My Natural History (10 page)

12. Marsh harrier

Circus aeruginosus

I
always like to say that seeing a marsh harrier was the high spot of my honeymoon, though sometimes I vary it by saying that in fact, it was the morning I bought the thermal underwear. However, to be perfectly honest, there were some other good bits as well, though I still think I must have been mad to agree to it. Well, I was mad: mad about Cind. And that last sentence is in the wrong tense, but never mind. Where was I?

We came back to Lamma Island from Sri Lanka after a couple of months of adventures, and we had saved the best till last. The trip around the wildlife sites of Sri Lanka changed the island for us. It also changed Lamma, and as we went on, we discovered that it had changed everywhere else as well.

Lamma was suddenly strewn with birds. Where had they come from? I remembered
The Magician’s Nephew
, the book in which the magical land of Narnia is created before the eyes of the observers, the animals rising from the earth itself – “Can you imagine a stretch of grassy land bubbling like water in a pot?… in all directions it was swelling into humps. They were of very different sizes, some no bigger than molehills, some as big as
wheelbarrows
, two the size of cottages. And the humps moved and swelled till they burst, as the crumbled earth poured out of them, and from each hump there came out an animal.” After that “showers of birds came out of the trees” while frogs burst into the rivers and butterflies and bees appeared from nowhere. I remembered, too, the creation story in
Paradise Lost
, the egg bursting with kindly rupture, and the smaller birds that solaced the woods and spread their painted wings. The return to Lamma put us, rather
unexpectedly
, into the first chapter of the book of Genesis, and the fowls of the air were created before us, for surely, they had not been there before. But now they were everywhere and, it sometimes seemed, they were there for me alone. This was at first something to plume myself on, secondly a privilege. These days it also feels like a responsibility.

But first came the joy: and the joy has never left. The scrap of garden before our flat called into new being three species of bulbuls: most notably the crested bulbul, an absurd little bird got up like a clown, with red cheeks and
a pointed hat. The Chinese bulbul, with a head like a badger, made a shocking din I had never heard before: but now it did it every morning. There was also a red-vented bulbul: how did that get there? How come I had never seen the magpie robin, as jaunty a little bird as exists anywhere in the world? Where had they all come from? I discovered them with the help of Karen Phillips who illustrated
A Colour Guide to Hong Kong Birds
, the first bird book I had acquired deliberately since I had won the great field guide by learning the multiplication tables.

Of course, I already knew about the black kites that drifted across the skies of Hong Kong and sometimes delicately plucked stuff from the water’s surface as the ferry chugged to and from Lamma. I had often seen them wheeling about the peak, flapping seldom, twisting their forked tails to steer. But I was shocked to find that some of these kites were in fact white-bellied sea eagles, yes, and there was a strange sense of appropriateness in
discovering
that this was the same eagle I had seen at Gal Oya. It was part of a pleasing pattern: and I have been falling on pleasing patterns like that ever since. And just a few weeks before, this eagle hadn’t even existed. There had been one kind of big bird: and now there were two. It was as if I had split the atom, sundered like from like and created two unlikes. The eagle carried its wings in a shallow vee, a dihedral, and was altogether more chunky and substantial an aeronaut.

And the sparrows that cheeped around the house: it was with a shock that I realised that these were not house
sparrows
at all. Rather, they were tree sparrows, which I knew about from my studies with S Vere Benson: country
cousins
of the cockney sparrow, birds that habitually have nothing to do with buildings. They had a fine chestnut head, rather than the ashy grey of the house sparrow, something I had never noticed before. But now we were sudden intimates.

There were other, more exotic birds leaping from nowhere: rufous-backed shrike, blue rock thrush,
white-breasted
kingfisher, no doubt the large blue bird that had given me such delight in a previous life. You could see reef egrets from the ferry, sometimes great rafts of red-necked phalarope in the Lamma Channel. Once a great frigate bird flew over the island: impossibly slim wings, deeply forked tail. I made an expedition to an egretry: two or three huge trees among the branches of which the
long-legged
birds looked like giant white fruit. Sometimes the call of the koel echoed across the island, saying its own name, though I preferred to think that it sounded like my friend Al when lit up by enthusiasm and Carlsberg: “Un-
real
! Un-
real
!”

But the bird that gave me most pleasure in this time of Creation was a little thing that I saw every day. That’s to say, I now saw it every day. Very close to the harbour wall was a large boulder: that was its regular perch. Every day,
on ten separate occasions, 500 people would pass within ten yards of it going towards the ferry pier and then 500 more would come the other way as they left the ferry for the delights of the island. And the bird, which I had always believed to be the most shy and elusive of all birds, would never twitch a feather. Instead, it would sit there, bobbing its head, glaring at the surface of the sea, occasionally turning itself into an iridescent dart and flying at the water, to return to its favourite perch on the boulder to scoff a tiddler.

It was a kingfisher. One of the most sought-after and beloved of birds, an outrageous explosion of colour, the bird everybody wants to see: and yet nobody saw it. Nobody noticed because nobody looked. It had been there all the time, or at least I assumed so. But it was as if my awakened eyes had called it into being, summoned it from the rock as Aslan summoned the animals from the boiling ground in Narnia, as God called the birds to burst forth with kindly rupture in
Paradise Lost
. Perhaps it was the bird I most wanted to see: the bird with which everyone most craves an intimacy: and at a stroke, it was there for me every day. I nodded to it as I went to work; I waved to it when I returned to the island in daylight hours,
generally
as I was making my way to the bar.

