2008 - The Bearded Tit (25 page)

‘Four shillings?’ scoffed my dad. ‘We want to watch the match, not buy the team!’

But football was growing from while-away-the-time to mild interest and beyond.

I was nine in 1965 and bolshy enough to support the opposite team to my parents in the FA Cup final. As my parents were natives of St Helens in Lancashire, they supported Liverpool, of course. So I ended up supporting Leeds. This was sacrilege in our house: not only was Leeds not Liverpool, but it was also in Yorkshire! But Leeds had only just come up from the second division so it was a foregone conclusion that the Reds would stuff them. In the event, Liverpool won two-one in extra time, and this merely cemented my fondness for Leeds, the underdog.

When you live in Cornwall and your nearest league team is Plymouth Argyle, you’re allowed to support anyone. My interest in football outlived my interest in Leeds United and for years I was ‘unaffiliated’, except, of course, for watching Illogan out of the bedroom window whenever possible and keeping an amused eye on Argyle. I watched England matches in the unique way that England fans have: if they lost, it was because of individual players from a club you didn’t support, or because of the FA, the despised footballing authorities that managed to cock up every tiny aspect of running the game.

But it was moving to London in the late seventies and living less than a mile from Highbury, the home of Arsenal, that made football for me go from mild interest to obsession.

My parents were dismayed. ‘But, Rory, they’re southern. How can you support a team from the south? A London team?’

The moment that made me realize Arsenal were going to be big in my life was the day I bought the ‘travel club’ card. I already had a season ticket for the North Bank for home games; now I was going to be an away supporter. That was the defining Arsenal moment for me.

Of course, things change. You get married, have a mortgage and two children, and no money; Arsenal frustrate and irritate the hell out of you and stop being an obsession, a way of life, and go back to being a mild interest.

Then there was running. One Christmas my younger brother returned from Spain, where he was living, looking fitter than I had ever seen him. He had taken up running.

‘Running?’ I said disparagingly. ‘How can you take up running? Isn’t running what you do when you run? You know, when you walk very fast? It’s hardly a sport. It’s hardly something you can ‘take up’!’

He’d been running ten miles a day, five days a week for two years, and I foolishly accepted a challenge to race him.

‘One mile,’ I said confidently, because the last time I’d run I’d been quite fast. That was about ten years earlier, a factor I should probably have taken into consideration.

‘No, a mile’s too much for you,’ my brother disparaged back.

‘Bollocks,’ I said. ‘A mile is nothing.’

And so the race went ahead. We were together at the beginning for a few seconds then he disappeared into the distance. The next time I saw him was about five minutes later. He was leaning over me where I lay in the gutter about seventy-five yards from our house.

‘Are you OK’

‘I think I started too quickly,’ I eventually uttered in between painful gasps for air.

Within a year, I had entered the London Marathon. Another defining moment. A new hobby. A weekly Sunday morning drive to take part in half marathons all over southern England. (Braintree was my best half-marathon time: ninety-three minutes.)

And as for the London Marathon…Well, at the risk of sounding vain, I could have won it. I should have won; but unfortunately there were 17,000 other people in front of me. Then getting married, having children, getting divorced, eating and drinking too much came between me and my athletics career, so I eventually moved on to something more sedentary.

Then there was country and western music. I was asked to write a comedy country and western song. This would be great fun, I thought; C&W may be appallingly schmaltzy and embarrassingly self-pitying, but it is ‘lyric led’ so you can make verbal jokes, and also it only requires minimal guitar playing and compositional skills. (Three chords good…two chords perfect, as the saying goes.) For a fortnight I immersed myself in country music, listening to hundreds of tracks, traditional and contemporary. At the end of those two weeks, I was hooked; I loved country music and my life was going to be a waste unless I had actually sung on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

And, dear reader, that I did. I’ll explain later in a book that isn’t about birdwatching.

Ah yes, birdwatching. The point at which I crossed the line between mild interest and obsession was the day I bought a spot-ting-scope. That’s when you know you’re hooked: the day you buy a bit of equipment, a piece of kit, a gadget. It was the day before my birthday, which is in the middle of March and therefore coming up to the best birdwatching time of the year. This was all the excuse I needed to splash out a bit of the overdraft on some pointless self-indulgence. And as any beginner knows, the worst thing about buying a gadget is that you have to go to a shop where everyone’s an expert whose principal aim seems to be to make you look stupid and inferior.

