by Simon Barnes
To my father – the first bad birdwatcher
I ever met. He taught me all he knew.
I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.
Hamlet
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Not just a nice hobby
2. Hamlet was a bad birdwatcher
3. Birds are only human
4. Let’s fill the whole screen with tits
5. A present from my father
6. Teeming hordes
7. Falling in love again
8. Simon knows the names of things
9. Alice’s key
10. Well done, medium or rare?
11. Shirtless Tim and a nice bit of posh
12. And all that jizz
13. Treasure houses
14. The right place
15. Bad birds
16. The right time
17. I spy with my little ear
18. Let them be left
About the Author
Copyright
1. Not just a nice hobby
What makes the marvellous is its peculiar way of being ordinary; what makes the ordinary is its peculiar way of being marvellous.
Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
I am a bad birdwatcher.
On the other hand, and taking one thing with another, when it comes to enjoying birds I am world-class.
Where shall I start? With the carmine bee-eaters of the Luangwa Valley in Zambia? With the rhinoceros hornbill glimpsed through a gap in the canopy in the rainforests of Borneo? Or with the crested oropendola seen from the press box at Queen’s Park cricket ground in Trinidad (when I was being paid to watch Ian Botham)?
No. Let’s start in Barnet, on the extreme edge of London. I used to live there. I was going into the centre of London to meet someone, perhaps even to do some work. I wasn’t looking for birds. I hadn’t even got binoculars; you can’t use them in a London pub, not without attracting adverse comment, anyway.
I wasn’t looking for birds, but I am always looking at them, you see. Not for reasons of science, or in hope of a fabulous rarity, or to make careful observations of seasonal behaviour. Just because looking at birds is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Looking at birds is a key: it opens doors, and if you choose to go through them you find you enjoy life more and understand life better.
It was a nice day of early summer, the kind of day when a chap’s eyes keep turning to the girls who have moulted into their skimpy summer plumage and men wear their jackets on their thumbs. And because it was such a nice day, I thought I’d walk past the common to Hadley Wood train station rather than through the High Street to High Barnet tube. It turned out to be one of my better decisions.
I was going through Monken Hadley churchyard to catch a train that would get me to Oxford Circus (change at Highbury & Islington) in 40 minutes. And there were lots (note scientific precision) of house martins whizzing round and round the church tower.
Perhaps you know all about house martins. Or perhaps you think they are swallows. No matter. They are jaunty and swallow-like and, if you are lucky, they nest under the eaves of your house and leave aromatic trails down the wall and bring joy to your heart on the rare day in spring when they return from their travels.
They are dapper little chaps, navy blue with white bums, and they are one of the sights and sounds of the English summer: doing things like whizzing round church steeples and catching flies in their beaks. Later in the season the young ones take up whizzing themselves, trying to get the hang of this flying business. I always imagine the martin mother saying: Well done, little one. You flew three times round the church tower. Now you’ve got another flight to try. Cape Town.
Where was I? Monken Hadley church, pausing on my journey to Oxford Street to spend a few moments gazing at the whirligig of martins. It was nothing special, nothing exceptional, and it was very good indeed. Note this: one of the great pleasures of birdwatching is the quiet enjoyment of the absolutely ordinary.
And then it happened. Bam!
Gone.
From the tail of my eye, I saw what I took to be a kestrel. I turned my head to watch it as it climbed, and I waited for it to go into its hover, according to time-honoured kestrel custom. But it did nothing of the kind. It turned itself into an anchor, or the Greek letter psi. Or a thunderbolt.
No kestrel this: it crashed into the crowd of martins like the wrath of God, and almost as swiftly vanished. I think it got one, but I can’t swear to it, it was all so fast. And there I was down on the pavement with a bag full of books on my back, uttering incredulous obscenities and prayerful blasphemies. What the hell was that?
It was a hobby. Perhaps the most dashing falcon of them all: slim, elegant and deadly fast. Not rare as rare-bird-addicts reckon things: they come to Britain in reasonable numbers every summer to breed. The sight of a hobby makes no headlines in the birdwatching world. It was just a wonderful and wholly unexpected sight of a wonderful and wholly unexpected bird. It was a moment of perfect drama. Note this: one of the great pleasures of birdwatching is the moments of peak experience.
We humans tend to simultaneous and mutually exclusive desires: to be married, to be single; to be social, to be alone; to travel adventurously, to stay at home. Birdwatching embraces both halves of our natural desire for contradiction. It brings us enhanced enjoyment of the ordinary, the easy and the safe, and it brings us moments of high drama and gratification and dangerous delight.
Rather like life, really. And that is what bad birdwatching is all about. Life, that is to say.
***
Let’s go back to that hobby, and those martins. How much skill was required? How much knowledge? How much scientific background? None, none, and none. The martins were just there, being obvious and making their merry farting calls to each other: one of the great ambient birds of the English summer. Everyone has seen martins, and is aware of them at some level, even if he can’t put a name to them and is unaware of the diagnostic white bums.
