2008 - The Bearded Tit (22 page)

‘I think Danny needs a hobby,’ I had said to Tori.

‘He’s got a several hobbies: smoking, drinking, shagging…’

‘No, that’s his work; he needs something to take his mind off those things; something to help him relax.’

‘He needs a girlfriend,’ said Tori.

‘Ah, that’s the girl’s solution to everything, isn’t it?’ I teased her. ‘You wives don’t like the idea of there being single, rogue males wandering around the jungle. Perhaps you’re worried he’ll lead me astray.’

‘He was definitely a different person when he was with Diana. Much nicer.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘but she broke his heart. That’s the trouble. He’s frightened of being hurt again, you see. He suspects all girls are like her and will end up dumping him.’

‘Mmm,’ said a sceptical Tori. ‘I think that’s his excuse to behave the way he does. He needs company.’

‘He’s got Danny the cat. The only vegetarian cat on the planet.’

‘Yes, but the cat is Diana’s, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that was a horrible irony.’

Diana was the love of Danny’s life. They were together for five years, but you always sensed that her mind and her life were elsewhere. She’d had a couple of flings towards the end and it became obvious the relationship was doomed. About a year before the official split, Danny bought her a cute, fluffy kitten and named it after himself so that if she left him, she’d have to take it with her and always have a reminder of him. When she did leave him, she left the cat as well. But not before she’d trained it to be vegetarian. Something she didn’t manage with Danny.

‘He’s into photography, isn’t he? He was good. He was forever taking photos of Diana,’ she reminded me.

‘Well, he’s still got a lot of gear, but I don’t think he’s done it for ages. It’s hard to hold a camera and light a cigarette at the same time.’

I knew, of course, that birdwatching was never going to be ‘up Danny’s street’, nor would it ‘save’ him from the devil, but it would be a very new and different experience for him.

Oh, and it might stop him telling me I was such a sad anorak if
he
dabbled in it occasionally.

I have always tried to avoid encouraging friends to do things just because I enjoy doing them. I was lobbied for years by people saying things like:

‘You should go skiing, Rory, you’d love it!’ I loved the scenery but that was about it. I loathed the queuing for hours for a chair-lift to go very slowly up a mountain, only to come down it again in thirty seconds. (Oh, and I liked the mugs of hot wine as well.)

‘You should go to a grand prix, Rory, you’d love it!’ Boring. Some very attractive women hanging around in tight leather, though, but not enough to endure the smell of rubber and petrol and the sound of the Doppler effect.

‘You should go to an opera, Rory, you’d love it!’ Er…no comment.

‘What’s so great about birdwatching, then, Rory?’

Er, nothing’s great about it. I like doing it occasionally; that’s all.

To be honest, I had little hope and less expectation of ever getting Danny to the woods, hills, moors or rivers with a pair of binoculars, and that was fine, but something I had said about birds one time had clearly stuck in his mind. The next time I met him he was visibly excited. He could hardly hold his fag still to light it.

‘Mate, you won’t believe this. I’ve just seen a bird. It was amazing, mate. I couldn’t wait to tell you!’

‘What sort of bird?’

‘Oh, mate, it was a…er…a bird. A dicky bird!’

‘A dicky bird?’

‘Yeah, a little…er…tweety-tweet dicky bird!’

‘Can you describe it?’

‘Well, this is the thing, it was incredible. Such markings and colours. Probably quite rare. I’ve never seen anything like it before, I know that, hand on heart, mate.’

‘Go on.’

‘Little. Really small. I mean, mate, it was a fucking cute little tweety thing.’

‘Colours?’

‘I’ve written everything down here, look.’

He produced a torn piece of cardboard, which had once housed twenty Silk Cut, and on it was a drawing and some writing. It was actually quite good. Danny had made some detailed and comprehensive notes. More than I’d ever done before or since. I read it.

‘Dicky bird. Tiny. In bush by dustbin. Yellow tummy. Blue head. White side of head. Black eye-liner. Blue bonce. Greeny-blue back and wings. Blue tail.’

That was very good. It was a textbook piece of fieldwork, albeit no field was involved as such. Danny had done it all from the comfort of armchair, fag and can of London Pride. But it was well described.

Danny had seen his first blue tit.

‘I can’t believe I’ve never seen one before! Are they rare?’

‘No, very common. One of our commonest birds, in fact.’

‘So why have they been hiding from me?’

