in Crawley. We’re spending Christmas Day in Brighton. Crawley is on the way to Brighton.

  It would definitely be Plan Z.

  I can’t. Can I?

  No.

  Maybe?

  No. What kind of person would do that?

  But…

  No.

  I check the BirdGuides app obsessively. Plan E is still a possibility, but it reeks of desperation.

  And what’s so bad about that?

  Reports of a black redstart on Culver Down on the Isle of Wight. Yes, that’ll work, because I’ve been so successful at finding them everywhere else. I’m not going to get the last one on the Isle of Wight. I can feel it. It has to be here in Norfolk, and it has to be now.

  Last day, last chance.

  Plan D. A return to Felbrigg Hall, hoping to catch the beggars unawares while they’re still rubbing sleep from their eyes. I set out on my own, Tessa and Oliver understandably having little appetite for a pre-dawn start followed by a cold and fruitless traipse around the Norfolk countryside with an increasingly irritable me.

  I can picture the little owl, perching on a fence post then darting across the shallow grass in search of a mouse.

  But picturing it isn’t enough. I need to see it.

  Some days, you just know you’re doomed to failure. There’s something in the air. It dawns on me as I skirt the big house that this is merely an early-morning walk, good for exercise and nothing else. But I carry on anyway, willing an owl to appear from behind a wall, trying to conjure a brambling from the thin December air.

  I find a bench overlooking the grounds and sit, summoning the patience I lacked as a child, hoping my stillness will draw them out. As I wait, I allow the memories of the year to drape over me like a blanket. From Dungeness to Skye I’ve sought the birds, Clouseau-like in my doggedness and, at first, incompetence – but graduating through Rebus and Frost to achieve the very occasional Sherlock moment.

  The thought bludgeons me around the head, as it has done repeatedly throughout the year: what the hell was I doing for those thirty-five years? How could I have gone so long without this simple pleasure in my life? What was I thinking?

  At some point in the early 1980s I laid aside my binoculars. I don’t remember exactly when. It was a gradual tailing off rather than a sudden renunciation. Perhaps I was finding it too difficult to hold them at the same time as a cricket bat. Perhaps the torpor that enveloped me during my teenage years buried any interest in birds so deeply that it took another three decades to resurface. Perhaps I just moved on to other things.

  At times this year I’ve wanted to go back in time, revisit my younger self and urge him not to give it up, not to yield to whatever repressing influence it was that pushed birds into the sidelines. But even if time travel were possible, and laying aside the inherent space-time paradox that would arise from meeting myself, a paradox likely to cause the universe to collapse in on itself or indeed never to have existed at all, what would it achieve? And what exactly would I say, anyway?

  Hello.

  Who are you?

  I’m you in 2016.

  What happened to my hair? And my clothes? And… well, everything?

  Never mind that. I’ve come to tell you something very important.

  Have you?

  I have. It’s this: don’t forget about birdwatching.

  Umm… OK. Are you sure you want to waste time travel on that? Because, you know, Hitler…

  Pretty much. Also, do your piano practice, don’t pretend you like smoking when you’re in your twenties – you’re not fooling anyone – and when you meet Douglas Adams in 1987, try not to stand there drivelling like an imbecile, and don’t get smart with him about time travel. Oh, and I’ve got this bit of paper for you.

  What is it?

  It’s a list of all the girls who aren’t interested in kissing you.

  Ew.

  Believe me, it will save you a lot of time and energy.

  OK.

  Oh, and this is the most important thing…

  What?

  Make absolutely certain you watch every minute of the Ashes series in 1981 and 2005.

  I would have done anyway.

  Yeah, but it can’t be said too often. Where are you going?

  Sorry, but Tomorrow’s World is about to come on.

  Can’t you watch it later on iPlayer? No, hang on, cancel that. Wasn’t thinking.

  What’s eye player?

  Never mind.

  Look, is that all? I really want to watch it. They’ve got a thing about wireless telephones you can carry around the house. They sound amazing.

  You just wait. Anyway, yes, we’re done here. There’s other stuff, but it’s too big to go into at this stage.

  OK.

  Oh, but… one last thing.

  What?


  Just in case you do give up birding in the next few years, could you put a tick against black redstart first? You won’t regret it.

  A memory arrives, as it does most years at this time. Welcome. I’ve been expecting you.

  He was sixty-seven. No age, but at least spared the slow decline of passing years. Our memories of him will always be of a man cut off while still at the peak of mental and musical acuity. His suffering was intense, short-lived; mine lingered, cast a shadow over the early years of what I came to understand wasn’t really adulthood but an extended adolescence.

  It’s two days before the funeral, early evening. Christmas and New Year have come and gone in a fog of numbness. They will remain hurdles for many years to come, the innocent memories of childhood Christmases obliterated by the timing of bereavement. Family and friends have gathered, the rallying-round process continuing for weeks, solidarity and friendship united to ease the burden.

  A meal is being prepared, the atmosphere in the kitchen one of strangely social conviviality. I’ve taken myself into another room to watch television. Four channels are plenty, especially when one of them is broadcasting Schubert. The Trout Quintet. I watch, listen, relax.

  And now I’m walking down the corridor to the kitchen, and there are sirens, but they’re not sirens, they’re me, my whole being erupting in a keening howl of grief, all the shock and emotion coming out for the first time, exploding in one anguished non-human wail. And I can’t hear myself. To me, the walk is conducted in total silence. But they hear me above the sound of conversation in the kitchen, and when I get there it’s full of cooking steam and warmth and love, and, I’m later told, great relief. At last. About time. Now it can begin.

  I hear honking. A flock of pink-footed geese approach from the west, high, haunting, taunting, bringing me back to the present. They remind me of Plan E. There’s no alternative. I check the BirdGuides app one last time. It’s still there.

  I go back to the cottage, make Tessa a cup of tea, thank her for doing all the packing in my absence, put on my best winning smile, and ask if it might be possible to go home via the scenic route.