And the hobby was unmissable, unmistakable: a great black (I saw him only in silhouette) force. It wasn’t necessary to identify the bird, to know it by name; it was enough to witness a fierce and terrible drama. Any bad birdwatcher would have known it was a bird of prey, and any human being would have known it was something dreadful. Knowing its name was a luxury. It wasn’t exciting because it was rare and because I could call it Falco subbuteo and because I could tick it and boast about it. It was exciting because it was a thrilling bird in a thrilling moment.
Now, I am lying here just a bit. Knowing that the bird was a hobby was a formal completion of the business. It was an explanation, a key to the drama. That is what hobbies do, you see: they turn into anchors or psis and make sudden lacerating dives into flocks of circling martins. It was gratifying to have the explanation: the understanding.
But before the understanding comes the wonder. Comes the delight. And that is the first aim of being a bad birdwatcher: the calm delight of the utterly normal, and the rare and sudden delight of the utterly unexpected.
The only real skill involved in this perfect birdwatching moment was the willingness to look. It was not skill that gave me the sight; it was habit. I have developed the habit of looking: when I see a bird I always look, wherever I am. It is no longer a conscious decision. I might be in the middle of a conversation of amazing importance about the Direction Of Our Marriage, but my eye will flick out of the window at a hint of movement, caught in the tail of my eye, and I will register: bloody hell, sparrowhawk. I might say it aloud, too – not necessarily a wise decision.
I once found a questionnair
e in a birdwatching magazine. It asked: “How often do you go birdwatching?” I reject the question out of hand. I don’t go birdwatching. I am birdwatching. Birdwatching is a state of being, not an activity. It doesn’t depend on place, on equipment, on specific purpose, like, say, fishing. It is not a matter of organic trainspotting; it is about life and it is about living.
It is a matter of keeping the eyes and ears and mind open. It is not a matter of obsession, not at all. It is just quiet enjoyment. A happy married man will still glance at pretty girls and appreciate their loveliness without the need to do anything about it. It is just a habit of heterosexual males to look, and it is one that adds to the gaiety of life.
A car nut will make a quiet, unthinking appraisal of every vehicle he sees; it is part of the way his mind works. He will hardly be aware that he is doing it, unless his glance is caught by something exceptional. The habit is not something to do with what he does; it is something to do with what he is.
And that is what being a bad birdwatcher is all about. It is just the habit of looking. Born-againers talk about Bringing Jesus Into Your Life; this book is an invitation to bring birds into your life. To the greater glory of life.
2. Hamlet was a bad birdwatcher
And all around not to be found…
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Woodlark
Perhaps you know nothing at all about birds. Perhaps you even say it: well, me, I know nothing at all about birds. If so, you are lying through your teeth. It is impossible to know nothing at all about birds. Trust me: you can identify several different kinds of birds. Let’s compile a list of birds that you can already recognise – even if you call yourself the most ignorant birdwatcher in the land:
robin
swan
duck
blackbird
swallow
crow
sparrow
blue tit
heron
pigeon
That’s ten for a start. Now we’ll throw in cuckoo, because that is the one bird that everyone can recognise on call. And you might as well add a few more:
thrush
seagull
goose (perhaps even Canada goose)
kestrel
owl
pheasant
eagle
kingfisher
magpie
You can recognise a woodpecker by ear, when you hear it bashing the hell out of a branch. And of course there are plenty of birds that you can recognise from pictures, without ever being in much danger of seeing: snowy owl (from Harry Potter films), puffin (from the spines of paperback books) and, of course a Famous Grouse. And you could throw in a few exotics, too: parrot, peacock, toucan, flamingo, pelican, ostrich. True, not all the birds in those two lists are proper species. For example, there are three species of swan that you can see in Britain. And please don’t be put off when I tell you that there are 74 different species of cuckoo in the world. But we’ll bother with species later. Let us keep things simple and talk about different kinds of birds. A swan is a different kind of bird from a robin, and if you can tell the difference between one kind of bird and another, you have already established your birdwatching credentials. This is something we can all do, as surely as we can tell a car from a lorry.
So there is an awful lot of latent knowledge of birds that most people in this country possess. Birds are part of our common culture. You can concrete over the land, but you can’t concrete over our minds. We have our roots in rural soil, even the most urban of us. Birds are part of our lives and our thought processes, whether we acknowledge the fact or not. We are all bad birdwatchers; it is an inescapable part of our lives.
A liking for birds is quite different to a liking for stamps or matchbox labels. I find it hard to believe that people like these things in their own right; they are just a medium for collection mania. True, for some people there are lashings of collection mania involved in birdwatching – it takes the form of making lists rather than actually collecting dead birds – but it is not necessary to be a maniacal collector in order to be a bad birdwatcher, or, for that matter, a good one.
