The Lesser Spotted

Rosy dawn.

5:45.

Half remembered motions of getting up and dressed and heading to the tube and running for the doors and jumping on and realising it was the wrong train. Fifteen minute delay. The sun is up and burning through the haze when I eventually arrive. I shovel dry cereal from the packet into my mouth as I walk through suburban streets, hoping no one would see me.

Chiffchaffs sing and the dew in the grass sparkles. Old oaks emerge from the dissipating haze, raking at the jet contrails that scar the sky even at this time. The birdsong grew stronger: Blackbirds and Robins mostly, and other common species shading in. The sharp kicking call of a Great Spotted Woodpecker raised excitement, the sharp shriek of a parakeet took me by surprise. I'd forgotten I was in London. I was searching for Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers, a species that is quickly and worryingly disappearing throughout England but which remains in some of London’s wooded edges. It remains a secret though: I was told about this wood on the condition that I would tell no one else.

Magpies loitered like bored teenagers. Cackling and chasing each other, as if waiting for something, anything to happen. I loitered with them for two hours in that small wood between houses, quietly seeking out calling birds, unwilling to admit defeat until the sun rose above the canopy and the paths filled with dog walkers and the city roared into another sunny Saturday.

I may not have found what I was looking for in the wood, but I found something else. I found solitude in the city.

The single most exhausting thing about London is the lack of solitude. I can handle the hours I work and the hours I socialise but for a person predisposed to be out of the house; to be alone in some quiet place is the missing link. This is not a city built for introverts, for people like me who find chaos sapping and calm restorative. To be in the woods with the rising sun and surrounded by birds, not people, is the greatest simple pleasure I know.

I have many excuses.

Pardon? I’m half deaf you see. Discovered Led Zeppelin too young. And I’m more of a visual person anyway. It’s sort of like I'm audio-dyslexic or something — the melody never sticks but the words do.

And so on.

Birds don’t sing with subtitles and I struggle to remember the identifying features of any birdsong for more than about five minutes. I’m deeply envious of the birders with a xeno-canto of the mind, as I can just about manage to hold twenty five species or so in my head at any time. For me there’s a reason why birder is a contraction of birdwatcher and not bird-listener. And yet…

March baked. The trees shook through the haze over heath. A Stonechat perched in a stunted Silver Birch, not quite in the brightest orange and black of its breeding plumage. Buzzards spiral high into the wind, surveying their territory over the Surrey commons; a fragment of the old English landscape. In the bones of a tree a lark sat. Not your typical lark. Through the haze of the telescope I could make out the salient details: black and white coverts on the edge of the wing interrupting the dull brown plumage, and a longer bolder stripe over the eye. A Woodlark. It is a classic boring bird. Important too: only 3000 or so pairs left breeding on the southern and eastern heathlands. And then it started to sing.

Photo by Stephen Menzie

'Teevo cheevo cheevio chee'

Initially tremulous - as if still warming up for the spring ahead - notes shaded the air. Then a torrent. At this distance the bill doesn't appear to move, but stuck open directing its aria, descending through notes as blue as the sky, echoing.

Echoing. That's what flicks the switch in my mind and it's 2007 again. I am 15 and wandering the sanderling heaths of coastal Suffolk by myself. Cautiously, it's spring, there might be Adders about. I found the heath by accident, following a track round from the adjacent estuary. It looked good habitat for Dartford Warblers, but I don't see them. Instead, I enter a glade of pines and am struck by birdsong. The most intensely delicate, beautiful melody I had heard from a bird. And the volume! It seems like the exaggeration of memory, or of youthful exuberance but it filled the glade like a soloist in an opera hall. Volume and beauty. It moved that cold teenager — shy, and not much given to displays of emotions — to a moment of rapture. I never saw that Woodlark well, but I knew I would never experience one like it again.

The song from the bare tree fades, the lark flies to the ground and lands out of sight, but never out of mind.

It is a typical boring bird. One of my favourites.

