Turkey birding report - now published in the October 2018 issue of Birdwatch magazine

On a lamp-post near Patara in south west Turkey, an immaculate vanilla-and-liquorice Black-eared Wheatear is pausing on its northward migration, giving a scratchy, swallow-like song.  It’s an unpromising spot for birds.  Polytunnels fill the valley; most of the greenery here is under plastic or glass.  A line of liquidambar trees planted by the local government alternates with bougainvillea by the smooth new road leading down to Patara’s famous beach.  Each tree has its own irrigation spout: just one of the ways in which people have altered the water table.  That this was once a marsh is shown by reed-filled ditches where bright green frogs give a rubbery bath-toy squelch.  Cetti’s Warblers shout sporadically, loud and sudden enough to make me start.

Everywhere I go in this part of Turkey I am reminded of what it once must have been like.  The flat coastal plains between the hills were once extensive wetlands, but as elsewhere, the landscape has been primed for people and their enterprises.  On the coast this means tourism.  Here, just inland, it means a great quantity of tomatoes.  Truckloads of them.  There are other crops besides, warmed by the sun (already powerful in mid-April) and watered by snowmelt from the nearby Taurus mountains.

There doesn’t seem to be much room for wildlife, but at several points on my week-long trip I am pleasantly surprised.  Here and there are corners of wetland, hemmed in by development and often littered and polluted, but still providing a vital habitat for birds moving through the area. 

I spent a day with Ali Ìhsan Emre, a local conservationist, visiting wetlands around Fethiye.  Ali is an outspoken, distinguished-looking gent of 61 with a long white beard pinched in at the middle with multicoloured elastic bands.  He has been instrumental in local conservation issues, ranging from protecting nesting loggerhead turtles on the tourist beaches to lobbying the government to protect what’s left of the wetlands.  I could not have picked a better guide.

Early in the morning Ali takes me to a canalised section of the river at Çaliş, to the north of Fethiye.  Although little more than a suburban concrete drainage channel, there are patches of shallow water, mud and reeds: just enough to support a few pausing Green Sandpipers, Little Ringed Plovers and a pair of Pintail. 

We move on to what Ali calls ‘Bird Paradise’ behind the beach at Çaliş.  I had been sceptical about this place, misled by the name into thinking that it might be an aviary.  Ali leads me through a metal gate (locked “to keep the drunks out”) and along a path between a remnant patch of saltmarsh and the straightened river.  Where the latter empties into the sea, the scene opens out to a view of hazy mountains behind the milky-blue bowl of Fethiye Bay.

We’re now at the mouth of a tidal inlet.  Fishermen wade in the calm water, catching shrimp in nets cast by hand.  Nine Purple Herons stand like rusty rakes scattered across the few acres of marsh before creakily taking flight and heading north, followed by a line of wonky-looking Glossy Ibises.  Red-rumped Swallows, Little Stints, single Black-winged Stilt and Greenshank and terns including Gull-billed rest or drop in to feed.

Çaliş marsh is threatened by drainage and development.  Next to it is a beachside restaurant, built without permission, whose late-night music and buzzing generator often disturb the resting birds.  To the north, the town of Çaliş continues to expand, a wave of white, terracotta-roofed development that looks as if will crash and spill down onto the vulnerable tawny triangle of the reserve.

Ali campaigned for seven years to have this place protected.  He is concerned that even now it is vulnerable.  The tourist lira is the chief factor in planning decisions, and the drive to lure it here has filled up almost the entire valley with buildings and infrastructure.  Ali and a group of volunteers from Izmir University monitor the biodiversity of ‘Bird Paradise’ to ensure its ongoing protection.  Local businesses are beginning to see the benefits of turtle conservation in attracting tourists; Ali hopes that the tide will turn in time for the birds, too.

Along the coast at Ciftlik, another even smaller marsh behind the beach is overlooked by newly built holiday apartments that look as if they might sink into the sodden ground.  They are being bought up by Russians, says Ali, but for now they stand empty next to piles of building detritus, polystyrene and discarded toilets.  A scum sits on the surface of the dwindling wetland.  Ali stands on a heap of rubble, camera in hand, surveying the scene.

