Among a wealth of birds…1

We went to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Park in Arundel. There were a great many birds there: gaggles of geese, a fanfare of swans, a whimper of coots, a phrace of moorhen, thrifts of pigeon and wounds of ducks, so many ducks, all colours and shapes. It's a bird zoo essentially, but there are also some hidden and wild. They are more elusive and mysterious and it’s more of an honour to see them.

Rose’s goal was to see a kingfisher. I feared she would be sad if we didn’t see one. I would have been a little sad as well but I’ve seen one before when I was a teenager on the grimy banks of the river Dour in Dover, on my way to school.

We made a circuit around the reed bed walkways and woodland tracks without seeing a kingfisher, then we went back to the visitor centre to have some tea. The café tables looked out onto a small lake surrounded by trees and reeds. It was said to be a good place to see kingfishers. And indeed it didn't take long before there was a flash of electric blue across the water into the trees.

The kingfisher has a massive beak, proportionately. It’s like it’s half beak, but not quite.

We saw another one later on when we were having a boat tour of the reed beds. The blue of the kingfisher is caused by the refraction of light through the fine feather hairs; the feathers are not blue. Our tour guide alerted us excitedly to the presence of the bird as it whistled past. I’m glad it was still exciting for her, even though she guides that motor boat through the reeds every day in search of fluffy water voles.

Long Tailed Tits At The Hotel

I was in a positive mood because I was going to a five star hotel to try out for a baking job. The gates to the hotel began on the busy main road and through the gates the private road to the hotel wound through acres of trees, lots of old trees; massive redwoods, twisty cherry trees, limes and oaks, all in their autumnal splendour, constantly drizzling leaves into the wind.

Even though I was eager to go and hang out in the opulent hotel, I stopped to look at the birds bouncing on the winds between the trees. I went into a clearing where the ground was spongy beneath one of the redwoods. I thought there might be some goldcrests. They like conifers.

Cars were driving past on the hotel road. They were big and new and had blacked out windows, and were driven by massive men in suits. I began to imagine I was in a dark moneyed Murakami underworld and if I stood by the side of the road peering about through binoculars, I might be stopped and asked to move on, but I did it anyway.

I saw some long-tailed tits. Even without binoculars I could tell it was them. Their silhouette looks like a ping-pong ball on the end of a trailing ribbon or something. The tail is longer than the body, which is round and fluffy. I’d never seen one before. Ever since I saw the picture shown above, I wanted to see one.

The day after, I heard some goldcrests at the hotel. Strangely they sound like goldfinches. There’s a similar type of twilpy blib, like a Radiophonic Workshop drip, but the goldcrest’s call is higher and more whistly. I wasn’t in a positive mood anymore though, so I didn’t get my binoculars out.

Fake Tree and Starlings

Me and Rose went out walking in Lower Horsebridge, or was it Upper Dicker? There were fields all around but they were mostly inaccessible and the public footpaths were dead ends. There was a fake full sized pine tree in an enclosure with some electricity generators. Only when you were at the foot of this ‘tree’ could you tell its branches were jutting metal pipes and the trunk was a tall metal pylon of some sort with the grain painted on, and that was the strange thing, because you can’t see the grain of a real tree when it’s a tree; it’s covered in bark, isn’t it, and that’s why it looked weird from a distance, though I didn’t realise it at the time.

We saw a few green woodpeckers as they swooped down to feed in the grass, and along the only footpath that wasn’t a dead end, ‘the cuckoo trail’, there were quite a few small birds in the hedges – chaffinch, many sparrows, robins, goldfinch, and in one particular bush there were some peculiar calls, harsh and digital and loud. I peered into the twig matrix. An old man walking two scrawny puppies stopped to talk to us. He was one of those old men who always stop and talk to people. I carried on scanning the hedges and espied a light brown bird, maybe slightly bigger than a blackbird and it had a streak of yellow feathers in its tail, rather like a greenfinch but it was too big for a greenfinch and didn’t have that stocky mini-parrot finch-beak.

We later realised that the calls we heard in the bush were from a starling. One distinctive part of their repertoire is the glissando, starting from a high pitch and swooping down. The rest comprises less recognizable clicking and squawking. We saw quite a few starlings around after that. Through the binoculars you can see their speckled colours, the fading summer iridescence of the males.