I shall go on to the maniac business in due course. Let me just point out for now that the collection maniacs are not the mainstream. They are not the orthodoxy. They are not even the elite. They are just people who love birds and birdwatching, and are equally ravished by an arcane competitiveness. Some are good birdwatchers, some (but don’t ever tell them) are bad birdwatchers. Yet they are all, to a man (and they are mostly men), great competitors.
Good luck to them. But they are not what all birdwatchers want to be in their heart of hearts. Perish the bloody thought. Perhaps you own a car. There is a kind of car-owner who goes in for mania. He will have a collector’s car, a buff’s car: say, an MGA. And he will love it and make love to it with interminable tinkerings and polishings, and he will drive it (lovingly) to rallies, and he will meet fellow maniacs, and they will talk about technicalities and parts, and they will talk shop and they will bitch about the people who aren’t there. And generally have a lovely time. Ordinary motorists are as much like classic car buffs as ordinary (good and bad) birdwatchers are to the species of birdwatching maniacs known as twitchers.
Mad collectors are all very well. As Miss Jean Brodie said, for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. So let us leave the collectors on one side for the moment. The point of birdwatching is not birdwatchers but birds.
Birds have always been part of English or British life; not just as things to eat, but as part of the way we see and understand the world. Birds were even used to tell fortunes. Prediction by means of birds is called ornithomancy: the flight of a hawk, the passing of a V-shaped straggle of ducks might be an evil sign, or it might be the most auspicious omen. In fact, the very word “auspicious” comes from the Latin for birdwatching.
English literature echoes with the sound of birds. In the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, we hear of the plaintive loneliness of the bad birdwatcher:
Sometimes I made the song of the wild swan
My pleasure, or the gannet’s call, the cries
Of curlews for the missing mirth of men…
Probably a whooper swan, I’d reckon. But really, the poor seafarer must have been in a dreadfully low state to imagine the mournful, far-carrying bubbling call of the curlew as an echo of human laughter. If you know the curlew’s call, your heart has to bleed for the poor man who heard it and heard the uproar of conviviality.
Hamlet said that he was mad north-north-west: when the wind was southerly, he could tell a hawk from a handsaw. This line has baffled not a few in its time, but handsaw (or hansaw) is a contraction of heronshaw, which means a young heron. Hamlet was clearly a bad birdwatcher himself, though he probably carried a falcon rather than a pair of binoculars when he went a-birding. When the wind was southerly, he could tell the slow rhythmic wing-beat of a young heron from the flap-flap-glide of a hawk. No great trick to that: even a bad birdwatcher like the moody prince was up to it.
Poets have always celebrated birds. William Blake said that robin redbreast in a cage put all heaven in a rage; Gerard Manley Hopkins not only rejoiced in a kestrel in The Windhover, the most thrilling nature poem ever written – my God, what would he have written had he seen my hobby? – but he also wrote the definitive poem about being a bad birdwatcher, and his problem in telling one lark from another:
Teevo cheevo cheevio chee:
O where, what can that be?
It’s a woodlark, Father Hopkins. Lovely song, too. The bird can even sing its own Latin name, or the first part of it: Lullula arborea. The French call it l’alouette loulou.
I touch on literature here not for the sake of the poets but for the sake of the birds and the bad birdwatchers. Birds are in our past, they are in our blood and in our bones. In short, when you make the decision to become a bad birdwatcher, you do not start from scratch. You are already a bad birdwatcher. The baddest birdwatcher on the planet start
s off with a huge bank of information, tradition and culture. After that, it is just a matter of getting the habit. The habit of looking. And listening, like Father Hopkins, but we will come to that later.
So let us make a start on the looking side of things right now.
Look out of the window.
See a bird.
Enjoy it.
Congratulations. You are a bad birdwatcher.
3. Birds are only human
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness, –
Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Why birds? Why not mammals? After all, we are mammals ourselves; it makes more sense to watch our own kind. Or why not reptiles, since reptiles are wonderfully unlike our own kind? Or insects, because there are so many more of them to see? Or plants, because they at least have the decency to keep still?
Birds are the most studied organisms on the planet. They are the best observed, the most fanatically recorded, the most lovingly written about. Birds have more good observers than any other kind of animal, and untold millions more bad ones. Why?
The answer is obvious. Because they’re obvious. Birds, I mean. At the end of the last chapter, when you looked out of the window, you will have seen a bird all right, unless you were dead unlucky and in absolutely the wrong place and didn’t want to look for more than a few seconds, or it was dark and there were no owls passing by.
But how many mammals did you see? I mean, wild mammals? Thought not. It is a rare and generally exciting thing to see a wild mammal.
Squirrels, yes, grey squirrels in the park. Bunnies are easy enough to see, too. But that’s it. It’s a real thrill to see any wild mammal. Or at least unexpected – not everyone is overjoyed at the sight of a house mouse or Rattus norvegicus.
