A hobby of mine when I was a teenager was birdwatching. I’d go for walks up the hill behind my parents’ house with binoculars and field guide; if I was lucky Mum and Dad would take me to RSPB Vane Farm (now Loch Leven), a half-hour drive away; or I’d go with my cousin Colin, also a birder, in his little 2CV to somewhere like Fife Ness or Tentsmuir, where I saw my first Cuckoo. I was in the YOC (the junior section of the RSPB); hell, I even had a Barbour jacket, which my friends mocked me endlessly for.
But how much birdwatching did I actually do? When I think back, and compare it to what I do now, I’m not sure.
What I did do, however, was pore over my bird books. Birds in books looked perfect; they could be studied in detail and for minutes at a time. In reality, birds flit, are seen in silhouette or shrouded by foliage; they’re glimpsed, half-identified, or heard but not seen.
With hindsight, knowing what I’m like it seems inevitable that I didn’t get into birding by actually going out into the field: there was no epiphany, no jaw-dropping moment of natural wonder. No: far more typically for me, it was an illustrated pamphlet I found among the rest of the junk in my bedroom which was the trigger. I’d had it for years and never looked at it until it turned up and flicked a switch in my head: birds. That Christmas I got my first proper bird book: Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Ireland by John Gooders, illustrated by Alan Harris. My Dad had given me his old Observer Book of Birds but this one was – although bigger – easier to navigate and clearly designed for practical use outdoors, with a laminated cover. It had a profile painting of the 250 or so birds most likely to be seen in Britain and Ireland. The Observer book was more selective, and the pamphlet was about the birds you’d most likely find in your garden. This one had previously-unheard of exotica like Nuthatches, Hawfinches (the size of that bill!) and (coolest of all) Crested Tits.
Another year I got the RSPB Complete Book of British Birds (whose sponsorship by the AA would not sit so well in today’s (metaphorical or literal) climate). This was a massive hardback coffee-table book, with many, many more paintings of birds in more lifelike poses: soaring Ospreys, diving Kingfishers, etc. It was, and still is, a work of beauty, even if quite dated now in many respects. The cover of it (below) shows the sort of idealised view of a kingfisher that few birders, surely, are ever lucky enough to enjoy. In this respect there is something aspirational as well as utilitarian about such guides. They don’t show you the myriad blurred forms that constitute many people’s experience of seeing – glimpsing – birds in the wild.
There were field guides in my local Waterstones which had photos and therefore could justly claim to be more ‘realistic’ than the illustrated guides. I never liked these books even though the birds they showed were much closer to how birds actually looked when you were watching them. Colours change depending on the light; plumages can be scruffy (especially in late summer); and so on. The illustrated guides show none of this: their birds are perfect. The birds I saw in the wild were not1. Illustrations, though, depended on the artist. Although the technical ability of these artists is undoubted, that doesn’t mean individual styles couldn’t influence my feeling toward a bird. It’s difficult to make a Kingfisher look ugly, true, but no painting I’d ever seen quite captured how charming – and attractive – a Bullfinch is in real life. Someone like the late John Busby could make any bird look amazing, and his was a much more sketch-like watercolour style which sought to capture the sense, rather than the detail, of the subject.
I can’t help think of Proust’s narrator in In Search of Lost Time, especially the second and third volumes, where his ideas about the things he obsesses over (the church in Balbec, the Duchesse de Guermantes, the actor la Berma) collide with their reality and, inevitably, fail to match up with the mental images and associations he carries of them. Were birds I saw in the wild maybe, by and large, just a wee bit…disappointing?
Maybe. Something else I liked to do was tick boxes, and that kind of mentality doesn’t necessarily lend itself to prolonged study of an object. There’s an extensive list at the back of the Complete Book of British Birds which was both thrilling and daunting: so/too many birds! Looking at it now, over three decades since I logged my sightings, I’m slightly sceptical. Did I really see a Ring Ouzel? It seems unlikely. And yet, there’s no tick beside Jay, Kingfisher, Chough, or Red Kite, which I hadn’t seen at that time; and there would still be none for Hawfinch, Goshawk or Puffin, none of which I’ve seen. I may not remember seeing a Ring Ouzel, but I do remember not seeing Waxwings. My cousin saw some one winter and hurried home to phone me. By the time I met him at the spot, they’d stripped the trees of berries and buggered off, as is their wont. It was years before I saw one.
I’m still a sucker for a nice painting, though. The book by Swedish artist Lars Jonsson, Winter Birds, is a recent favourite (see image of Bullfinches, top). Jonsson provides studies of dozens of his most regular bird table visitors and, being Scandinavian, this includes rarities for the Scottish ornithologist, such as Black Woodpecker and Nutcracker. But also those more commonly seen at this time of year:
These days, I never go out explicitly birding but will often have binoculars handy when out for a walk, and my eyes and ears are always alert for something. That something needn’t be a headline bird like a raptor: the crystal tinkling of Goldfinches delights me as they pass overhead, as does the soft fluting of a Bullfinch. At the birdtable in the back garden, I watch myriad tits scattered by a nuthatch; the opportunist Robin (and those other opportunists, magpies); and the furtive creeping of dunnocks. Today I pay attention to their behaviour in a way I didn’t when I was young: the way a blue tit, after pecking at a suet ball, will wipe its beak on a twig to remove the fat, the way we’d use a napkin. Or the way a Robin bobs up and down before it faces a different direction, always on the lookout. I watch the springing of thrushes across the grass, before they stop to listen for the movement of worms beneath the soil; or I listen to a Wren, hidden at knee level in a bush and scolding me with a courage and audacity out of all proportion to its size. On a cold day you can see the steam from their beaks as they breathe. These moments are just that: here and gone, uncatchable on paper and far more precious.
Illustrations (c) Lars Jonsson
1Did I actually like birds? I did like illustrations of birds, in the same way I liked certain illustrations of military aircraft: I went to RAF Leuchars Air Show almost every year in the mid 80s, but aside from the Red Arrows the highlight was the chance to look at and maybe even buy a Squadron Print, near-oblivious to the aerial acrobatics happening overhead: the idealised image was more alluring than the fast-moving, barely-glimpsed reality, even when literally putting on a display right in front of me.
Into the Gyre 
