This Birding Life Read online

  This Birding Life

  Stephen Moss is a television producer, writer and broadcaster, who has written the monthly Birdwatch column in the Guardian since 1993. He works at the world-famous BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, where his award-winning TV series include Birding with Bill Oddie, Bill Oddie Goes Wild and Springwatch. He is also a regular voice on BBC radio. His other books for Aurum include A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching and A Sky Full of Starlings: A Diary of the Birding Year. He lives in Somerset with his wife Suzanne and five children.

  This Birding Life

  The Best of the Guardians Birdwatch

  STEPHEN MOSS

  For my late mother, Kay Moss, with fond memories of walking across a golf course on the Isles of Scilly, during a howling gale, to see Buff-breasted Sandpipers.

  And for my wife Suzanne, who has not yet had that pleasure.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  PROLOGUE

  1 Growing up: 1963–1982

  2 Spreading my wings: 1983–1997

  3 My local patch: 1994–1997

  4 Birding Britain: 1998–2005

  5 Birding abroad: 1994–2005

  6 Birds, places and people

  7 Back home: 2001—present

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  Introduction

  Once in a while, I try to picture what my life would have been like if I had never become interested in birds. Yet birds form such a central part of my existence, and have influenced the course of so many aspects of my life, that the idea that I might not be totally fascinated by them is, quite simply, unimaginable.

  That doesn’t mean that I am some sad obsessive whose every waking hour is spent thinking about, pursuing or watching birds. I have many other interests, a loving family and a wide circle of friends, most of whom are not birders themselves. But birds are always ‘there’ — something I can’t help noticing, watching and thinking about.

  Moreover, I am one of those very lucky people for whom my consuming passion is also my work: both in my job as a producer at the BBC Natural History Unit and as the author of various articles and books on birds. But for the first decade or so of my working life things were very different. The catalyst that led to the convergence of my hobby and my career came in the early 1990s, when I was working for the BBC’s now defunct Continuing Education Department in London.

  I had produced a now long-forgotten television series on the British weather and, together with my friend and colleague Paul Simons, had written a book to accompany it. As a result, we both began contributing short articles on the weather to the Guardian, commissioned by Tim Radford. A year or so later, I suggested to Tim’s colleague Celia Locks that the time might be right to launch a column on birdwatching. My first ‘Birdwatch’ column was published in January 1993, and since then I have delivered more than 150 monthly missives, totalling over 80,000 words.

  This volume contains a selection of those pieces, rearranged into chapters with common themes. I have edited them as lightly as possible, removing the odd error (mine), the occasional misprint (the Guardian’s), and at my editor’s behest, pruned the text of clichés. But otherwise they stand more or less as they were written.

  They cover a wide range of subjects: from nostalgic trips down memory lane, to memorable people, places and, of course, birding experiences – both at home and abroad. What they have in common is a consistent approach to birds and birding: a philosophy, if you like, by which I incorporate the pastime into my daily life. Like so many people, I find enjoyment, solace and quite literally ‘re-creation’ in the experience of watching birds, whether in my back garden or the most exotic foreign location.

  If I have conveyed even a little of the enormous pleasure, joy and fulfilment watching birds has brought to my life, I shall have succeeded. If you are not a birder, and these pieces persuade you to give it a go, I promise you won’t regret it!

  Prologue

  JUNE 1998

  It’s over 35 years since I began watching birds. OK, so I was only a toddler when I started, but in biblical terms, that’s more than half a lifetime.

  In Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s celebrated book about supporting Arsenal Football Club, he wonders how many childhood pastimes you’re still enjoying when you reach middle age. Playing with Lego? Only when the kids absolutely insist. Wearing short trousers? Only when I travel abroad and really let my hair down. Making up complicated fantasy games and losing myself in another world? Not as often as I’d like.

  So why do I still pick up a pair of binoculars and a book of coloured pictures, and go out into the countryside to watch small, feathered creatures? It’s not as if I don’t have better things to do: piles of urgent tasks at work and home, and the whole multitude of distractions and entertainments available to late twentieth-century man.

  Perhaps that’s why I enjoy watching birds. In an ever-changing world, it provides a stability and continuity hard to find elsewhere. Indeed, it occurred to me recently that when I’m watching a particular bird, it often brings to mind the many other times I’ve seen that species.

  For example, a lone Jackdaw just flew past my window. Seeing that bird reminded me of one afternoon a few years ago, in Galilee, in the north of Israel. I stood in the gathering dusk, in the heart of the Hula Valley, waiting for a spectacular roost of more than 20,000 cranes to pass overhead. Suddenly, I heard a familiar call: a harsh ‘chack’, multiplied many times. The sound came from a flock of almost a thousand Jackdaws, feeding in a lush, irrigated field. Until that moment, I didn’t even know this species lived in Israel, let alone gathered there in such vast numbers.

  Closing my eyes, I remembered all the other times and places I’d heard Jackdaws call, or watched as ragged black silhouettes swept across the sky. A Gloucestershire village on New Year’s Day, when it was the very first bird I saw that year. The tower of an ancient Norfolk church, with a flock of Jackdaws angrily mobbing a passing Osprey. And a service station on the M4, where Rooks and Jackdaws gathered to scavenge morsels of food dropped by passing motorists.

