The Year of 100 Birds – Week 20
Memories | Goldcrest | Dunnock | Book giveaway
Memories
I saw some birds this week. But while they were, as so often, front and centre and background, I’d like to write, for once, about a human.
His name is Mike, he was a childhood friend, and I’ve written about him once before, in Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear?, the story of my returning to birding after an absence of 35 years:
The word ‘godwit’ triggers a memory. Me and Michael, fellow Young Ornithologists and relentlessly competitive in every sphere. I’ve invited him on holiday in Scotland, and we’ve spent three days outdoing each other in ornithological smart-arsery.
Michael is better than me at everything. Birdwatching is the one area where I have a chance. It’s a miracle my mother hasn’t killed us both.
We’re on a beach, looking at a flock of waders.
‘Dunlin, look. Knot on the right.’
‘Oystercatchers over there.’
‘Common sandpiper to the left. Greenshank.’
Competitive birding for kids.
Michael gets excited. ‘Ooh look! Godwits!’
I train my binoculars on a group of brown birds with long bills. His identification is plausible. But there are two kinds of godwit: black-tailed and bar-tailed. To tell the difference we need to see their tails, tantalisingly hidden by folded wings. We’re going to have to flush ’em.
That’s what we tell ourselves, anyway.
A proper birder wouldn’t do that. A proper birder would work it out from other indications. Bill or leg length, subtle plumage variations.
And a proper birder wouldn’t run screaming at a group of harmless waders just for a tick.
In my defence, I’m not the first to run, nor the first to scream. But I am the first to see the identifying bars on the terrified birds’ tails as they scatter to the four winds.
If my mother is unimpressed by our behaviour, she doesn’t show it. Much.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but Mike’s friendship gave me validation. He was sporty and popular – whereas I… well, apart from a slight flair for cricket, I was neither of those things.
As is often the way, our friendship was short-lived – we moved to different schools, followed different life paths – but I occasionally wondered what happened to him, whether he’d retained his interest in birds, and whether he remembered that trip.
Well.
He got in touch. He moved to Australia thirty-five years ago, and in 2020 started a company called Aussie Bird Tours.
That answers the first two questions. As for the third, here’s an interview clip he sent me.
Colour me gobsmacked.
He’s coming over to England in June. We’re going birding together, as if the last 50 years had never happened.
I don’t imagine we’ll be deliberately flushing any godwits, though.
Meanwhile, if you’re in or visiting Sydney, go on a tour, why not? Say hi from me.
Goldcrest
You change as you age.
Some things remain the same. At 60, I’m as likely to spend a day watching cricket as I was at 10. And the cheap allure of a Kit-Kat will never dim. But the way you see the world evolves. And while my reaction to an encounter with a goldcrest might, in its simple expression of childish delight, be outwardly unchanged across the half-century, the motor driving it is different.
The goldcrest, to lapse briefly into field guide talk, is a tiny passerine in the kinglet family. It’s olive-green on top, creamy white underneath. White wing bars, a black button eye and the eponymous crest – a striking stripe on the crown (yellow in the female, tinged with orange in the male) – complete the ensemble.
A beautiful bird, then. One of many, albeit more diminutive than most. Shorter than a teaspoon, but a gazillion times cuter – and weighing no more than a 20p piece (I adhere at all times to the unwritten ornithological law that demands the weight of birds be expressed in terms of coinage).
Tiny bird, huge energy. And as surefire a cheerer-upper as I can think of. Part of the goldcrest’s potency stems from my personal history with it, as described here – with the mildest of apologies for featuring it twice in this post – in Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear?:
The most heavily thumbed page in my copy of The Reader’s Digest Book of Birds was the goldcrest’s. I loved it hard. Perhaps it was because (and here I encourage you, in sympathy with Britain’s smallest bird and 1970s Oxfordshire’s smallest child, to play the world’s smallest violin) I was what my mother called a ‘late developer’. While my contemporaries rocketed skywards, I needed a ladder just to sit on a chair. At one point I thought I was shrinking. I was so desperate to grow that I indulged in what might generously be called ‘wishful thinking’, but more accurately ‘measurement fraud’. The pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe indicated a miraculous spurt of three inches in one twenty-four-hour period in 1975, the result of judicious standing on tiptoes and dirty work at the pencil. I yearned to grow, but remained minuscule until well into my teens, by which time I had other problems.
