It could have been a scene from Scandinavia: the silver birch and the rusting bracken, thick dark mud and lashing hail. It lasted for two skin stinging minutes. The wood thinned out. Bracken gave way to heather, the hail to the numbing wind, and the path to a bridleway of finest sludgey mud, studded with white ice. Half a kilometre over the heath to a clump of pines where the Parrot Crossbills are and the clouds break up; the last hour or so of sunlight appearing over the distant pines. All around was heather, oak, pine and birch; damp and glittering in the light. It is tempting to lose yourself in this landscape that feels so old and right and proper. 

It is not Scandinavia. Not even Scotland. It is Nottinghamshire.

Behind the pines on the horizon the black edge of a slag heap can be seen. The product of a hundred or so years of removing useful things from the earth and putting it back somewhere else. The map is ridden with names that tell my dad - Nottinghamshire lad - of the old pits and collieries that were shut as he grew up. They're just names on a map to me. Further back, and the animals that would've kept this area open and unwooded have been replaced by conservationists, counter intuitively pulling out trees in the name of nature. It's in the name: Budby Common. Ignore the fences passed on the way here and it still appears like the common lands of a John Clare poem, though lacking in its people.
Curious landscape paradox. It is deeply coloured by human hand yet it looks and feels untouched.

Parrot Crossbills. Large red finches from Scandinavia, they are rarities that turn up on the back of a poor pine seed crop in the Arctic taiga, in search of food. I had tried and failed to see them elsewhere three times this winter. The itinerant nature that brings them here also makes them hard to catch up with. This time felt luckier. A birder we had met on the way here had successfully seen them and gave us directions to the pines on this heath.

We were not lucky. Damp and cold, we saw Common Buzzards shrieking over the woods and Jays flash exotically against the sky, but nothing particularly out of a birder's idea of the ordinary. It's only on the long dark train ride home that I begin to wonder why we do it. Why I, in particular, turn my nose up at the idea of twitching, but continually return to places where Parrot Crossbills have been seen and will be seen by seemingly everybody but me. I don’t keep doing it for the dubious honour of being Britain’s unluckiest birder.

I’ve been birding for eight years to general apathy from friends and occasional hostility from others. But oddly there’s been a recent flourishing of interest from several people, mostly focusing on why we do it, why we ‘just look at them?’. It’s a question that opens a gap of mutual incomprehensibility. They can’t understand the interest, and I can’t understand why they’re not. I have to explain my hobby and the seeming irrationality of it.

I’ve always been interested in animals, since childhood visits to the zoo, watching birds on the garden feeders and being sat in front of the Lion King and Free Willy, my favourite films as a kid. I’ve been a fisherman - fly and coarse - but thankfully never a hunter. I found watching wild animals to be the best route to knowing and to experiencing nature with as minimal an impact as possible. I would feel the thrill of catching a fish between the waits that seemed like they would never end. I would feel conflicted about hauling it on to land, looking at it, then putting it back. Better to have never taken it out in the first place? I recognise that need though, the drive that makes the fisherman spend days on the lakeside, waiting for the elusive fish bite. I don’t know why millions of people will watch Attenborough documentaries, but never try to seek out nature for themselves, unmediated and with the intimacy of real experience.

I will keep trying to get to know nature. Nature may be amorphous and defies definition at every attempt, but for me that’s part of the attraction. It is at once full of things to learn and full of things that are unknowable. It takes me to silent places and a horizon without houses, but lets me hear the beating of my heart, and hold conversations with the most interesting people.

The box-ticking, blinkered, crowd mentality of twitching is something I find very distasteful, but with my attempted twitches of Parrot Crossbills it’s taken me to new places, on the Essex coast and in my own home county. It’s shown me the loveliest part of Nottinghamshire.

All without the actual birds.

All in the act of just looking.

