Monday, 19 March 2012

Southampton


I went to see my brother Ben, who lives in Southampton with his girlfriend, Steph. Their flat overlooks the river. As soon as we got there I looked out of the window at the river through their hefty binoculars and saw an oystercatcher. It was standing on a half-submerged wooden structure, which had recently been looted of its metal by opportunistic gypsies. At first I didn’t know what bird it was that I was seeing. It was black and white and anonymous until it revealed the distinctive pointy orange oyster-catching beak that it had been hiding in its feathers.

Near the lone oystercatcher were a group of about twenty other birds all huddled together and still. They were grey. I decided they must be sandpipers; they seemed about the right size. After a while they all flew away. They had been sitting there doing nothing for a few hours and then they just flew away as if they had decided in an instant with one mind.

Steph got some old bread. I think she soaked it in water or milk. We threw it over the balcony for the seagulls. They all swooped about catching the bread chunks in mid air. These seagulls were black-headed gulls with the dark mark beside the eye, which will later spread in the summer and complete the eponymous black head.

They are smaller and friendlier than the aggressive skinhead herring gulls of Brighton and Dover, and they have less grating screeches.

Steph tried to get one to take bread out of her hand but none of them were quite that bold, even when she looked away to make them feel safer. They weren’t hungry enough for such potential danger.

 
(taken by Joe Punton)

Wednesday, 14 March 2012

A bird close to home


On the way home from town, on the road whose pavement is raised on steps and overlooks the sea, whose houses occupy just one side so as not to spoil the view, we heard a bird’s piercing song. We could see it in a tree but it was too far away to identify for sure. It sounded like a song thrush, but maybe slightly more songlike. A mistle thrush? The only way to know for sure was to rush home and get some binoculars. Home was close, so we did.

The bird had moved tree but we found it by its song in a new tree. It soon stopped singing but we stood and looked at it for a while. It was difficult to see in the fading sunlight. Probably a song thrush. (see previous blog)

As we looked, a friendly vagrant called out to us. He told us that he had seen the meteorite on Saturday 3rd March. He didn’t think much of it until he saw it on the news the next day. You could probably look it up on the computer but when he left school in 1981 they didn’t have computers. He began to move on.

Then another passer-by shouted to us, asked us what we were looking at. We explained. It must have seemed like there was something extremely interesting in that tree for there to be two people staring into it with binoculars. The man told us that he had seen a program on TV where there were lots of people in a field looking at a rare bird and then a big tomcat came and ate it up.

The vagrant at the other end of the street was shouting something about how he was observing an observer observing the observers.