This Birding Life (35 page)

Sixty years ago next month, a young man began observing the breeding behaviour of a pair of Redstarts. With the help of friends and colleagues, he continued doing so for four years, amassing a wealth of
data. Then, the Second World War came to an end, and he never saw his beloved birds again.

The man was John Buxton, and his studies took place at a German prisoner-of-war camp called Eichstätt, deep in the forests of Bavaria. Eichstätt was an ideal place to study birds, and as a prisoner for more than five years, he had plenty of time to do so. As author Peter Marren has observed: ‘In some ways, prisoner-of-war camps offer rather good opportunities for birdwatching. It is hard to imagine any other circumstances in which so many intelligent, active people would have so much spare time on their hands, nor so much incentive to find a distracting pastime.'

Buxton cut an unlikely figure as an ornithologist. In fact he was not a professional scientist at all, but a tutor in English literature at Oxford. But when he was imprisoned in Eichstätt, after his capture during the ill-fated Norwegian campaign, he began to look around for something to alleviate the boredom, and the Redstarts fitted the bill.

So while his fellow inmates spent their time dressing up as chorus girls or digging escape tunnels, Buxton turned his attention to the study of Redstarts. He immediately enlisted help, organising his colleagues with military efficiency. Regular observations began in April 1941, and soon took up virtually all the prisoners' free time. In just three months, from April to June 1943, Buxton and his team spent a total of 850 hours watching the birds – an average of more than nine hours a day.

Buxton was acutely aware of the irony of his situation, as a captive man watching free birds: ‘My redstarts? But one of the chief joys of watching them in prison was that they inhabited another world than I; and why should I call them mine? They lived wholly and enviably to themselves, unconcerned in our fatuous politics …'

After the war, Buxton returned to academia, and was later active in promoting bird ringing, introducing the mist-net into Britain from Germany. He died in 1989, virtually unknown to the modern generation, but mourned by all those who remembered him. As a legacy he
left a delightful monograph in the Collins New Naturalist series,
The Redstart
, now sadly out of print.

John Buxton was not the only birdwatcher at Eichstätt. The camp also played host to a young advertising executive named Peter Conder, who had been captured in June 1940, and like Buxton spent five long years in the prison camp. His captors got so used to his birdwatching activities that he became a useful look-out during escape attempts. He made detailed observations on Goldfinches, recording his results on whatever material was available, including German toilet paper.

Conder's experience was quite literally a life-changing one. After the war, instead of returning to a career in advertising, he became warden of Skokholm Bird Observatory off the Welsh coast. Later, he became director of the RSPB, increasing its membership tenfold during his time in charge. Thus the man who described himself as ‘an academic failure, and a bit of a loner' became one of the leading conservationists of his day: all thanks to some Goldfinches – and a plentiful supply of toilet paper.

So, the countryside is closed. Or to put it more accurately, most places where people normally go to watch birds are currently not open to visitors. Birdwatchers all over Britain are confined to seawatching, reservoirs or a walk round their local park. But the situation is not quite as bad as it may seem. Birdwatchers may be frustrated, farmers devastated, and the tourism industry tearing its hair out. But for the birds, at least, the foot-and-mouth crisis may turn out to be a good thing.

Britain is a very crowded island. Our 120 million or so birds have to share their space with almost 60 million humans, along with their dogs,
cats, bicycles and cars. Whether we mean to or not, we cause disturbance to birdlife. Dog-walkers flush breeding partridges and Skylarks; mountain bikers and off-road vehicles carve up nesting habitats; and birdwatchers themselves sometimes disturb the very birds they come to see.

Not now, though. With much of the countryside out of bounds to the casual visitor, birds can get on with their lives more or less undisturbed by humans. In London's Richmond Park, for instance, Skylarks and other ground-nesting birds can look forward to a bumper breeding season, without the unwelcome attention of dog-walkers and their pets. Numbers of predatory crows in the park have also declined dramatically, because the lack of human visitors means less rubbish and waste food for them to scavenge. Elsewhere, in the ‘real' countryside, the clock has been turned back to a time when the only human presence was the local farmer.