Against the odds, but perhaps because it’s all that’s left, Ciftlik marsh is full of birds.  Waders including Whimbrel, Black-tailed Godwit and Wood, Green and Marsh Sandpipers probe at the muddy edges.  Squacco Herons drop in and out.  A Night Heron circles above for several minutes, no doubt scrutinising the evidence of humans and the compromised marsh, deciding whether to call in or not.

Next is Akgöl, or ‘White Lake’, so named because of its pale bed in the dry summer months.  It’s a picturesque place: a reed-fringed freshwater lake behind a deserted beach, surrounded by peaceful wooded hills.  It looks promising, but the only waterbirds today are two Pygmy Cormorants.  It’s early afternoon, and perhaps a little early for peak migration. 

Tiger moth, Akgol (photo: Ali Ihsan Emre)

Walking through the pinewoods around the lake, we fleetingly hear the shrill piping of a White-throated Kingfisher.  The woods are fragrant and airy, full of insects and wild flowers.  My first taste of pungent wild asparagus is a revelation compared to the bland stuff in British supermarkets.

Little Ringed Plovers chase each other in noisy display flights over Little Stints resting next to a puddle.  Along the bushy strand behind the beach and in lush fields with enormous bramble thickets, we find Hoopoes sitting in the sand like folded paper fans, Woodchat Shrikes, a Great Reed Warbler and more.  A Nightingale gives a single burst from scrub on the edge of the reedbed.  A male tortoise in search of a mate lumbers though a cow field. 

Woodchat shrike, Akgol (photo: Ali Ihsan Emre)

After a late lunch in a lokanta (canteen-style restaurant) run by a friend of Ali’s, we move on in his 30-year-old red Toyota pickup to Kayaköy, site of a famous abandoned Greek village and inspiration for Louis de Bernières’ 2004 novel Birds Without Wings, which aptly features an ornithological theme. 

Krüper’s Nuthatch proves relatively easy to find in the pinewoods between Fethiye and Kayaköy, and the lush valley that frames the ruins is full of wild flowers, tortoises and birds.  Corn Buntings jangle their purses from small fields, groups of migrant Yellow Wagtails (including Black-headed) forage among free-range sheep.  White Storks, Alpine Swifts and a buzzing flock of Bee-eaters pass by overhead.

The historic ruins of Kayaköy itself are fascinating, abandoned in 1923 and shaken by a series of earthquakes.  The eerie houses of the departed Greeks provide habitat for Blue Rock Thrushes and Red-rumped Swallows.  Jays of the black-capped atricapillus race are common everywhere.  At times, standing in this green valley, hearing Blackbirds, Collared Doves and Swallows, I can imagine I am in England on a summer’s day.

A boat trip along the coast on a scuba diving trip proves disappointing for birds, with no seabirds apart from a few gulls (including Audouin’s and Slender-billed).  However, one stop in a deserted cove produces Peregrine, Long-legged Buzzard and another Blue Rock Thrush.

By contrast, a trip to the ruined Lykian capital of Patara is far more productive.  The area surrounding the honey-coloured arches, columns and amphitheatres of the ancient port city is protected from development.  As a result, Patara is entirely unspoilt and historically and ornithologically compelling.  Marsh Harrier, Glossy Ibis and Squacco Heron float over the reedbeds.  Undisturbed farmland and scrub holds Masked and Woodchat Shrikes, Corn Bunting, migrant Pied Flycatcher and Whinchat.  The ruins are alive with Tawny Pipit, Lesser Kestrel, Hoopoe, Spanish Sparrow, both rock thrushes, and Black-eared, Isabelline and Northern Wheatears.  Nesting loggerhead turtles along the beach’s vast sweep of sand are another draw later in the spring and summer.

