CAB Presentation: On Becoming a Better Birdwatcher.
(By Oliver Craner, Age 33 and a 1/4)
I have always been a bad but enthusiastic birdwatcher, although I have been getting better at it lately. In this brief presentation I will describe some of the reasons why I began to bird watch and try to explain what is involved and why I continue to do it.
1. Beginning to bird watch.
I did not start watching birds because I was particularly interested in birds. I started because, as a child, I liked to draw, and paint, and look at illustrated books. I had been given books filled with pictures of dinosaurs and birds and I would take particular care in copying out the beautifully painted plates of my Collins Field Guide to British Birds. It was one step from this to looking for those birds in real life – particularly the exotic multicolored vagrants I loved to draw and color in with bright felt tip pens. So I hung a net full of peanuts from a tree in my back garden and waited for flocks of hoopoe, waxwing and bee-eaters to arrive. Of course, they never did. This was disappointing but it was also a challenge, and stirred what turned out to be a prime motivation of any ornithologist, good or bad: that is, the determined, hopeful search for the exotic rarity amongst the boring brown flock. This is part of the grim superiority of amateur bird watching on the British Isles over the twitching safaris of intrepid and obsessional Bill Oddies: the boring brown flocks are immense, but the odd seasonal beauties and off-course vagrants are also many. The joy of starting to look for birds in the full ignorance of youth is that you expect to see dazzling rarities as due course. But I have yet to see a real hoopoe, waxwing or bee-eater.
2. How to bird watch.
I have always been a poor bird watcher. For years I showed up at nature reserves without research or serious equipment. My binoculars belonged to my grandfather and had seen decades of active service. I knew nothing of seasonal migration or plumage. I arrived and hoped for the best and usually came away with nothing more than a fleeting glimpse of fleeing songbirds in thick foliage. Serious bird watching is an uptight, tense, neurotic activity that can often turn aggressive, hence the aptness of the term “twitching”. Chasing rare birds around Britain is not something to be taken lightly. It requires a peculiar and ego-driven dedication as well as a heavy investment of money and time. It involves telescopes and digital cameras with extreme zoom lenses and excessive petrol miles. In fact, all you really need is a pair of decent binoculars, a sharp eye and a field guide. Learning songs and seasons and plumage is interesting enough and often helpful but it is not really essential. You don’t need to know all that much to access the other motivational drive of bird watching, which is the ability to decode landscape. Recognizing birds, like understanding plants or weather, provides a simple key that opens up the visual and rhythmic secrets of the natural world. This is not a twitching thing.
3. What I do.
And this is not just true for the country, but the city too. I have been a member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for a number of years and last year I worked as a member of the RSPB team monitoring peregrine falcons nesting on the clock tower of Cardiff City Hall. This was a perfect example of how even a minimal awareness of birds can help to unlock and enrich your surroundings. People are always amazed to discover the fastest bird of prey in the world nesting and hunting in the heart of Wales’s civic centre. Once they are shown this, their surroundings are transformed. I enjoy working for the RSPB not because I am an expert, but because I am not an expert. I often need help and guidance and I can get that, strangely enough, by learning to help and guide others.
4. At last, becoming a better birdwatcher.
I have become a better bird watcher over the years because of the slow, natural accumulation of knowledge, and because of working for the RSPB and buying a new pair of binoculars. But I will never be a twitcher. I still enjoy going out looking for birds because I love to explore the natural landscape, I like to draw and paint it, to run and swim and surf in it – and, along with waves and weather, what animates the landscape, is the teeming wildlife. And none teems with greater color and variety than our native and migratory bird life. I cannot claim much more for ornithology than the beauty of variety and color but, in this case, it is enough for me.