I am not a bird watcher; I do not twitch. I look at birds (how can one not). I’d cross the road to see a beautiful example, but I would not list bird-watching amongst my hobbies.
Having stated that I don’t go twitching, I do acknowledge that my appreciation of a species of bird is perhaps a little in step with its rarity. My heart beats a little faster for the green woodpecker in my garden, than it does for the blackbird. I will willingly watch either, or any of a variety of their cousins if I am not occupied. One of the pleasures of my house is a kitchen sink that gazes down the back garden, affording a moving nature spectacle while I stand and my hands do the washing up and my mind drifts to contemplate the wilderness - I am not a gardener - but that is another story.
Unkempt garden notwithstanding, I live in a park; a National one. My environment then is rich with a diversity of birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, mites, flowers, shrubs, trees, fungi… I walk this precious zone, mentally ticking off the things that make it special, excited to find the few rarities that define its uniqueness: the wild gladioli, the rare orchids and butterflies.
There are species here I am yet to see. I have not, as an example, yet seen a purple emperor butterfly, though they fly in the North of The Forest, in well documented locations. There are uncommon birds: the shrike, the nightjar, the Dartford Warbler. I’ve never knowingly seen a shrike, nor a nightjar, though this year I heard the chirring of a nightjar and found it as strange and beautiful as the recordings suggest. In all my years here, until this one, I imagined I had seen a Dartford Warbler on, maybe, three occasions. I could not be sure, identifying unknown birds is frequently just a matter of eliminating all of the known alternatives and plugging for the least likely remainder.
Out on one of my frequent walks, a month ago, I was just exiting a patch of dense, tall gorse, into a more open area, not of heath, but heather and light scrub, when I saw a bird that could only be a Dartford Warbler. I had no optics on me; no binoculars, and of course, no camera. Only twenty feet away, furtive, dark, prominent eye-ring, slight crest; its most obvious feature: a long dark tail, cocked like a wren’s. I stood, I watched, noting its patterns of foraging, its four-dimensional motif. Amongst the young gorse stems and birch seedlings, I saw four matching birds, all feeding, occasionally making contact sounds. They moved away after ten minutes, leaving me… ? Thrilled, exhilarated? I tried to commit the sounds to memory, store the images, savour the moment.
Over the following four days I returned to the same spot, at various times of the day, carrying a camera. I didn’t manage to repeat the experience of course. I arrived one day to the heavy flapping of a buzzard I disturbed from a sapling within the scrub, no birds that day, except the laughing overflight of goldfinches. I approached another day, with the sun behind me, through the closed car-park, to find a couple on the cider, shouting about their social media, waving phones at each other. I tried an early morning, dew still on the spiderwebs, musty smell of warming bracken. Nothing.
Nothing, around here though, is very rich. On these sorties I saw plenty: a damp discarded snakeskin, deer, parasitoidal wasps, butterflies (do not befriend the butterflies), the secretive herbs that flower on browsed heathlands and, while we’re on the subject of birds: a young cuckoo. I enjoyed these walks, even the silent stands, scanning for barely familiar wings.
A week later, I was beginning to feel like the drunk in the story, who is looking for his keys under a lamppost, because he cannot see to find them anywhere else. Finally, standing near that same spot, across the width of the area of scrub, and occasionally visiting the taller gorse there, I saw a pair of warblers. This time I had a camera, though the range was too far for successful photography. As I did the first time, I stood and watched, drinking in impressions, learning what real bird-watchers endearingly call the bird’s jizz.
Eventually, after the birds moved on, so did I, crossing into the next valley, a popular spot with horse riders and dog walkers. Again I walked pony trails through tall gorse, emerged to low scrub, there to find more Dartford Warblers. A family, at least three individuals. The same group, or new? I asked myself, enjoying the scene, surprised that the birds seemed unperturbed by the relative proximity of people. This little flock flew into taller gorse and I lost them, so I set out to continue my walk, along the length of the valley, taking with me that warm feeling of accomplishment.
As I slowly descended, following a grassy track bordered by rough patches of heath and light scrub, I watched the common stonechats flitting between the terminal spikes of gorse; listened to their chat-chat calls. These charismatic birds are ubiquitous in this landscape; familiarity does not dull their strident calls, their bright colours. This time of year they skulk more so than in the spring, but they are easy to spot, travelling and feeding in family groups. My recently tuned ears detected a different song mixed in.
It must be a common mistake, for people who do not watch birds, to assume the members of a flock belong to the same species. I know mixed flocks often pass through my garden, but with the identification cues attenuated by distance, I had come to expect a flock, led by easily identified stonechats to be a homogeneous group. Using the power of my camera lens I could see that this was not always, or indeed generally, the case. Quite often, a brace of chats would pull a few aliens in their wake; Dartford aliens. On that day I counted 9 Dartford Warblers. This bird I had previously taken to be rare, it turns out, is not.
I understand the difference between locally and nationally rare. Finding out that these birds are not locally rare, and once seen clearly, so easy to identify, leaves me feeling a bit foolish. Foolish or not, I’m happy to be able to visit them, just a couple of miles from home; they are quite stunning. Now I have to learn the rest of the warblers, before I make the same mistake again.