Of course, birds do not live in an ecological vacuum. Indeed, many species that breed on moorland or farmland depend on the annual cycle of grazing by sheep or cattle, which provides suitable habitat for breeding and feeding. If these animals disappear from large swathes of the countryside it will not only be a disaster for the farmers but could also bring problems for birds like the Lapwing that make their nests on grazing land.

Incidentally, in their search for a scapegoat for the current crisis some sectors of the media have decided to put the blame on birds. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that birds can spread the disease, but given the sorry state of intensive farming that led to the crisis in the first place, it does seem a bit like shooting the messenger.

Meanwhile, the countryside is at last beginning to open up to visitors, albeit in a fairly limited way. Some RSPB reserves, such as Titchwell Marsh in north Norfolk or Radipole Lake in the heart of Weymouth, are open and will provide many people with a welcome birding fix over the next few weeks.

As for the future, what will be the long-term effects of foot-and-mouth
disease on Britain's birdlife? One thing is sure: never before has the countryside been put under so much scrutiny. Once the crisis is over there is likely to be a radical rethink of agricultural policy, hopefully resulting in a return to more traditional, wildlife-friendly ways of managing the land. If and when this happens, we can only hope that the needs of our birds are recognised, along with those of farmers, tourists, birdwatchers and everyone else with a vested interest in the British countryside.

A few years ago, an American ornithologist wrote a book with the provocative title
Where Have All the Birds Gone?
He showed that North America's songbird population had undergone a drastic decline since the Second World War, mainly as a result of habitat loss and modern farming methods.

I am tempted to write a book of the same name today. For over the past few years, along with many others, I have begun to notice declines in many once familiar birds. Last week I was in north Norfolk, hoping for a range of spring migrants and newly arrived summer visitors. True, the weather was hardly ideal – persistent north-easterlies for the whole three days – but I was still surprised at the lack of birds. At Cley, the only migrant waders were a small party of Ruffs and the odd Whimbrel, while Titchwell was hardly any better. Songbird migrants were thin on the ground, too: with just a few Whinchats, although one of these was in the same binocular view as a day-flying Barn Owl.

Which brings me to the good news: some birds are clearly increasing in numbers. Barn Owls, Sparrowhawks and Marsh Harriers are all regular sights on a trip to Norfolk nowadays, whereas when I first
visited the county in the 1970s they were scarce. Avocets are thriving, too: a welcome boost for the RSPB.

A few days later, on May Day Bank Holiday, I visited Dungeness. There, too, there were good numbers of some birds, including plenty of Sedge Warblers and Whitethroats, and a heavy passage of Swallows and Swifts. But it has been years since I regularly saw birds like Bullfinches, Willow Tits and Lesser Whitethroats, which in my youth were fairly common. The latest
London Bird Report
reveals the seriousness of the decline, with the Willow Tit, once a regular breeding bird in the capital, down to just seven individuals, none of which bred.

Whatever the cause of these declines (and they are probably due to a combination of factors), one thing is clear: by and large, birds which live on reserves, such as Avocets and Marsh Harriers, are doing fine, while birds with wider but sparser distributions, including farmland and woodland species, are declining – in some cases perhaps even heading towards extinction.

That may sound a bit over the top. But recent studies have suggested that when bird populations decline they do not do so in a neat and orderly fashion. Once numbers drop below a certain level, whatever conservation measures are put in place, the species may be doomed.

Take the Passenger Pigeon. Once the commonest bird in the world, it was so abundant that flocks containing tens of millions of birds literally darkened the North American skies as they passed. The birds were shot indiscriminately for food, and a rapid decline began. For some reason, the pigeons appeared to lose the will to breed, and numbers dropped like a stone. Fifty years later, in 1914, the last surviving Passenger Pigeon, Martha, died in captivity in Cincinnati Zoo.

Nothing so dramatic has ever occurred on this side of the Atlantic. But when we start to notice the decline of familiar birds such as the Song Thrush, Starling and House Sparrow, it's time to get worried. So next time you hear that songbird populations are in decline, don't console yourself with the thought that they will recover. This time, there's just a chance that they might not.