The greatest names in early bird-watching are English. Even the great American bird illustrator, John James Audubon, needed to sail to England (via New Orleans, where he bought an alligator as a travelling companion, though it swelled to twice its size, ‘breathed hard and died’ after only nine days into the voyage) to publish his masterpiece, The Birds of America. By then, the lyrical prose of Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne in 1788, and the woodcuts of Thomas Bewick’s 1797 A History of British Birds, had both brought about a revolution in thought, inspiring the first true wave of pursuing birds for pleasure.
Birds as sport and food had always been a favourite English pastime, and shooting birds to collect them as specimens was so popular that it had its own motto: ‘What’s shot’s history; what’s missed’s mystery.’ But the English have pioneered bird conservation. And the public have taken to birds in absurd numbers. A figure in The Independent claimed that bird-watching in England was a £250 million-a-year industry, bought into by an estimated 3.6 million bird lovers.
Approximately 3.5 million of them seemed to be at the bird reserves Titchwell and Cley during my visit with Bill. It was incredible. The car parks were full, and so were the paths towards the shoreline – you had to squeeze past lines and lines of people coming the other way with their bins and their scopes and their windcheaters and their walking boots and their thermoses and their packed lunches. It was like being on the London Underground. I was dying to be in the country, to escape to fresh air, but I was already there.
Little egret, dark-bellied goose, velvet scoter. Bill was racking up our bird count, and remained alert to any news of rare sightings: his beeper beeped all day long, courtesy of a 24/7 service that updated twitchers about movements and whereabouts. On our second afternoon, we parked near a thatched house flying a Jolly Roger flag in The Broads and joined a twitch of 12 birders to find a rare pallid harrier standing in a field. Old war stories were exchanged over the clicking of expensive cameras. ‘I’m not fanatical,’ a fat man was saying. ‘I do it within reason. Although I was up in Scotland last Christmas. Ever so cold it was. I had three quilts on me and still couldn’t sleep a wink. There were 400 people on that twitch. Ever such a crush, that was…’
The twitch for the pallid harrier was quiet and respectful. But I wondered whether any of the twitchers were among the guilty party who had been outed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds that same week. According to a story in The Times, a group of 30 twitchers had pursued a migrant rose-coloured starling to death in Norfolk. The bird had been blown off course in stormy weather to Great Yarmouth while migrating to India from Russia. ‘They hounded him for two days solid,’ said an RSPB member. ‘I told them to leave him alone but they said “tough”. It was tired and desperate to eat, but they wouldn’t leave him alone. They weren’t interested in its welfare. All they cared about was getting their picture.’
I got my 97 birds, ticked off on Bill’s list, and returned with a bird feeder and a sack of nuts bought at the Cley reserve. Thanks to Bill, I was able to identify the birds that flocked around the feeder I stuck on the end of a metal pole outside my Barton Close house – blue tit, coal tit, great tit. It was good to observe them as the autumn days faded, and winter banged on England’s door. Leaves fell from the trees, it got dark before four in the afternoon; I dozed in the warm, vast, silent university library while reading an original copy of Buller’s book of New Zealand birds, dedicated to his sons Walter Leonard and Arthur Percival. Cambridge was such a loveliness, with its meadows and bicycles, its brilliant talk and its peculiar images, such as the topiary emperor penguin designed by Antarctic explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs in the grounds of Wolfson College.
Over breakfast, lunch and supper in the dining hall, I would try to keep up with the minds of fellow diners such as the Ibsen scholar from Norway, the giddy Swiss political scientist, and the Trinidadian engineer who claimed he was studying the vibrations made by musicians who played the steel drum. Much of the rest of the time, I plodded away writing a book, and tried to hide from the shame I felt after reading British ornithologist James Fisher’s view on modern authors of bird books: ‘Those who have tried it lately, under the misapprehension that nature writing still needs a Tone of Voice, or Slant of Pen, or (worst of all) a ponderous facetiousness, have not known what they were writing about, really.’
It was a strange three months. The food was good, the talk was amazing, the tits were pleasant on the eye. But I wanted to be home, where Emily slept while on the other, daylight side of the world I observed great tits, where the spare room waited for Minka. The closest I got to New Zealand was an afternoon in the basement of the Museum of Zoology, where I looked at Cambridge’s collection of huia, stuffed and lying head to tail inside a sealed glass case. Just about the closest I got to England was the night in the Ffolkes Arms Hotel (‘acquired by the Ffolkes family in 1678’), where I dined with Bill. The news in that day’s paper was about Tony Blair finally declaring he would stand down as prime minister.
‘Will you miss Blair?’ I asked Bill. ‘No,’ he said. And then he talked about his own