Slow, Steady

If a pan-list is a survey of the wildlife that I can find then it doubles up as a survey of my natural history knowledge, and it didn’t take long to find the edges of that. All it took was a single white flower. My knowledge with wildflowers is appalling, but this is winter; it’s small, white, and sort of resembles an Umbellifer, but bunched into a ball instead of spread out on a flat circle. I took a couple of photos and moved on. How hard could it be? Very, apparently. I flicked through my copy of Harrap’s Wild Flowers several times and couldn’t even find a resemblance, let alone an exact match. This feels like beginning again without a teacher. Exciting to think about but frustrating in practice.

If a pan-list emphasises the limits of what I know, then it celebrates what I do. I know it feels as though it has rained for the last forty days and forty nights. And after that? Sun. A sky the colour of a Caribbean sea and Song Thrushes singing from a bare brown tree, bathed in the winter sunshine. I know I didn’t feel the cold either, despite being ankle deep in a puddle and the shards of ice not yet thawed out from over night. It wouldn’t take long. After all that rain it doesn’t feel as if the life has been washed out, but renewed. The grass is verdant green, and the gorse is flecked with its first yellow flowers. And the birds carry on singing.

I know I achieved the zen of the birder too. In the absence of a genuine solitude, it’s the next best thing. In one of the corners of the park, Redwings and Blackbirds flocked. Imperceptibly I stopped looking about me, and a quiet, calm concentration descended. Thought evaporated and movement became by instinct, and the tracking of the flocks of thrushes took on a rhythmical meditative quality. I glance up out of instinct and my eyes cross the flight path of a Great Spotted Woodpecker, then the next time, a Sparrowhawk. Both were new for the list.

I know I miss that state when the path takes me away from the birds and towards the eastern end of the Scrubs. The bare end, of football pitches and a small gull flock that would be to dogs what catnip is to cats, if only they could catch it. They never do. The trees here line the edges between the grass and the road. It feels bleaker and more lifeless, colder and windier. I don’t enjoy this end. The birder zen evaporates and the simple pleasures found at the other end, of three species of thrush in one tree, aren’t to be found.

I don’t mind, particularly, The urban naturalist knows you take those pleasures where you can and hold on to them as you tramp down the cracked paving slabs, past the tube station and back towards home.

15. Robin

16. Song Thrush

17. Dunnock

18. Redwing

19. Hawthorn

20. Goldfinch

21. Great Tit

22. Buddleia

23. Great Spotted Woodpecker

24. Sparrowhawk

25. Wren

26. Gorse

27. to be identified?

Fireworks

After the bang… the whimper of wind and dull percussion of rain. I peak behind the curtains and see grey and roll over. An hour later I’m at the local park being cold spin-washed by the weather, with added hail. The path is a quagmire. Beside me a steady stream of neon-clothed cross-country runners splash past. I am sober and with not even the slightest hint of a hangover. I look up as the eleventh species of the day – a parakeet – flies overhead, all dark against the sky.

I slip my welly off to shake out the dried old mud digging into my sock. 11 pence falls into a puddle instead. In the bush to my left a Blackbird cocks its head at me, quizzically (or so it seemed) before flitting into cover.

New year, new list.

I haven’t listed since I was a teenager, when it was a useful method of working out which of the three or four other teenage birders I talked to were ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than me. I realised the absurdity of this soon enough. I didn’t like the idea of being able to distil the richness of my birding experiences into a spreadsheet of seen and unseen. I didn’t like the way it compelled me to have a hit list of species I shamefully hadn’t seen; or gave me a number with which to judge myself with - and find myself wanting. Giving up the list was one of the best things I have ever done as a birder. Among the other best things: Lepidoptera, Odonata, Orthoptera, etc. Entomology filled in the gaps and gave me new horizons.