‘I’d like to buy a telescope, please.’ Glances are smirked between the older, balding shop assistant and the spiky gel-headed junior.

‘A telescope?’ says the baldy.

‘Yes, for birdwatching,’ I offer helpfully.

A snigger from the youth who says, ‘You want a telescope for birdwatching?’

There is palpable mirth in the air. I have definitely made their day.

‘So, where are these birds then? On the moon?’

Another snigger.

‘Er, I’m not sure I understand what you mean,’ I said with as little amusement as possible, and they realized they were close to losing a customer.

‘No, sorry, ha, no, we’re just messing about. Thing is, erm…a telescope is usually for astronomy and things like that. If you’re a twitcher, you want a spotting-scope, which I suppose is like a small telescope…’

Oh I see, of course; we’re talking about arcane jargon, of which I’m ignorant and they’re not, so they can make themselves feel briefly superior. Well, I wasn’t standing for that.

What about if you want to spy on the woman in the house across the road?’

This shut them up and drew a worried glance from another customer.

‘Right, I’ll let you deal with this gentleman,’ said the bald one to the youngster.

We established that I was a birdwatching beginner who needed a not-too-complex ‘spotting-scope’. ‘What sort of magnification were you thinking oft’ the younger man went on matter-of-factly.

‘Mmm, good question. It depends. I don’t know how small the bird is yet.’ I beamed inanely at him. The gel-head ignored this and proceeded to show me what he had in stock. He had become business-like but was still keen to pull technical rank on me.

‘This is the MM2 Travelscope, retractable to 18cm, with wideband focusing wheel and retractable lens hood, dedicated MM225x and 15-40x eyepieces.’ He hardly paused for breath.

‘Mmm,’ I mused expertly. ‘Have you got a light blue one?’

‘Black only,’ he said, with no-nonsense eye contact.

‘Shame. What about those three-legged things you stick them on?’

‘Tripod?’

‘Ah yes, tripod. That’s the word I was looking for.’

‘The Delta IV has a fluid head with reversible handle for left and right use and the G-clamp converts to a hide clamp system.’ He finished with a small self-satisfied smirk.

‘Excellent. Do you have one of
those
in light blue?’

‘No.’

‘Shame. I’ll take them anyway.’

Still just about on the warm side of frosty, but happy to have made such a pricey sale, the young man went about getting all the bits of kit from the stockroom, then unpacking, packing, wrapping and bagging them before writing up the bill of sale and putting it though the till. The whole process took about ten minutes, at the end of which he announced primly, ‘£335.75, please.’

‘Oh, hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ve changed my mind. How much is that magnifying glass?’

Pleased with my day’s shopping I returned home and showed Tori my exciting new purchase.

‘Look at this. Magnifying glass. £2.50. It’s not quite what I wanted but it’ll be fun. We can go ant-watching. And burn holes in bits of paper in the summer.’

‘Right, well, while we’re on the subject of buying silly things, I’ve got you something for your birthday. I know it’s not till tomorrow but I’ll give it to you now anyway. Close your eyes!’

When I opened my eyes I was thrilled. There before me was an MM2 Travelscope, with wide-band focusing wheel and retractable lens hood and a Delta IV tripod plus fluid head with reversible handle for left and right use, and with a G-clamp that converts to a hide clamp system.

T
here is a narrow tree-lined track that goes from the North Norfolk coast road (the A149) down to the salt marshes. It skirts the graveyard of Titchwell church with its distinctive round flint tower. The lane is memorable to me for two reasons: first, there is a spectacular amount of dog shit there, particularly tricky to avoid when your eyes are on the sky; and, secondly, it was also the venue for a ‘first’ in my career as a grown-up birdwatcher. A beginner’s true ‘bird moment’.

One Sunday afternoon we were slaloming down this track in between the unscooped poopers when we were stopped by a loud, clear, quite singular bird call. Though ‘singular’ may not be the best description. It consisted of two notes, the second slightly higher than the other. The bird producing this unique sound was perching openly high on the bare branches of a dead tree. Through our binoculars we could see a very small, pale brownish bird with a faint pale stripe through its eye.