  I have a photograph of me as a toddler, aged 18 months or so, my hand outstretched to a bird. It was a tame Jackdaw, and I remember my mother telling me that it had turned up in our garden sometime back in late 1961. For a few months, it hung around to be fed, and then disappeared. Later on she showed me the photograph, and the image stuck in my mind.

  Looking back, I suppose this Jackdaw was the first bird I ever looked at. Did this chance encounter, together with a child’s curiosity, lead to a lifetime’s all-consuming obsession with birds? Or did I throw it a piece of bread, turn away, and go off to play with my toys? I don’t know. But I do know that whenever I see a Jackdaw, half a lifetime’s worth of memories rise to the surface.

  CHAPTER 1

  Growing up

  1963–1982

  The pieces in this chapter are a selection of my childhood birding experiences. Starting in the south-west London suburbs – in those days known as Middlesex – they cover the two places that really got me hooked on birds: the gravel-pits at Shepperton and the reservoirs at Staines.

  They continue through family summer holidays, and my first tentative trips as a teenager – made with Daniel, my schoolmate, dear friend and birding companion for the past four decades. The chapter ends with a memorable trip I made to the Shetland Isles after leaving university – a trip which, looking back a quarter of a century on, I now realise convinced me to continue birding into my adult life.

  Reading them again, I am struck first by the many discomforts we went through to see birds: we certainly suffered for our pleasures back in the 1970s. But they also evoke a time of innocence, when life was really mu
ch simpler: we wanted to see birds, so we got on our bikes and looked for them. In doing so we went to wonderful places and met some extraordinary people; and this combination of birds, places and people is, in essence, what birding is all about.

  Funny black ducks

  JANUARY 1996

  I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in birds. Big birds, small birds, brightly coloured birds in nature films, little brown birds hopping about the garden. Sparrows and swifts, gulls and geese, waders and warblers – and funny black ducks.

  Yes, funny black ducks. Well, it had to start somewhere. And in my case, a lifetime’s fascination with birds began with an experience I share with every child, past and present: feeding the ducks.

  It was one of those dull, grey winter weekends back in 1963. Bored at home, I persuaded my mother to drive the mile or so down to the Thames at Laleham, in our yellow Ford Anglia. When we arrived, I began the ritual of chucking one piece of bread at the assembled Mallards while stuffing another in my mouth. Suddenly I stopped, my hunger overcome by a three-year-old’s curiosity. I turned to my mother and asked the question: ‘What are those funny black ducks?’

  Despite having spent part of her childhood evacuated to the Devon countryside, my mother was not the greatest bird identification expert. In fact she had no idea what they were and tried to fob me off by changing the subject. With all the tenacity of a curious child, I persisted. And to her great credit, instead of shutting me up with another piece of bread, she promised to find out.

  When we got home, she remembered that the previous Christmas one of my aunts or uncles had given me a small brown book: the Observer’s Book of Birds. Glancing through its pages, she found the answer to the mystery: they weren’t ‘funny black ducks’ at all, but Coots.

  I picked up the book and, as they say, couldn’t put it down. To my three-year-old brain, the tiny watercolour plates and abbreviated text were the fuel for a new obsession. I began to memorise the names of every single bird, starting with Magpie on page 18, and continuing until the final entry on page 217, a rather disappointing black-and-white illustration of a Capercaillie.

  Many years later, having children of my own, I can appreciate the single-minded way in which I immersed myself in my new-found interest. OK, so birds didn’t have to compete against Nintendo, Jurassic Park and the Simpsons. But watching my own five-year-old son, James, engrossed in the modern equivalent of the Observer’s books, I’m glad to see that some things don’t change.

  I think what really captured my imagination was realising that birds were actually living, breathing creatures – not just stuck inside the pages of my little brown book. Since then, birds have become a lifetime’s interest – occasionally bordering on an obsession. I can’t help it. It’s a bit like being a West Ham supporter – I’m stuck with it until death do us part.

  Of course I’m not alone. There are millions of people around the world who enjoy watching birds, and whether their interest began at the age of three or seventy-three, they all have a story to tell about what started them off.

  As to why we enjoy watching birds, well that’s a tough one. It can’t be because we enjoy being the butt of predictable jokes, or getting our feet wet, or walking for miles in the freezing cold. We do it in our spare time, yet calling it a hobby seems less than adequate. Perhaps the late James Fisher, writer and ornithologist, summed it up best when he wrote: ‘The observation of birds may be a superstition, a tradition, an art, a science, a pleasure, a hobby or a bore: this depends entirely on the nature of the observer.’ For me birdwatching is all of these things, and much, much more.

  Down the pits

  MARCH 1996

  During the years following the Second World War, strange blue holes began to appear on the Ordnance Survey map of west London. They weren’t the work of aliens, the Ministry of Defence or a slapdash cartographer – but gravel-pits.