And this is where listing reappears. Last year the birders of Wormwood Scrubs cumulatively reached 98 species of birds for the year, a phenomenal achievement for a London park with no standing water and a skyline including the Shard and the London Eye. In the process they turned up such birds as a Common Rosefinch and a Short-eared Owl. I dipped the Rosefinch in the pissing rain on my first visit. It’s still a species I haven’t seen. The Scrubs is in the odd position then of having a proven track record of turning up good birds, but also great potential for turning up more in the most unexpected of ways. I was amazed by the snipe I saw here, I can’t imagine what I’d do if I saw that Short-eared Owl here, let alone that Rosefinch.

But that’s not quite good enough to sustain through the long summer months, of getting up at 6am and traversing it before work. So I plan to do a pan-species yearlist. At the moment it seems to be the perfect motivator, to get out and around the Scrubs and to carry on broadening my entomological knowledge, and those of other taxas. I might not be saying that come September, but we’ll see. My list at the moment is fourteen and I see no rush. At the start of January a year seems a very long time indeed.

1: Starling

2: Feral Pigeon

3: Black-headed Gull

4: Homo sapiens*

5: Canis lupus familiaris**

6: Common Gull

7: Carrion Crow

8: Magpie

9: Blue Tit

10: Long-tailed Tit

11: Ring-necked Parakeet

12: Blackbird

13 Grey Squirrel

*Mark Telfer, aka Mr Panlist, says I can.

** And the rules allow you alien species whose existence is entirely reliant on humans.

Two Suffolks

The Sandlings lie a few miles back from the Suffolk coast. A long strip of heathland on sandy soil they, like the Brecks at the other end of Suffolk, have been ploughed up or planted with pine. But unlike the Brecks, the heather here still clings to more than just the edges. At Tunstall the heather veins with the Scots Pine and birch that run around the main body of the pine plantation. Orange leaves still cling to the birch, and the heather is still dark purple. It’s pretty for the Forestry Commission. But that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. East Suffolk is (to this Suffolk boy at least) the prettiest flat landscape in England.

I’m sure the riders on horses the colour of the pine bark would agree. And the dweller in the cottage surrounded by the wood. The flat-capped gent from the local church bell-ringing guild out for a stroll; and the half of London that bought homes out here to live like Mr and Mrs Andrews.  The other birder? He’s chewing his lip and staring into the tops of the pines. There is no sign of any crossbills, neither the resident Commons or the vagrant Parrot Crossbills, driven here from deep in the Scandinavian forests and found last weekend.

There is little sign of any birdlife at all. Flocks of crows from nearby pig fields fly over; a few Goldcrests slip quietly through the branches of the pines. It’s almost as if behind the façade of prettiness there’s not a lot here.

I stumble across what actually is there by accident. I have a habit from life as an introvert of naturally looking at my feet. Sometimes it comes in handy. Coming past a stand of birch my neck drooped, and amongst the grass and dying bracken I found a Fly Agaric, glowing redder than a Robin. 

It’s the ur-mushroom. Other than those you find in the supermarket, most people of my generation found their first fungi through Super Mario. In that pixelated universe of running and jumping a Fly Agaric-like mushroom will help you power up. In the real world it will make you hallucinate and, I quote, ‘cause sweat-inducing poisoning, stimulating the secretory glands and [induce] symptoms which include profuse salivation and sweating’. A severe case will apparently kill you. But the Fly Agaric is friendly compared to the other species of fungi in its genus, such as the Fool’s Mushroom, the Death’s Cap or the European Destroying Angel.

***

Day two. The west. Crisp winter air and a faded blue sky. The smell of sugar beet colours the air and a slight haze blurs the horizon over the fields. A Green Woodpecker flicks up from the cemetery and flies into the old oak. A Nuthatch calls. The woodpecker laughs, or yaffles in the old dialect. The beet is piled up by the field edges before being moved to the local sugar factory, whose cooling tower dominates the local skyline. Early winter on these roads is characterised by open-topped lorries thundering around the bends, occasionally shedding the odd beet that you can pick up from the verge. The lorries coat the road in a slick of wet mud and oil, and close to home, a dead badger. This is not pretty Suffolk, but a Suffolk, of tractors, lorries, towers on the horizon and a deep dark mud that stains my jeans, that sucks in feet and only begrudgingly spits them back out. This is the Suffolk of my home.

