This Birding Life (2 page)

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.

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.

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 Reservoirs 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'.

After that, you couldn't keep me away. During the mid-1970s, my friend Daniel and I visited Staines Reservoirs several hundred times, and kept ludicrously detailed lists of the birds we saw there. Our efforts paid off, at least occasionally. Highlights included summer-plumaged Black-necked Grebes, regular Little Gulls and, best of all, an invasion of what seemed like hundreds of Black Terns, in September 1974.