The Year of 100 Birds – Week 17

A Whimbrel Way | Swallow | Willow Warbler

A Whimbrel Way

I saw some birds this week. Feathers, beaks, flapping – you know the drill.

Not all of them prompted discussion. An admiring glance is often enough, although sometimes the glance turns into a stare. Depends on the bird.

This one – the discussion one – was on the estuary, standing alone, off to one side, not associating with the gulls and geese and such like. Not standoffish, just independent.

Curlew. Europe’s largest wader, perennial winner of Britain’s Curviest Bill, population in steep and seemingly irreversible decline. Always a pleasure – albeit, thanks to that decline, one cut with the undertow of anxiety – e never a chore. Cracking bird. A minute spent watching a curlew fossicking around in the mud for invertebrates is a minute well spent. And its bubbling call is one of the great sounds of the mudflats. Evocative, melancholy, haunting even.

No. Wait.

That bill. Perhaps not so long as we thought at first. And how big is this bird exactly? So difficult to tell. Big, yes. For a wader. Certainly bigger than the oystercatchers – pied dumplings with carrot bills – flying past, shattering the peace with their pungent p-peep-ing. But curlew big? Or merely whimbrel big?

And that’s when conversation turns to eye-stripes and crown-stripes and superciliums, the niceties of plumage the field guides are so keen on. Because while a curlew is rather plain in the head, its slightly smaller cousin the whimbrel is blessed with a distinctive example of all three of those features. So to be certain, all we need is for the Discussion Bird to turn its head towards us and present them for our scrutiny. Just a bit. About thirty degrees or so. Go on. Just turn round. Swivel that elegant neck. What harm can it do you? Come oooooonnnnnn.

Immune to our silent entreaties, the Discussion Bird continues its fossicking, stubbornly keeping the crucial features hidden from view. It doesn’t care for our dilemma. It has no identity crisis. Not that it’s ever thought about it. The whimbrel – if it is indeed a whimbrel – isn’t even aware that it is (or, perhaps, isn’t) a whimbrel. And it isn’t, as far as we know, driven by the deeper philosophical questions of life. It has enough on its plate contending with day-to-day survival. Food, rest, breeding. The food, right now, is of particular importance, because while it has already travelled far from its west African wintering grounds, it still has far to go – Shetland, perhaps, where its small British breeding population is centred. Or maybe further north, beyond the Arctic circle – an extra leg to ensure rich pickings and increase its chances of breeding success.

We turn our attention elsewhere. Gulls and geese and such like. A sneaky glance back to the Discussion Bird.

Bingo. The whimbrel has obliged. Eye-stripe, head-stripe, supercilium.

Pleased to meet you.

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Swallow

Memory is both strong and weak. For example, I can’t remember what I did last Tuesday, but I can remember exactly what it felt like to stand underneath the phone lines in my childhood backyard as the swallows gathered ahead of their long migration. I can see their agitation, hear their chattering, almost – almost – smell that early autumn scene.

I’m sure I’m not the only one. The swallow – barn swallow to give its proper name – is familiar to bird-noticers on all continents except Antarctica (‘except Antarctica’ being among the commonest two-word phrases in all nature writing). Received with joy wherever and whenever they appear, they are – depending on your culture, location or religion – harbingers of spring, hope, love, loyalty, freedom, beauty, resilience, and much more. They’re deeply embedded in our folklore, from the idea that swallows consoled Christ on the cross to the legend that if you remove a swallow’s nest your house will be struck by lightning. They’re in the Bible, Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, Wilde, Betjeman, Monty Python, and many more, not to mention countless works of art. And their journeys – remarkable, extraordinary journeys – from south to north and back again have been recorded, studied and wondered over throughout human history. The lives of some birds remain almost entirely mysterious. While the lives of swallows do – and must – retain some secrets, we know them as well as we know anything. And we like them. We really, really like them.

Perhaps we like them because they seem to like us. Before we came along, they made their nests in caves – some still do. But as we developed, so too did our buildings, and those corners between roof and wall proved perfect for a swallow’s nest, built with mud and lined with feathers and grass. As well as the phone lines – where did they perch before those appeared? – a childhood memory centres round the feeling of a swallow flying low over my head, apparently unbothered by my presence, as it swept in and out of the garage to feed its young. Later, at the pond, on one of those endless summer days of childhood, they skimmed low, hawking insects, beaks occasionally breaking the water’s surface to take a drink – ballet and poetry combined in one precise, graceful movement.

Of all the birds, the swallow carries the heaviest weight of nostalgia. And it reminds me that, while what I did last Tuesday might forever evade me, in some areas my memory’s still as effective, still as vivid as ever.

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Willow Warbler

Photo: Steve Garvie

It’s a rite of passage for any beginner.

The experienced birder takes you into their confidence and explains the difference between two common birds of dauntingly similar and nondescript appearance: the chiffchaff and the willow warbler.

Never mind that most of the time the view you’ll get of either bird will be at least partially obscured by foliage; never mind that there is a much simpler way of distinguishing the two species. The experienced birder insists on throwing in terms like ‘primary projection’ and ‘supercilium’, apparently indifferent to the fact that the beginner is simply delighted to have seen a bird at all.

The simpler way – made all the more useful by the relative elusiveness of both birds – is to focus on sound, not appearance. The chiffchaff’s insistence on shouting its name all the live-long day makes it one of the easier birds to recognise by sound.

The willow warbler’s song is quite different – a sound, despite its downward lilt, to lift the heart.

If the song is a gateway to willow warbler fandom, its migration cements the deal. We rightly bang on about the wondrous journeys of swifts and swallows and arctic terns and bar-tailed godwits – the glamour kids of the migration world. Meanwhile, upwards of 2.3 million willow warblers – mere scraps of things, half the size of a swallow – slip into the country, unheralded save by the connoisseurs, those whose antennae are tuned into that curious, melancholy, lilting song.