Brighter Later

It was a brighter morning than the last two, less wintry as well. The mud underfoot was soft and the puddles not iced over. An ice blue sky stretched over London, the backdrop to an insipid sunrise and dappled grey clouds. Still winter then. Breath clouded in front of me and everything seemed pale and calm. The cold keeps the dog walkers away, but makes the morning struggle with the dead weight of the duvet one I more often lose than win.

Walking out across the pitches I notice the gulls that roost here are already mostly gone. Only a few remain to be mobbed by the restless crows for any worms their pattering feet bring to the surface. I track one idly in flight. A first winter, it is already agile enough to keep the crows at bay, but maybe they’re not seriously pursuing it. Dull brown feathers are scattered across the wings and body like little autumn leaves. I continue to follow it as it comes back across and morphs from the expected Black-headed Gull into a Common Gull. I’d misjudged the size; and the everyday turns into something different. Not exciting – by coincidence the common in the name also suggests something of its regularity – and not something unexpected either, but something new. I’d never seen one here before. I look around and find an adult perched on the grass too. Crisp white and grey, as if it had been made of snow and shadows.

Maybe transformation was the theme of the walk.

Halfway across the park and looking back over my shoulder. A crow sailed across the sky. As crows have done and will do, it looked dark and angular and uncannily like a bird of prey. It came in across the park, holding my attention when it banked, revealing a pale barred underbody. In an instant I correct myself. Not crow but Peregrine Falcon. It flies into the sunrise but the light is weak and I can still make out the plumage; the black hood and white cheeks and the sheer muscular bulk of its body. It circles around and heads off towards the tall towers of the city.

Transformations. Formerly one of Britain’s rarest birds and inhabitant of the tallest cliffs in the remotest parts; a recently resurgent population has taken them into our cities. The towers make perfect cliffs, with a seemingly endless supply of pigeons. It could be one of London’s, or one from further afield. Peregrine, from peregrinate, was first defined to me as ‘winter wandering’: my dictionary only states ‘wandering’, but the winter part stuck. The idea of winter’s nomadic Peregrine Falcons can’t be moved from my mind.

As it flies off into the sunrise I involuntarily dredge up all the extraordinary facts about this species. But nothing quite compares to the experience of actually seeing it. It transforms the morning from pleasant to something electric. Not so much the spring, but the spark in my step.

A mixed flock of roughly forty Redwings and Fieldfares flew over the tall trees to the north. I wonder what awaits them in Willesden, maybe Wembley or perhaps even Watford? I wonder where they go, and where they roost. I figure I’ll never know and not everything needs extraordinary facts. I stamp off down the pavement to bring life to my numb cold toes. I walk past the tube station against the tide of suits. Nobody makes eye contact with the man with the binoculars, muddy-green coat and cheap wellies.

The Natural Eye

There is an owl glaring down at me as I have a cake with my coffee. Its ear tufts are held in against its head, two bumps deviating from the v-shaped brow that makes up the owl-frown and culminates in the hooked beak, with piercing pale yellow eyes either side. The dull brown plumage is delicately notched light and dark and fades out in drips of paint down to the edge of the paper. It’s the most arresting image in the exhibition. And then you realise it was painted by a teenager*.

The Natural Eye is the Society of Wildlife Artists’ annual exhibition in the Mall Galleries, London. It is the one week in the year when a scrap steel Giraffe towers over a limestone Ptarmigan within sight of Buckingham Palace. It’s an unusual location. Wildlife art exists in an unhappy hinterland between commercial twee and acceptance by mainstream contemporary art galleries, particularly when compared to landscapes or portraiture. It strikes me that nature writers such as Mark Cocker, Richard Mabey et al, never have this problem as being accepted as a valid voice in contemporary literature. Ted Hughes, poet of crows, foxes and hawks (amongst other things) became poet laureate, for example. But with a mayfly-like lifespan, this gallery in the heart of London throngs with the life and the rowdy, colourful chaos of nature.