I was drunk with delight: half-seas over on the joy of the things that the smallest adjustment of vision had brought before me. But it was not as if I had changed: it
was more as if the world itself had changed, and done so especially to please me. It was as if things I longed to see had become visible before my eyes, as if the creatures I longed to share my life with had appeared, summoned by my own needs. The earth had changed: it had changed for me: and it would never change back. No wonder I was drunk.

We ended our Hong Kong adventures and returned to England. Cind was going through drama school; we had a bedsit in Ealing. I was doing sub-editing shifts for
Titbits
, and subbing the astrology for the
Daily Mail
. It was all rather suddenly and dramatically different from
freebooting
around Asia. The wild world went elusive again. But I was with Cind; what else mattered? I also began to write for
The Times
. I had nothing to complain about. We went ahead and got married while Cind was at college. What little money we had was in a building society awaiting some fantastical moment when we might be able to buy a little shitheap of our own. There was none to spare.

So Cind had the notion that we should spend our
honeymoon
on the Norfolk Broads. In April. Her family has always had romantic feelings about boats: Cind’s mother spent the first seven years of her life at sea, while her grandfather had captained one of the last Thames sailing barges to run cargo around the coast of Britain. (He took it to and from Dunkirk several times during the great evacuation as well.) Cind chose a boat from a catalogue,
one suitable to the grand-daughter of a sailing bargee. And me, I had forgotten what England was like. I had spent the last four years in Hong Kong and then the past eight months in offices, in the tube, in pubs, in the bedsit, which was warm enough if you had sufficient coins to appease the hunger of the meter. I was not prepared for this.

You couldn’t fault the theory. We needed to see the horizon. We needed to be where wild things were. It was just so cold that I wanted to die. Still, we made that stop and bought that thermal underwear and things improved. And there were nice birds, even if I didn’t really know how to look at them. Despite the best efforts of S Vere Benson and Roger Tory Peterson, I was a hopeless
practical
birdwatcher. Still, I had binoculars, and I peered at birds here and there, and very often, the sight of the bird would marry up with the half-remembered, wholly-loved images from
The Observer’s Book of Birds
and from other books I had perused so often and so long and so
fruitlessly
.

I had once owned quite a few. People gave me bird books. Kind grandparents, kind aunts, kind friends of the family bought them for me. It was the default present. When in doubt, they gave me bird books: sometimes years after I had stopped thinking of myself as a birdwatcher. All kinds of unexpected memories from those days of nightly perusal came into play as we chugged our way
around the Broads. We saw kingfishers, fleeting and
distant
, and congratulated ourselves on our field skills. I saw a tern, sitting on a post just as it did in a photograph in a book I could no longer name: but how much better this bird looked in its black-and-white reality than it did in its black and white picture, in those days when colour
photography
was an exoticism.

I remembered one such photograph with special clarity. It was in a book of black-and-white pictures, each picture accompanied by a brief text. It showed a male marsh
harrier
on a nest: I was to learn later that it was a famous picture taken by the great pioneer of bird photography, Eric Hosking. The bird stood there with his wings raised high like the wings of an angel: indeed, some claim that the carved angels in the churches of Suffolk are borne aloft on marsh harriers’ wings. Alongside this bird is a chick of woeful ugliness. I no longer have the book in question, but I have a book of Hosking photographs, and it includes this seminal and dramatic picture, taken in 1942, when this was a feat of adventure on the far edge of the possibilities of technology.

I can’t remember the wording of the caption in my original, but it basically said that if you want to see a bird like this, think again. This, it said, is a bird beyond your scope. It is a bird for supermen, a bird for the elite of the elite. It is only found in the wildest places, and it has been driven – harried – to the point of extinction. I couldn’t
know when I read the book as a boy, and I didn’t know when I visited the Broads on my honeymoon, that the population of marsh harriers was reduced to a single breeding pair in 1971: that summer when I listened stoned to birdsong in the garden of Burwalls. All I knew was that marsh harriers were rare beyond all hope of ever seeing one.

And I saw one. Our barge-like boat was tied up, and since Cind sat there it was like a burnished throne that burnt on the water. Certainly, its occupant beggared all description. And so, for that matter, did something else I saw when I turned my eyes from the boat to see a large flying bird, unmistakably a bird of prey, yet not a black kite or a white-bellied sea eagle; or, to be a bit more English and sensible, clearly not a kestrel or a
sparrow-hawk
or a buzzard or any of the birds of prey you are allowed to see. It flew with the greatest nonchalance, hanging in the air as though doing the air a favour, holding its wings, a bit like the white-bellied sea eagle to tell the truth, in a shallow vee or dihedral. But it was the wrong shape for an eagle; it had the wrong vibes, and besides, it was the wrong place. I couldn’t believe my eyes, or rather, my mind: I was convinced that I must have made the most colossal howler, that some obvious and common bird explained this fabulous and thrilling sight, that if I were to explain it to a proper birdwatcher, I would be laughed at: Oh, that’s the sort of thing crows do round these parts; it’s
a well-known confusion. Did you really think you’d see a marsh harrier? That’s too rich for words.

But it had to be. Didn’t it? Eventually, almost to my relief, it floated easily away on whatever drifting errand that absorbed it, and I went back to the barge and the barge-borne queen, my long-johns warm beneath my trousers, to look it up. “Has
low quartering
flight with
occasional
wing-beats and long wavering glides, with wings in shallow vee.” There was no questioning any further. A miracle had taken place before my eyes. The dead had been brought to life: the extinct had leapt up before me in glorious existence: the impossible was now quite obviously possible.