Well, Danny, in a way you’ve been hiding from them. But this one wasn’t the first one he’d seen, literally, with his eyes. This one was the first one he’d seen with his brain, his heart. And now he knew it was called a blue tit, and from then on he would see them all the time and become joined to a new bit of the planet. As the lovely JJ had said all those years ago, the name connects you to something, and to others who also know the name. You begin to share the world because of the name. I wouldn’t lumber Danny with these musings just yet.

A blue tit is a great start.

Par us cacruleus
could wait as well.

W
e were up again at the crack of lunchtime and were back in the bar of the Black Swan to have a restorative pint of orange juice and fizzy water. There are many unwritten rules of birdwatching and I think our late night with the Rooski had broken several of them. Certainly our absence from the reserve at six in the morning would have been noted by the Watcher in the sky. But, hey, we were just beginners.

A useful and interesting discovery made that lunchtime was that the gents was a good place to pick up twitching titbits.

I was sitting there in a cubicle eavesdropping on the urinal conversations when I heard one bloke say to another, ‘Great morning. I’m going back late afternoon to see if I can see that yellow-browed warbler again.’

‘Really?’ his co-pisser said non-committally.

‘You see it, did you?’

‘Er…no. ‘Fraid not.’

I was pleased to hear that not only was there a yellow-browed warbler, whatever that was, on the loose, but also that it was quite respectable, in bird circles, to twitch in the late afternoon. Tori was very keen to see some new things, though I didn’t think we could top the morning’s marsh harrier. I was at the bar when a friendly beard nodded and asked, ‘How’s it going? Your first time, the Russian tells me.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Have a good morning?’

‘Marsh harrier and shag,’ I answered.

‘Not bad. Plenty more out there today.’

‘Yes, I know. Going back later on this afternoon.’ I paused; should I or shouldn’t I? Oh what the hell, let’s give it a go. ‘I haven’t seen the yellow-browed warbler yet.’

He turned to face me and then let out a disparaging snort.

‘Someone in the bog just told me he’d seen a yellow-browed warbler. He’s a well-known bullshitter. He’s talking bollocks. It was probably a willow warbler.’

‘Ha!’ I nodded. ‘Just what I thought!’

Though I was secretly excited. I had never seen a willow warbler before either.

The Titchwell Marsh reserve is one of the best of its kind. We got there around four o’clock. The car park was packed, which I found rather alarming. In a few of the cars, couples munched sandwiches and drank tea from Thermos flasks. It could have been my guilt, but they seemed to eye us with suspicion, if not scorn. No, there was definitely a hint of ‘oh, they’ve finally made it out of bed, then!’ in their perusal of us.

There is a very good shop and visitors’ centre before the path on to the marshes.

By the exit of the shop there is a book in which you are invited to list what you’ve seen. This was going to be a great help. We could make a note of what others had seen and try to fit any unknown bird to the name.

And what a lot of unknowns there were: scaup, scoter, purple sandpiper, whimbrel, glaucous gull, Kentish plover, smew and merganser. I’d never heard of any of these. They must have been on the black-and-white pages of the
Observer’s Book of Birds
.

‘What’s a scoter?’ I asked Tori.

‘I’ve no idea. Ask one of this lot.’

I was too worried about being scoffed at to ask a question like that to one of the many experts milling around the shop looking at telescope upgrades.

‘A scoter?’ I imagined they’d say. ‘Don’t you know what a scoter is? You ignoramus! What are you doing here if you don’t know what a scoter is?’ I was in the mood for avoiding humiliation when Tori made a unilateral decision and grabbed a passing twitcher to ask.

‘Excuse me, what’s a scoter?’ The man couldn’t have been more charming.

‘A scoter. Oh, it’s a black sea-duck…er, that’s about it, really. There’s the common one, very black, and a dark greyish one called a velvet scoter. There’s quite a few out there today actually. Why don’t you come up to the beach with me and I’ll show you?’

Not so fast, mister! I thought to myself. You’re not taking my missus up the shingle to show her a velvet scoter.

‘He was quite good looking,’ she later informed me. ‘And charming!’

‘Don’t fall for that,’ I enlightened her. ‘You’re a good-looking woman. Just coz he’s a birdwatcher doesn’t mean he stops being a bloke.’ Though, I confess, I hadn’t thought that the issue of eye-candy would crop up on a birdwatching trip in the Norfolk marshes.