After fifty years of the SWLA how is wildlife art looking? And what is the purpose of wildlife art?

Colourful. That, at least, is the impression on first glance of walls stuffed with paintings, woodcuts, linoprints and plinths of sculptures. And birdy: if it was renamed the Society for Bird Art it seems that not many of its members would complain. In Nick Derry’s art the two come together joyously. His paintings are riots of colour: Red Kites on purple paper; a Red-backed Shrike with a well-butchered hawker; Blue-headed Wagtails feeding amongst flowers, Swallows and a Greenshank. There is a vernal joy here that the artist sees and communicates in loose brushstrokes with all the life and energy of the birds themselves. That for me is the purpose of wildlife art: communicating the essence, the nature of nature.

The very best art here does that, and the best thing about the exhibition is its presentation of so many different ways of seeing animals. Darren Woodhead finds that nature through minimalism. Watercolours, painted in the field on a white background and mostly consisting of just a tree and a bird; they tell of windblown stories of migration, fleeting moments and occurrences on the Lothian coast. Harriet Mead performs a kind of alchemy in turning lifeless and rusty scrap steel into sculptures of hares, a heron, a giraffe. I have no idea how its possible to turn callipers into feathers. Like I said, some kind of alchemy. All these works are touched by abstraction. The natural eye at its best sees beyond what is merely present and invests it with something meaningful. The worst works here don’t do this. It feels unfair to criticise any in particular but a reliance on the habitual ways of seeing things, nothing beneath the surface prettiness that shackles a slightly disappointing amount of work on show.

Oddly there is a lack of work with an obvious conservation or cultural element to it. Very little of the art on display places an animal into a human or human altered landscape, which is something I can’t quite explain. Is there a fear of aestheticisng the ‘unnatural’? I found three exceptions. Carry Akroyd’s Big Turns and Little Terns finds an echo in the white angular wings of a foreground flock of terns and the blades of a distant wind farm. It is a scene familiar to any Norfolk birder and I like how it makes the connections in the scene, mercifully without picking a side. Bruce Pearson should need no introduction and his work from time spent on South Atlantic trawlers with the BirdLife albatross protection team is extraordinary: beautiful and timely.  Only one has made it into the exhibition but with fisherman, fish and bird as its subject, he provides more depth and balance than typically found in coverage of conservation issues.

The final exception is the likeliest to be hung as part of a collection of contemporary art. A Blush by Fran Giffard is a series of diary pages with exotic birds drawn in graphite and painted in aquarelle. Exotic birds perch on top of lists and numbers, notes to self and accounts of the day. This is how birds are for me. How they decorate the edges of the daily routine, bring a touch of wonder to the mundane, every day.

For a fiftieth birthday snapshot of the work of its members, The Natural Eye is eclectic, but the hits in this exhibition far outweigh the misses and I left with my head full of ideas and the urge to pick up a pen and draw for the first time in years. I think that counts as a success.

The Natural Eye is on at the Mall Galleries until the 10th of November. Entry is £3.

*Unforgivably I forgot to write down their name. It was the winning image in the 13-19 year old age category.

Do You Remember The First Time?

‘…I can’t remember a worse time'

Just a standard Saturday night. Several crates of ale and ten friends round. Pre-drinks until late then a tube to the cheesiest club in Oxford Circus. Ten quid entry fee; a fiver for a drink. Bright lights and bad music and the night bus back at four in the morning. Emerging at ten and staggering with the pallor of the freshly dead into the kitchen, frying a small farm’s worth of pig for bacon butties and remembering the night that nobody needed reminding of. Just a typical Saturday night and Sunday morning for the flatmates.

I went moth trapping instead.