So it was solidarity with a fellow titch, as well as the bird’s undeniable charms, that kick-started my unrequited love affair with the goldcrest.
Yes, unrequited, for of all the common birds I might have expected to see in the normal course of events, this one eluded me.
And then, one bright spring day in 1977, there it was. My goldcrest. Not, as I’d been led to expect, flitting around in the upper tiers of a conifer, but perched on an apple tree, head cocked and staring directly at me with an appealing look. Its crown was alive with the yellowy-orange stripe that gives it its name, and its tiny body quivered with energy. This adorable bundle of fluff constituted an overwhelming onslaught of cuteness. It felt like ‘my’ bird. The bond between us was a momentary thread of eye contact, but no less strong for that. To me, at any rate. History doesn’t record the goldcrest’s feelings.
I can’t remember what I did last Friday, but I recall every aspect of that encounter (and indeed the aforementioned godwit-flushing) with extraordinary vividness. The human brain, eh?
If ten-year-old me was spellbound by that first sighting – you always remember your first – then nowadays the thrall is more sound-related. Because while the appearance of the goldcrest is undeniably impressive, it’s the voice that grabs. ‘Thin’, ‘high’ and ‘piping’ are the words most commonly applied to its song. When trying to write it down a few years ago, I came up with this:
Tsee-ba-da tsee-ba-da tsee-ba-da tsee-ba-da scabba-diddle-oo.
I see no reason to change my tune now.
But here’s the thing.
As you age, your hearing range contracts. Frequencies that once pinged into your brain without impediment become dulled and then disappear. For most people, this is just one of a long list of ageing-related inconveniences that steal up on you with the relentless march of time. But for a birder, and particularly a musician-birder for whom the avian sound world is the stuff of life, it feels targeted.
One day I will no longer be able to hear the goldcrest’s song. I will stand under a tree, perhaps detecting the shivering of a leaf or that tiny displacement of air that tells you there’s something in there. My instinct will tell me what it is. But my ears will fail me.
Until then, I’ll greet every encounter with a ten-year-old’s enthusiasm.
Dunnock
Birders like to talk of the LBJ – the little brown job. It’s a useful term in Britain, where we have more than our fair share. For British birds, drab is often the order of the day, and while I’m far from averse to the joys of subtle brown streaks, sometimes you long for the kind of gaudy birds whose plumage performs the neat trick of shouting at you while simultaneously lifting your spirits.
The ultimate LBJ is the dunnock. It’s literally in the name: dun = brown, and ‘ock’ is a common suffix denoting ‘small thing’. But the name I grew up with wasn’t dunnock. This bird was the hedge sparrow, an example of the curveballs occasionally thrown by the bird-namers of a former time. The hedge sparrow of old, despite the similar streaked colouring of the plumage, is not a sparrow (the eagle-eyed will notice the difference between the dunnock’s thin, pointed bill and the chunkier offering common to true sparrows). It is, fact fans, an accentor.
It fucking loves a hedge, though. I’ll give it that.
And – entirely unrelated, and included almost as a contractual obligation to titillate the readership – it’s not averse to a throuple, either.
Book Giveaway
Having given you two extracts from Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? (and the illustration that formed the basis of the hardback cover) it would be silly of me not to offer you a chance to win a copy – or, failing that, buy one.
To enter, simply comment on this post with your favourite bird and a short explanation of your choice. I ask this in the full knowledge that any sensible person changes their choice of favourite bird at least as often as they change their socks. Nevertheless, humour me just for now.
If you want to cut straight to the ‘buying the book’ bit, there are choices here.
My favourite bird is the chiffchaff, because its call sounds like it’s singing the theme song to the classic children’s cartoon, Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds.
Long-tailed tits would be my choice (and especially the ‘snow fairy’ Japanese ones), for their unbelievable cuteness and also because the sound of their sociable chatter as they stream past you in a wood is always heart-lifting.