Midsummer at Barnes

There were builders in our houses and we felt slightly adrift, so we decided to go to Barnes for the day. We were delayed by a forgotten membership card, but with smooth rail connections the journey was quick, and when we got there we realised that actually we had lots of the sunny afternoon left. We had no particular birding aim for once so we tarried in the park on the way. It felt a bit like we lived there. Emma talked to a lady who actually lived there about a dashing mandarin duck on the lake. 

Very very dashing mandarin duck (male) (Photo by Emma Brook)

The woman said Barnes is a nice place to live; it may be full of yummy mummies, but at least you don't have to complain about anything, because someone has probably already done it. It's an unsettling place. It's like a haven for people who don't actually have anything to shelter from, where the only problems are ones that can be solved by complaining to the council.

At the actual wetlands we were surprised by how drastically the landscape had changed since we were last there, in February. The island in the middle of the water that had teemed with squabbling waterbirds was now a deserted tropical island, all wild and overgrown, like a green tide had come in.

As Emma drew, I chatted to the only other birdwatcher in the hide about how quiet it was. He said he hoped to see a bittern. I said it was probably unlikely because they don't nest here. We watched a seagull try to prey upon a coot chick but the coot's mother fought it off. Then a lapwing went and harassed the seagull in the air, presumably anticipating a similar attack on its own family. It was a distressing scene, but also harmonious.

What Emma was drawing

We exchanged our top birdwatching stories, and then we talked about how we had both been to the same bush at Pulborough Brooks where they went in Springwatch to hear nightingales singing. We didn’t talk about how incredibly emotional this part of the programme had been; how a sound recordist had broken down when he recounted how he had to play his son the song of the nightingale on his phone, because they couldn't find one in real life. There was an awful lot of stuff about 'sadly declining' bird populations in this year's Springwatch.

And it makes it feel a bit haunting to be walking around in nature. When I see a lone butterfly, I think about what it would have been like when there were CLOUDS of butterflies floating low over the summer fields. When I hear a yellowhammer singing, it sounds hungry and desperate now, like it's begging for the 'little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese' of its song. The woodpeckers are on the bird feeders; there are 50% less swifts; and the sand martins aren't even nesting at Barnes this year. When I see a bird, I see hundreds of its ghosts.

Then I made a serious breach of birdwatching etiquette: I was trying to find out what a cetti’s (pronounced 'chetty') warbler sounded like and I played a recording on my phone. It came out a lot louder than I had expected, and a real cetti's warbler in a nearby tree thought it was being challenged by another male and started singing in confrontation. We got a very good view of it hopping through the tree (probably in a panic of male pride), and I now know what a cetti's warbler sounds and looks like (they sing in short, loud, warbly barrages, and they are small and brown), which is brilliant, but I felt pretty bad for complicating the power dynamics of their mating season.

The day had been very hot, and at closing time the sun was somehow still as fierce as ever. We emerged reluctantly out of the cool cocoon of the nature reserve, and it faded like a mirage behind us as we returned to a very arid London.