The Year of 100 Birds – Week 27

Sparrowhawk | Reed Bunting

Sparrowhawk

There are many kinds of silence.

There’s the silence of a walk on the downs. Butterflies-a-flitting, swallows-a-swooping, the only disturbance to the tranquility the light riffling of wind in grass, and perhaps – if you bend your ear and properly listen – the distant carolling of a skylark.

There’s the silence – profound, extraordinary – of 50,000 people in a stadium remembering a life well lived.

There’s the silence, familiar to any stand-up comedian, of the room utterly failing to laugh.

There’s the silence between the notes, where the music resides.

There’s the silence – and this one I feel deeply – of a man sitting in a room, half-watching the cricket with the television on mute while he tries to concentrate on the matter at hand, namely describing different kinds of silence.

There’s the silence I experienced a couple of weeks ago in my local cemetery – a silence taut with tension, the silence of fifty small birds thinking “shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitDONTMOVE”.

Sometimes, in these situations, they’re noisy. Everyday birdy chit-chat intensifies into an outburst of warning calls. Something’s afoot. Specifically, something beaky, talony, killy.

But sometimes there’s an instant and telepathic agreement to shut the fuck up Steve if you value your life and everyone else’s do not on any account so much as twitch a feather.

I watched it fly in, clocked the change in atmosphere, the eruption of silence from terrified tiddlers. It’s close enough that through the binoculars I can see its yellow eye, the peachy barring on its chest warm in the morning sun. Peach on the chest means it’s a male. Significantly smaller than the female, but just as hungry, just as dangerous.

It sits there, apparently content merely to exist with menace. Nothing will move until it does, least of all me.

Much is made of the extraordinary visual acuity of birds of prey, sometimes exaggeratedly so, but I’m pretty sure that from its perch at the top of the tall cedar it’ll have a good idea of what’s where. Chaffinch at six o’clock, blue tit in the monkey puzzle, blackbird in the shrubbery. Seen and noted. It’s not stupid. It makes its living from this stuff. Knowing where small birds are, finding them, hunting, killing and eating them. The clue’s in the name.

It doesn’t limit itself to sparrows, of course. They’re all in danger, from chaffinch to blue tit. And even larger birds are not immune. The bird out of shot in the above photograph, still twitching in the remorseless talons of death, was a wood pigeon.

Often, surprise is the key. There you are at the feeder, just like any other Tuesday, chatting shit and throwing food on the ground, going about your usual busi—

WHOOMPH

The silence in the aftermath of a sparrowhawk strike, feeders rocking gently, feathers swirling in the air, the small birds scattered to safe places.

All except one.

Steve? Steve?

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Reed Bunting

I have several field guides. Because just one simply isn’t enough.

There’s a comfort to a well-compiled field guide, a feeling that you are in good hands. Knowledgeable people have made this thing, and they’ve devoted care to it, filling it with as much information about each bird as possible, but without overwhelming the reader. Size, shape, colours. Habitat, habits, diet. Where and when and how you might find them. A fundamental resource for anyone interested in birds. All you have to do is learn everything in them and you will never again be bewildered or confused.

Ha.

Life, of course, isn’t anything like that organised. You can study all the plumage variations of a bird, compare it with similar species, note its particular features. You can memorise the beautifully drawn illustrations until recalling them at will is a matter of instinct. But in the field somewhat different conditions prevail. What you want is for the birds to line up in front of you in order of height, each wearing a name badge and sporting helpful arrows to highlight key features. But birds don’t do this, the little shits. Very often they’re completely invisible, the only clue to their presence a shiver of twig, a tremble of shrubbery. If you do see one, they tempt you with a glimpse, a seductive flash of rump, before scarpering into the depths of the hedge.

Looking for that distinctive, off-white supercilium? The pale lores, the dusky tertials, the rusty uppertail coverts? Not a chance. All you’re getting, pal, is an indistinct blur, and you’ll be happy with it if you know what’s good for you.

Inconveniently for the fledgling bird-identifier, a lot of British birds fall into a loose category often defined by a three-letter initialism: LBJ. “Little brown job.”

The field guide I have in front of me lists 298 British bird species. They range from common to vanishingly rare, resident to migrant, big to medium to tiny. And about seventy-five of them, in one plumage or another, can adequately be described as little brown jobs. That’s a lot of brown.

One of those seventy-five is the reed bunting, a bird that enlivens any wetland visit. Always a pleasure, never a chore.

The female is a classic LBJ, all streaks and stripes and variations on brown: umber, cigar, sand, sable, cocoa, russet, taupe, walnut, chocolate, khaki. Fifty shades of brown. My first instinct when I see one is to think “ah, female house sparrow”, and then, almost instantly, “no wait ah yes ok don’t be silly never a sparrow”. The bill’s smaller, the streaking more pronounced, and so on and so forth. My field guide has, the bold italics almost a rebuke, “lesser wing-coverts reddish-brown”.

That’s me told.

Recognising the male is a simpler process, mostly thanks to its distinctive black head and white collar. A cheering sight, whenever I encounter one, with intense small-bird energy and a pleasing habit of disporting itself in full view. In breeding season, it clings to the top of a reed, throws its head back, and gives its cheerful, simple, jangling song with utmost energy and abandon. A fine way to go about life.

All hail the LBJ.