The Year of 100 Birds – Week 18
Lapwings | Reed Warbler | Chaffinch
Lapwings
I saw some birds this week. I could tell you about them all, but you’d hate that.
“And then there was the starling. And then two more starlings. And a wood pigeon. Then there was a pied wagtail. And after that a blackbird, followed by two robins and a dunnock.”
I will, though, tell you about the lapwings, for the simple reason that I remember them.
I remember them, even though I saw them for less than a second.
I remember them because they’re so deeply embedded as A Favourite Bird that I favour them over other, equally deserving species.
I remember them because when you’re on a long train journey and some unnamed instinct makes you look up from your book and glance out of the window, and when at that precise moment fifty lapwings billow up in a small cloud from the water’s edge, paddle-shaped wings beating in near unison, the sunlight just catching the dark green-and-purple iridescence of their backs as they wheel round and away from you, and when what you usually see from the window of a speeding train might be a couple of crows and a desultory wood pigeon, and when the brevity of the sighting makes you want to pull the emergency cord so the train can stop and go back and you can explain to your fellow passengers – in the brief period of amnesty they grant you before tearing you limb from limb – that honestly there were lapwings there and you should have seen them – when all those things align, it’s the easiest thing in the world – an instinct, really – to hold that image in your mind and save it to the folder in your brain marked ‘Eternal Bird Memories’.
And that, fellow humans, is why I will remember the lapwings I saw this week.
Reed Warbler
Life is full of wonder.
Consider, if you will, Exhibit A: the reed warbler.
We might focus on its migration – a mere slip of a thing flying thousands of miles every year blah blah.
We might highlight its song – that repetitive, rhythmic scratching and chattering so often heard from the depths of a reed bed in summer.
We might, and with reason, shine the light on its nest. If, that is, we can find it. It’s a delicate arrangement, about the size of a teacup, suspended precariously between reed stalks, woven with extraordinary deftness by the female from dried grasses, leaves and reed heads, and lined with softer materials – feathers, hair, moss. A work combining high level engineering and fine art.
We might, having thought about such an extraordinary feat for a few minutes, give ourselves a bit of a shake and turn our attention to the contents of that nest.
And it’s here that the wonder intensifies.
There are four eggs in the nest. Five, perhaps. They make a pretty picture. A bird’s egg is, of course, a perfect thing, and the soft geometry of those four or five eggs – olive green, speckled ovals nestled against each other – is pleasing to the eye. Interestingly, one of them is larger than the others. And there’s something slightly off about it, something you can’t quite put your finger on. A glitch in the egg-nest matrix. We note it, and continue to observe as the parent birds take it in turns to incubate the eggs for the next twelve days.
At that point, like Chekhov’s gun, the glitch pays off. Because one of those eggs was laid not by a reed warbler, but by a cuckoo.
We should pause at this point to admire the female cuckoo. Our human instinct is to disapprove of the machinations of the brood parasite, but the nature of the scam is undeniably impressive. And it’s a tough gig. She’ll be monitoring up to a dozen nests to ensure the timing is right – host birds will reject an egg if they suspect something’s up. And when the moment arrives she has to move quickly – into the nest, lay the egg, remove one of the host’s, usually in less than ten seconds. The deception initiated, she moves on to the other nests and follows the same procedure. It’s an extraordinary evolutionary adaptation.
It plays out like this. The eggs hatch. One of them – let’s call it Kevin – has a little hollow in its back. Kevin knows what to do. One by one, it manoeuvres its ‘siblings’ – whether egg or nestling – into the hollow, thrusts up and hoys them out of the nest.
The reed warbler parents, in the grip of total denial, raise the baby cuckoo as their own. At first their blind faith is understandable, but as the chick grows and grows and grows the scenario becomes less and less plausible.
“No I don’t know what happened to your other children. No I definitely didn’t kill them by throwing them out of the nest, the very idea. Yes it’s perfectly normal for a reed warbler chick to be so big that the only way the parent can feed them is to perch on their back NOW GIVE ME MOAR FOOD.”
And so it goes. When the time comes, the young cuckoo flies south, on its own and without having been shown the way – perhaps an even more remarkable adaptation than its instinct for fratricide.
As I say, life is full of wonder.
The question many of you will be asking at this point is ‘Has John Finnemore written a sketch about this?’ The answer to this question is always yes.
(PS it’s entirely possible this YouTube post – the only one I found when searching ‘John Finnemore cuckoo sketch’ – is wildly illegal, in which case I have no doubt John (or even John’s lawyers) will be hounding me to take it down.)
Chaffinch
As a young birdlistener I was easily confused. A million sounds, many of them distressingly similar. The descriptions in the field guides weren’t much help. It’s one thing being able to read “tzrü-tzrü-tswit-trett-psit-prrrü-zuuurrrr” out loud, making sure you enunciate clearly the difference between ‘ü’ and ‘uuu’ – quite another to recognise it in the wild.
There were mnemonics, of course. “Tea-cher tea-cher!” for the great tit’s default two-noter. “A little bit of bread and no cheese” for the yellowhammer. They were, to my mind, of limited use. But one of them stuck.
The song of the chaffinch – starting slowly and accelerating to a final flurry – sounds like a bowler (cricket, not hat) running to the crease and releasing the ball.
For this eleven-year-old, equally obsessed by birds and cricket, it was the perfect description. And fifty years on, the song of a chaffinch places me, with Proustian efficiency, in 1976, watching the John Player League with the curtains drawn, the only concession to the outside world an open window, through which the chaffinch’s song could sometimes be heard to coincide with the sight of Derek Underwood striding in to bamboozle yet another hapless batter.
Another time, another time.
Lovely stuff. We've been enjoying / fretting about lapwings (and chicks!) in a new place on one of our regular walking routes locally - hoping they make it through.
'watching the John Player League with the curtains drawn' - no greater pleasure