Its song was unstinting. We were intrigued.

‘No idea what that is,’ said Tori.

‘Me neither.’

Two men were walking down the path towards us. Judging by the amount of optical equipment they had strapped about them, these were hardened twitchers. I suppose we could have asked them if they knew what the bird was. But that might have made us look like foolish neophytes. So we relentlessly peered through our binoculars as they approached.

They might even say something like, ‘Oh, I see you’re looking at that fine specimen of a [say] dunnock.’ Then we could nod knowingly with a, ‘Yes, always nice to see a dunnock.’

They didn’t say anything. In fact, as they walked past us they peered at us through narrowed eyes, then up to the bird, then back to us with an expression that said, loud and clear, ‘What on earth are you looking at that for?’ With that hint of displeasure, they went on their way, no doubt to photograph a flock of resplendent quetzals that had been blown off-course from Costa Rica.

At this point I should make it clear that there are thousands of birders out there who would obligingly and without any patronizing whatsoever help out a struggling beginner to find or identify a particular bird. These two men just were not of that clan. Similarly there are probably thousands of beginners who would happily accost a superior with a cheery: ‘Do excuse us, but we’re new at this birdwatching business and are struggling to identify this particular individual; we were wondering if you might be able to lend us a bit of your undoubtedly huge expertise?’ But unfortunately, Tori and I, despite our inexperience and lack of technical knowledge, were blocked by pride and couldn’t bring ourselves to ask.

Not only that, Tori and I felt, and still feel, that birding is not a communal thing; it’s a personal thing. It’s something just for the three of us: me, Tori and the bird, whatever that bird is. We, therefore, are disinclined to invite strangers into our little world. Though it would be nice to know what this tireless chirper was.

We watched and listened and listened and watched but we got no nearer to identifying it. Minute, with a piercing call; that was about it. Nondescript was the only way of describing it. After about forty minutes of scrutiny we, reluctantly, left and started walking back to the car to scrape the bottom of our shoes. On the way we were stopped in our tracks by another bird. We couldn’t see this one but its noise was very distinctive. A harsh, explosive ‘tchik!’ Sometimes a double ‘tchik, tchik!’

Tori and I looked blankly at each other.

‘Never heard that before,’ I shrugged.

‘Me neither.’

A man walking a dog was approaching us. I thought I’d try a more cordial approach to birdwatching and ask him if he could help us.

‘Do excuse us, but we’re new at this birdwatching business and are struggling to identify this particular individual; we were wondering if you might be able to lend us a bit of your undoubtedly huge expertise?’

He gave us a look somewhere between defence and attack.

Another loud ‘tchik, tchik!’

‘Have you any idea what bird’s making that sound?’

‘I don’t know,’ he growled. ‘And I don’t care. Birds are all the bloody same.’ He grumbled off down the track.

I shouted after him, the hand of birding friendship still extended, ‘Thanks for your time anyway!’ Then, under my breath after a pause, ‘Hope you clear up your dog shit, arsehole.’

But, hey, do you know what? Coincidentally, a week later, Tori got a birthday present from one of her children: a DVD of common garden birds. The first bit was devoted to birds that come to your garden to visit nut-feeders. One was the flamboyant great-spotted woodpecker. ‘Unmistakable,’ said the commentary, ‘at your feeder, but hard to see in a deciduous wood. Most easily located by its distinctive call: a harsh, explosive
tchik?

Aha. A new chunky piece of bird knowledge.

Also featured on the DVD was a bird singing from the bare branches of a dead tree. It could have been filmed down dog-shit lane in Titchwell, hurling its disproportionately loud, bi-tonic song from the treetops.

As one, Tori and I pointed at the screen and said, ‘That’s it!’

A chiffchaff.

It was a first for both of us. A special ‘bird moment’ and a special ‘us moment’.

We have since seen many chiffchaffs and they are always a delight. I would never sneer at anyone who had stopped to look at one. In fact, I’d go out of my way to say, ‘Ah, yes, a chiffchaff; one of my favourites!’