Birds, Volume 2

This is the second of the mid-weekly posts sent to all those on the Birds list. If birds aren’t your thing, you can unsubscribe from these posts by going to the manage your subscription page. But do have a read anyway – you might find that birds are, after all, your thing.

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It’s dark outside. Minus three. A sensible person stays in bed. Why would you abandon the duvet’s cosy embrace? But the pull is strong. Those birds aren’t going to watch themselves.

Hat. Check. Gloves. Check. Layers. Check. Binoculars. Check. Camera. Oh go on then.

On the one hand, I want to live in the moment, experience it to the full and relish its ephemerality, rather than diluting it by recording it for posterity; on the other, my photo library is full of images that recall many such moments, which lurk in the memory bank waiting for the trigger to bring them surging to the top in a Proustian rush. Thanks to photographs I am that bird-mad 10-year-old feeding a jackdaw by hand, that teenager masking insecurity with a blasé, know-it-all attitude, that 23-year-old, broken by sudden bereavement but, in denial, not yet realising it.

You can, though, overstate the significance of a photograph. The same photo library is also full of images – banal, poorly executed, just plain naff – I have no recollection of taking. Their positive contribution to the universe can barely be measured.

Nevertheless, I like a pretty bird pic, and I like the challenge of taking one. So the camera sits next to the binoculars. When I feel like it, I take it with me.

Not that I really understand my camera. Not yet. I knew my way around the old one. But then something went wrong with it. Something that meant it would be more expensive to fix it than to buy a new one.

New one it is, then.

It’s not flashy – a ‘bridge’ camera: better than a phone, less cumbersome than the great big fuckoff lenses preferred by proper photographers – but even so, it doesn’t half have some buttons on it. Press this to switch to aperture priority, this to calibrate the auto white balance, this to speak to an operator, this to make a flat white.

I can fiddle around and gradually work out that oh yes when I do that it makes it too bright, when I do that it makes it too dark, and when I do that the focus frame moves to the bottom left corner of the viewfinder and doesn’t move back, no matter what else I try. But fiddling around is slow, and goldcrests are fast. There’s one now, just there.

There.

No, there.

No, hang on, there.

SIT STILL YOU LITTLE SHIT.

I love them really.

A goldcrest is the embodiment of small bird energy. Tiny, floofy, sometimes surprisingly furious looking. Extremely flitty (autocorrect wants to change that to ‘flirty’, which will probably do just as well).

My solution to the flittiness is simple, if blunt. I set the camera to burst mode. Point, click, hope. With luck, something useable will come out of it.

A sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Whhheeeeeeeeeee

The goldcrest is hanging out with a gaggle of long-tailed tits – equally tiny, equally floofy, somehow lacking the impression of suppressed rage – and between them they provide a warming antidote to the chill. Not that I need an antidote. Because the chill is the good kind. Quiet, crisp, clear. The kind of morning to make you feel pleased (smug, even) to have got up and out, wielding optical equipment.

There’s anticipation, too. What flavour of magic will I experience today? At which avian altar shall I worship? The birds don’t have to be exotic – if the only magic is a desultory mallard dozing beside a pond, then I shall worship the mallard, no questions asked.

And so it comes to pass.

I worship the dunnock on the roof, pecking away at moss in search of titbits and pausing occasionally to give a little burst of midwinter song.

I worship the mistle thrush singing from its treetop perch – that rich, mournful fluting, like a blackbird’s song compressed in range and denuded of clicks and squawks.

I worship the drumming of the great spotted woodpecker, that heartening marker of early spring, because why wouldn’t I?

I worship the elusive wren, catching my attention with a burst of song from the depths of the reeds then zipping low across the path in front of me and disappearing on a secret wren mission.

I even worship the grumpy pigeon, invading my personal space and giving me a ‘well what the fuck do YOU want?’ look.

And I worship, in particular, the heron.

There is nothing as still as a heron. Statues go to them for advice.

Later it will give its begrudging take-off – as captured so perfectly by Paul Farley: “fucking hell, all right, all right, I’ll go to the garage for your flaming fags” – but for now it stands and waits, patience heronified, shoulders hunched in a pose to give my physiotherapist conniptions.

A standing heron is an easy photo. No goldcrest, he. And the angle of the rising sun does good things with the light, with inevitable consequences for the trigger-happy amateur photographer.

Snap snap snap.

And as I snap it opens its prehistoric dagger beak and exhales, and physics and chemistry and magic do their thing, and I am again that bird-mad 10-year-old, gasping with the thrill of an intimate moment.

I’m happy to have brought the camera, to have captured it so I don’t have to go to the bother of working out how to describe precisely the way the sunlight catches the bumps and valleys on the ice, the exact set of the heron’s body, and the shape of the curl of steam that comes out of its mouth. I can just point to the photograph and say “Look at this.”

Sometimes, in moments of unhealthy self-examination, I ask myself why I watch birds. What’s the point of it?

Not today. Today is all yes. Yes to the dunnock. Yes to the mistle thrush. Yes to the grumpy pigeon. And a big, resounding, triumphant yes to the heron.

I imagine the walk without them. And there’s the answer, simplicity itself.

A day with a bird in it is better than a day without a bird in it. That’s all.

It doesn’t do to overthink these things.

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Shriek of the Week

There’s never a bad time to subscribe to Shriek of the Week, but with spring (and therefore peak birdsong season) on the horizon, now is a particularly good time. Charlie gives you a birdsong a week, with examples and descriptions and expertise lightly worn. By springtime you’ll be a birdsong guru.

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Thanks for reading. That might well be quite enough bird talk for you. If it isn’t, below the fold this week you’ll find a touching story of a spheniscine/diomedeidian encounter. Or, to use words normal people will understand: Penguin Meets Albatross.