[F911]From Young To Old

My first experience of intentional birdwatching took place in Richmond Great Park. The time;
1986, the occasion; one of the first dates with my (now) girlfriend. There I was, all
dressed up and ready to knock her out with my charm, memory plays strange tricks as you get
older and there she was, luring me into the undergrowth of the local park, hissing to me to
keep my head down. No, it wasn't this bird's feathers she was after observing, but a large
Green woodpecker that she had spotted. It must have been love on my part because, although I
don't remember seeing the flash of emerald, I do remember getting my trendy new boots
covered in mud.
That was the first of many times that I have shared the joys of avian
observation with my spouse. She had been a committed twitcher from an early age. As a Girl,
a family friend had dragged her along to many birdwatching expeditions, from sighting a
large wader (a ruff) on a one time sewage farm, soon to become the fifth terminal at
Heathrow, to happy weekends spent observing the many migrants arriving on the Norfolk coast
from Europe. Birdwatching is one nature pursuit that just about anybody can get something
out of, and most of us have 'twitched' at some time in our lives. What child hasn't fed the
ducks, or pigeons? That's the good thing about birds. They are so accessible. You can see
them almost everywhere at any time of the day. And you can hear their beautiful songs.
Blackbirds and nightingales have been immortalised in song and verse. The ubiquitous gull
can be heard far inland; pigeons coo vociferously in our city centres; rooks squawk as they
arrive at their evening roosts and starlings chatter as they gather in flocks on our roofs,
telegraph wires and urban trees. No other wild animal group is so easy to see and admire.
The skill of flying, and therefore the ability to get out of the way if needs must, has been
a boon for the latent birdwatcher in all of us.
That birdwatching foray with my girlfriend to
be was the first of many enjoyable observations of our feathered friends. Some I will never
forget. Standing on top of the Preseli hills in Wales and listening to the liquid bubbling
coming from the throats of hundreds of curlews in the gathering dusk of the evening, sadly
not a common occurrence nowadays. Or that magic afternoon, cycling along a country road with
my oldest friend and counting 32 larks as they rose skywards from the fields either side of
us. Another sight, rarer now than it used to be, was the spectacle of thousands of starlings
darkening the sky and turning as if they were one giant Bird whooshing around the Sky above
the field next to our first home. We've watched puffins and guillemots on Skomer island off
the coast of West Wales and along the seashore we have seen countless flocks of all sorts of
waders. And how to describe the thrill of seeing two peregrine falcons screeching over a
deceased pigeon that they were devouring at the base of a sea cliff, or watching red kites
circling lazily in the thermals above the hills of mid Wales. I'm so glad I've seen at least
one dipper incongruously running along a stream bed, underwater feeding. Another stream
frequenter, the heron, can also be sighted, perched in prehistoric stance, in the middle of
a field. What is it doing? I am assured by that fount of all bird knowledge, my girlfriend,
that it's on the lookout for a tasty mole. Sometimes, if we went out on a Summer night, we
would be lucky enough to catch sight of a Little Owl, staring down at us from his high perch
on a telegraph pole. We called one of our houses Hafod Y Wennol, Welsh for summer house of
the swallows, because, in it's previous life as a cow parlour, the swallows had swooped in
and made their little mud nests on it's walls. We felt so guilty at evicting them from their
home, especially after such a long and perilous journey from their Winter habitat somewhere
in Africa. But swallow poo is prolific and not to be tolerated indoors and they did have a
garage and another barn to breed in. For many years they were a significant part of our
summer, the sighting of the first arrival was always noted. Their twittering and swooping
round the farmyard a never ending source of enjoyment, their gathering on the telephone wire
and subsequent departure a gloomy time, heralding as it did the approaching winter.
At our
next home, a tall Edwardian town house, we had the amazing luck to be the Summer residence
to a flock of swifts, whose ariel acrobatics as they screamed past our windows would have
put the Red Devils Aircraft display team to shame. We never tired of watching as they
swooped and dived after insects, banking at the last second when it seemed they must collide
with the house wall. This was much better than television!
We have been lucky enough to live
in a beautiful part of the country where birdlife is prolific and constant. But town
dwellers have opportunities too. In any urban garden a wide variety of town birds can be
seen, especially with a little bit of encouragement. Introduce a nut feeder and a bird table
and, abracadabra, in an amazingly short space of time there will be blue tits, robins,
blackbirds, sparrows and various finches. If you're lucky there might be the odd Nuthatch.
The tiny Wren might hop about underneath, picking up any titbits and if they all suddenly
scatter for no apparent reason, look up to the skies and search for the shape of a
Sparrowhawk, on the lookout for any unwary prey.
Yes, Bird watching is something that you
can do all through your life, from a window or outdoors. Introduce your children to this
fascinating and colourful world and they will have a pleasure that will last a lifetime.
It's free entertainment and an excellent grounding in learning how to appreciate the
wonderful natural world around us.