It’s a hard activity to explain to those whose biophilia extends only to their own species. Most people can understand birds and butterflies. Dragonflies cause mild surprise. Moths? Scepticism, questions, outright concern. Not that I haven’t been sceptical in the past: I was not particularly enamoured by the small brown things that flew in through my window to land by my lightbulb and were repatriated after a disorientating, mind-boggling flick through the field guide. The first time you pick up a field guide and flick through is normally a dizzying, exciting feeling. With the moth guide… 1000 small creatures that generally lack distinguishing features. It was not the most promising of starts to not the most accessible branch of natural history.

Moving to the city started it. I began to look down as well as up. The borders between the branches of natural history dissolved: a birder metamorphosing into amateur naturalist. I caught myself looking at plants, scrabbling around in dirt photographing bugs and reading E.O. Wilson; which was one of the reasons why I found myself with a variety of bright lights, egg cartons and plastic contraptions in the passenger seat of Fiona Barclay’s car, stationary in traffic and watching the last hour of light slipping away from the day.

The day: as grey as the city, stuffy as usual and mild for October. This was apparently quite promising. The destination: Perivale Woods, a private nature reserve just by Central Line, surrounded by a fence and bordered by a canal, a railway track and the suburbs. Dusk had descended by the time we’d met up with David Howdon, moth expert, at the wood. In the growing darkness I unwound extension cables and laid them as a trail through the wood for one moth trap, lugged a car battery around as power for another and watched as five sheets of plywood and two bits of Perspex morphed into the third moth trap. Bright lights above containers filled with egg boxes was not our only method: we were also sugaring for moths, which involved painting a thick and sickly smelling solution of beer, sugar, treacle and amyl acetate on the same oaks, in the same places, once a month.

A cup of tea later and grey dusk gave way to an orange night, a sprinkling of weak stars and a full moon hanging just above the trees. We headed back out with torches down the black and muddy path. Trees in the torch beam take on a skeletal pale appearance and falling leaves appear like excitingly large moths. Spiders’ webs just don’t appear at all until too late. I was walking behind Fiona and David because I didn’t know the way, excitedly peering over their shoulders when something was found. A couple of Chestnuts (a small, dull brown moth with two dark spots) and a Red-lined Quaker (a small dull brown moth with two dark spots) were discovered, along with some Southern Oak Bush-crickets were found on the sugar. A tiny-winged carnivorous katydid that made its way here apparently via the channel tunnel, this bush-cricket was the most unusual thing we found on our dusk walk. With three torches trained on it, I attempted to take a photo...

The morning after: 7am, the Westway was empty and the rain torrential in places. Places such as between my house and the carpark where I was being picked up. In daylight Perivale Wood appears even stranger. A pristine slice of rural England hiding behind houses. I normally disapprove of private nature reserves – nature is free and should be available for everyone – but I’m willing to turn a blind eye here. This wood is pristine. Semi-ancient oaks, dense undergrowth and the only litter was one can of strong lager thrown over a fence from the canal towpath. In a city such as London it’s warming to know that we can still give nature a place mostly free from human disturbance, and that an old wood can remain an old wood without having a supermarket dumped on top.

In the traps? Numerous Barred Sallows, in the attractive pink and yellows of an autumn leaf. Several Red-green Carpets, like bewitched and trembling lichen. Chestnuts, everywhere, like flakes of wood, and a single Silver Y: a moth passing itself off as a well-marked piece of bark. Harvestman spiders with legs like tripwires and a selection of mystifying flies, the likes of which I have never seen before, and have no idea where to begin deciphering their identification. And one more Red-lined Quaker, that sat briefly on the fence post for a photograph, before flying off as an intense thunderstorm broke overhead.

Mothing is eccentric. Mothing is an intellectual challenge. Mothing is several thousand more living things that are in the process of entering my life. Several thousand attractive, misunderstood and under appreciated creatures. I’ll take that over quizzical looks cast by friends.