Photo by Stephen Menzie

The first slope is always the steepest. Motivational slogan turned muscle-straining reality on the road up past Logie Kirk. It was my favourite old walk, last done nine months ago when I had by feeling, not thought, developed the habit of jogging up and running down 'my' mountain. With the intervening nine months spent with my legs furled under a desk in London, that idea felt practically lethal...

***

It was a delicate Scottish morning. Silver sky and smirr and Blackbirds softly singing. I'd been back in my adopted home of Stirling for a couple of days. Long enough to reacquaint myself with the murmurations of daffodils and the neat borders of Starlings, Goosanders surfing the muddy Forth, and the amount of rain the sky above Scotland holds. While London sweltered (21 degrees!) Stirling was chilly and overcast with breaks of torrential rain, hail and the occasional flurry of snow. Smirr was a relatively clear break and I headed for the hills with Mareike. She’s from the flatlands too — the East Anglian part of Germany — and also feels drawn to the north and to mountains, and to walking quietly in each other's shy company.

I set an asthmatic pace, but one at which I made it up the first slope without pausing, until the sheep replaced the trees. The smirr was dissipating and the first hazy view down the valley emerged. I take a glug of water. I don't feel as bad as I had expected. The road hits the path, a broad and well trodden track over long brown grass, damp green moss and squidgy black peat. It feels good to have it under foot, as if the tread of my boots feels at home here too. Four Ravens cackle and tumble through the sky. Sheep bleat and Stirling gets rained upon. We peer down glens to the hillfoot villages and Forth valley sprawl, clouded in the hazy air of mild wet March. Menstrie, Alloa, Kincardine. Defiant patches of blue appear in the sky.

Pushing on. Each thigh stretching step up seemed to slough off the dust from desk bound muscles. A stirring in the sinews that says that hills should really be taken at a canter and with a manic grin. Towards the summit the moss and the grass get gradually replaced by heather, then rock. Sometimes there are grouse here but only Skylarks sung between the ground and the sky.

From the south these mountains appear suddenly out of the Forth valley like a doorstop, keeping the highlands out of Southern Scotland. Up close they are mostly smooth lumps with the exception of this one. Dumyat is rough and ragged, craggy and the only one with significant patches of bare rock. It is the most visibly volcanic of them all, and the most dramatic, despite being a domestic 418 metres high. The wee pet. A mountain in geographer's definition only. But its character defies its height. When I was at university here I walked it religiously in a physical counterpart to the austere pews and psalms of the church in the next village along. I didn’t, couldn’t, get bored of it. Brooding or benevolent. Golden still afternoons or mornings lashed by weather. The lamb and the Raven.



***

You can take this mountain far too gently. It can still spring surprises.

Three quarters of the way up I turn to Mareike and remark on the kind weather. She smiles. I scramble up the next outcrop of bare rock and turn onto the final rocky slope to the summit, and a slap of wind takes the breathe from me. We double over and carry on, hands on the rock for extra grip. From the summit cairn we can view from the Braes of Doune to the Forth rail bridge and beyond, the firth disappearing into hazy sky that reaches around to the Lammermuirs and loses half of Fife to flat nothing. Moors ripple away over outcrops of rock to the valley, or to the rest of the Ochils to the north and east. The rest of the Ochils are the land of hill farmers and their flocks, an off brown baize stained with bracken and gorse where the sheep can't reach, the odd crumbling shieling and one thin reservoir carved into the contours. A Raven skims the summit, low and flexing its body to sail across the wind. It turns back and flies once again low over us, to check if we were dead — I assume — and it flies away disappointed. I hadn’t felt this alive in months.

And the wind buffets us again, in the space of half of a minute going from mild inconvenience to shivering cold, pulling on new layers and trying not to be caught like a parachute. Mareike leans back into it, gleeful. I give up attempting to stand straight, and the joy of irresistible wind catches me too.

***

On the way down I would slip over twice. Mareike didn’t, so covered herself in mud out of sympathy, and then slapped me around the face with a little more, to weird looks from other walkers. Exhausted and covered in mud: my childhood requirements for fun still exist. I hope I never let them leave.

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.