  Originally dug to extract gravel for the postwar housing boom, they soon began to fill up with water, and trees and bushes started to appear. By the time I was growing up in the area during the 1960s, the ‘pits’, as we called them, had become a huge, outdoor playground. For an eight-year-old boy, they held an infinite promise of adventure.

  I first visited Shepperton Gravel Pits in 1968. I was on a nature trail with class 2H, Saxon School, under the watchful eye of Mrs Threlfall. As we wandered in a loose crocodile along the footpath, I caught sight of my very first Great Crested Grebe – a really special bird.

  After that first visit, you couldn’t keep me away. In those far-off days, before the current hysteria about the danger from child molesters, youngsters were allowed to spend weekends and school holidays exploring places like this on their own. So our ‘gang’ – Alan, Glyn, Ian, Rob and I – spent hours on end building rafts, playing hide-and-seek and catching tadpoles in the nearby brook.

  But gradually, I spent less time playing, and more time on my own, seeking out the birdlife. The Great Crested Grebes were still the main attraction, carrying their humbug-striped young on their backs like yuppie parents on a trip to IKEA. In winter, there were flocks of Tufted Ducks and Pochard, and a small group of Cormorants; in summer, ‘little brown jobs’ that I finally identified as Reed Warblers.

  One August Bank Holiday my mother and I went to collect elderberries to make home-made wine – and I remember seeing two Black Terns that had dropped in during their southbound migration, dipping into the water for food.

  But the most memorable event took place a year or so earlier, on 3 May 1970. My field notebook, covered with scribbled hieroglyphics, records the weather as ‘blooming hot’ – a daring profanity for one so young. That day, I went for a walk with Roger Trent, a tiny lad in the same class as me who had also become interested in birdwatching. We were looking out over the water and probably thinking about going off to play football, when a huge bird flew overhead.

  Now normally, huge birds in south-east England are herons, but we’d seen herons and knew it couldn’t be one of those. So for the rest of the day we followed the bird up and down, as it flapped lazily from one side of the pit to the other. We were pretty sure that it was some kind of bird of prey, and finally decided it must be a Buzzard. By then we were hot, grubby and tired, so we went back home for a glass of orange squash and Thunderbirds on the telly.

  It wasn’t until 14 years later, when I finally saw a migrating Osprey near the very same gravel-pits, that I realised the identity of our mystery bird. The date, the weather, the habitat and the memory of the bird itself make me sure that what we saw was one of these majestic raptors, making its return journey from Africa to Scotland.

  Now, of course, it’s too late to go back and find out. Soon afterwards, Roger and his family took advantage of the famous £10 a head passage and emigrated to Australia. As all ten-year-old friends do, we promised faithfully to write, but after exchanging a postcard each, the correspondence ground to a halt. Even so, more than 25 years later, I just have to open up my faded notebook to recall every moment of that warm spring day.

  Heaven and hell

  FEBRUARY 1996

  In Madrid, they have a saying about the city’s weather. ‘Nueve meses de invierno, tres de inferno — nine months of winter, three months of hell!’ It’s a long way from the Spanish capital to the outskirts of London, but this has always reminded me of Staines Reservoirs, where I did a lot of my early birdwatching during the 1970s.

  Between September and May, and especially during the winter months, it was so cold you just wanted to lie down and die. First your fingers froze, then your toes, then everything else. It didn’t help that you were standing on an exposed concrete causeway, surrounded by two huge basins of water, across which the wind whipped mercilessly. By contrast, during the summer months it could be unbearably hot, made worse by the vast flocks of midges which gathered along the causeway, preying on passing birdwatchers.

  So why did anyone go there at all? Perhaps because of all the sites in west London, Staines Reservoir
s was the place most likely to produce good birds. It needed to be – with Heathrow-bound aeroplanes shattering the peace every minute or two, you wouldn’t go near the place unless you thought you were going to see something good.

  I first visited the reservoirs with a group from the Young Ornithologists’ Club, on 17 November 1969. I remember the date because at the time, I thought it might be my last day on Earth. This was before the days of thermal underwear and windproof coats, so my mother dressed me up in the kind of jacket you wear to the shops, adding a thin pair of gloves as an afterthought. I suppose I should consider myself lucky I wasn’t in the short trousers we wore to school every day.

  I can’t remember seeing any birds through the tears brought on by a force six northerly gale. I do remember looking through my pair of (borrowed) binoculars at some black dots sitting on the water about five miles away, which I think may have been Pochard. Or Wigeon. Or just black dots.

  I also remember ‘dipping out’ for the first time – failing to catch a glimpse of the Cormorant that everyone else seemed to have seen. Good practice for later birding failures, I suppose.

  After the outing, we returned to the car park of the Crooked Billet, a Berni Inn on the nearby A30. We staggered inside, and downed a large Scotch (my mother) and a hot Bovril (me). As the feeling returned to my extremities, I vowed never again to return to this godforsaken place.

  Like so many resolutions, it didn’t last. I have a battered field notebook which starts with an entry dated 28 December 1969. This time, I saw a few more birds: it lists a total of 17 species, though with hindsight some of these look a bit dubious. One thing hadn’t changed, though: in the space provided for details of the weather, I simply wrote ‘freezing and frostbitten’.