Behind the visitors’ centre at Titchwell is a row of well-stocked bkd-feeders. And what a lot of bkds. I’d never seen such a collection in so small an area. Sparrow, chaffinch, goldfinch, greenfinch, blue tit, great tit, coal tit, wren, dunnock and, for Tori and me…(drum roll)…two new species!

Now that was gratifying. We hadn’t really started our walk and already we could welcome a couple of new boys to the list. It must be admitted, though, that we probably would not have noticed them had it not been for a keen father talking his son through the visitors to the feeder.

‘And look, Raymond. You see the chaffinch.’

‘I think so,’ said Raymond, who was clearly bored rigid and whose binoculars weren’t quite in line with his eyes. Or any of his face, for that matter.

‘Yes, you do. You know the chaffinch, Raymond, it’s the one we call the pink bird. Well, look at that one next to it. The one that looks like an off-coloured chaffinch…’

I was looking at the same bird. I certainly had it down as an off-coloured chaffinch.

‘…well, that’s a brambling, Raymond.’

Is it? Bugger me, so it is. I’ve never seen one of those. Tori nudged me and whispered, ‘That’s a brambling!’

‘So I hear. Fab! That’s a first for me.’

‘Me too.’

Raymond’s dad then, in a rather neighbourly way, turned his attention, and his son’s, and ours, to the little greeny, black and yellow bird that Tori and I were perfectly prepared to pass over and dismiss as a baby greenfinch, or possibly a mutant adult. ‘Look, Raymond, you see that one that looks like a little, streaky greenfinch?’

Yeah, that’s not a bad description.

‘…well, that’s a siskin!’

Tori and I looked at each other with genuine excitement. A siskin. A little, streaky greenfinch. Write that down in the list of firsts.

This was turning out to be
fun
.

But for the headache.

I
t was the first time I’d seen a brambling. Or a siskin, in fact. Two very different but very lovely types of finch. If you want to see a siskin in a hurry you need to go to the RSPB headquarters at Sandy in Bedfordshire in the winter and look at the feeders there. There are hundreds of them.

I love finches.

They’re easy starters for new birdwatchers. All finches are roughly the same size and shape but they are generally very nicely coloured. And they don’t mind mixing with each other so you can see goldfinches, greenfinches, chaffinches, bramblings, linnets and siskins all in the same place. This would be an excellent sight for the beginner and an eye-opener for Danny-like people who think that colourful birds in Britain must be escapees from a zoo.

The brambling, an orangey, northern version of the chaffinch, is a charming bird to see. A welcome change from the abundant chaffinch but not too dissimilar to be frightening. It comes with the binomial
Fringilla. montifringilla
, meaning ‘finch of the hills finch’. Its English name means something like ‘little creature from the brambles’.

And what a pretty little bird the siskin is! The sweet name for this canary-like bird is apparently an eastern European word, for a canary-like bird, which has come into English via Dutch and German. Its old name was the ‘aberdevine’, which sounds suspiciously Scottish to me, or possibly even Welsh, so I’m sticking with ‘siskin’. Its ‘brainy’ name is
Carduelisspinus. Spinusno
doubt refers to the spiky trees of its habitat—conifers and the like—though
spinusis
the Latin for the blackthorn (or sloe), and actually the bird is mainly partial to alders and birch.
Carduelis
comes eventually from the Latin for ‘thistle’ (
carduus
), which gives us, among other things,
Carduelis carduelis
—the thistle finch, or goldfinch as we call it. Now there’s a wonderful bird. If you ever get a close-up look at a goldfinch, I guarantee you will want to take up birdwatching.

Then there is the
Carduelis chloris
, the greenfinch—from the Greek
chloros
, meaning ‘light-green’, the colour of a certain deadly poisonous gas. (Atomic N°17, if you’re revising GCSE chemistry.) You cannot argue with the word ‘greenfinch’. It’s a finch and it’s green, which I think is all you can reasonably expect from a bird with a name like that. But as a striking extra they have bright yellow flashes on their wings and tails. The beak is noticeably larger and heftier than that of other finches, a perfect tool for this inveterate seed-eater. The greenfinch is a gift for someone like me who is not very good at recognizing the sounds of birds, especially when, in spring and early summer, it utters its unique sound: a sleepy, decaying wheeze. I think the word is ‘dzzzweeooo’ or possibly ‘zweeooooo’, but spelling birdsongs has also never been a strong point of mine. But I assure you that it is very rewarding to be able to identify a bird, categorically, from its song, and this one is easy. Once you recognize the descending droning buzz of the greenfinch, you will hear them everywhere. Impress your friends.