Walking back up the road to catch the otobus back to Fethiye, I rescue a perfect baby tortoise from a perilous road crossing, watched by a dog standing guard over a group of sheep.  I pause to watch the Black-eared Wheatear singing his scratchy Swallow-like song incongruously from a lamp-post.  From up there he can see miles and miles of intensive cultivation.  Crested larks forage between road and polytunnel.  A Rock Nuthatch pipes from the rocky hillside; Alpine Swifts slice the air above.  Here, as at Ciftlik, Çaliş and so many places in this crowded world, wildlife is still finding places to survive, despite us.

Rock rose (photo: Ali Ihsan Emre)

Impressions of Fethiye

On the wall of one of the currency exchanges in Fethiye is a black and white photograph of the town taken in 1952, before the earthquake five years later.  Taken from the hillside above where the marina is now, it shows many inevitable changes.  The straightened stretch of harbour was already there, with a handful of small fishing boats moored, not the ranks of gleaming tourist vessels, each with white masts and compulsory crimson Turkish flag, that can now be seen.  Behind that stretch of waterfront are the densely packed tiled roofs of what was then little more than a village, not yet redesigned by plate tectonics and the onset of mass tourism. 

The new town square now offers its open oblong to the sky in what the photo shows to have been a pleasant suburban area on the very edge of town.  There are many windows in the Fethiye of 1952.  Their south-facing shutters give the houses a dark-eyed look that strangely reminds me of the abandoned Greek dwellings in Kayaköy.  Although this is clearly a thriving little town, only one person can be seen: a figure in the foreground, standing next to what appear to be stacks of timber at the harbourside.

Although it’s tempting to describe the many changes to the buildings and layout of Fethiye since then, it’s what lies in the background of the picture that draws my eye the most.  Beyond the repeated rectangles of four-square houses and parallel roofs, offset by the more rounded shapes of trees and what may be the Yeni Hamidiye mosque, the northern edge of the town softens, giving way to a small wooded area.  Beyond this, at the mouth of the now canalised river, are the remnants of a great wetland that must have filled this stretch of coastline, still complex at the edges and unstraightened, where now the esplanade runs sharp and true as a knife towards Çaliş.  Distance blurs the background of the image, but there is an impression of unspoilt countryside, perhaps small farms and orchards, and the foothills behind entirely undeveloped.

In my mind there are still golden jackals, wolves and bears in those hills, and herons, egrets, kingfishers and ibises in the marshes.  The fields are full of flowers and bright flocks of finches and buntings.  The sea is still teeming with fish and octopus, not yet dynamited and degraded.  It’s quiet: vehicle traffic is minimal and the call to prayer is yet to be amplified to resound between the mountains.

I was not able to find the exact spot from which the 1952 photo was taken.  Perhaps that doesn’t matter.  My perspective is as skewed as time and not-yet-familiar eyes can make it.  Those distant hillsides had perhaps long lost their larger predators, and lead shot and diesel already polluted the mouth of the river, its wildfowl and wading birds largely gone.  People may have been poor and miserable, sick of living off the land and fearing the next earthquake.  The cafés, restaurants, hotels, currency exchanges and supermarkets of Fethiye, the sprawl of buildings that now fills the entire bay, the curbed rivers, the drainage ditches, the backfilled marshland, the user-friendly coastline: all have brought visitors, opportunity, revenue.  The process of developing this place began thousands of years ago; it’s not over yet.

Where that solitary figure stood in the foreground of the photo, a numerous team of municipal workers, Fethiye Belediyesi on their blue polo shirts, are now pulling up the ubiquitous dodecagonal paving slabs and laying a cycle path that will run from the Karagözler boatyard to Çaliş.  They are aiming to get it finished in time for the tourist influx.  All over the town there is a slightly frenetic air of construction and preparation.  The Roman amphitheatre is being restored.  Billboards with photos of children with Down’s Syndrome, next to others showing proposed developments, announce the council’s inclusivity and progressiveness. 

Meanwhile men with moustaches dressed in grey and black smoke endlessly, drink çay and play backgammon.  People buzz back and forth on scooters, transporting everything from rugs to small trees.  Mehmet the barber mutes the pop videos on the television when the azan begins.  The stalls at the Friday market are piled with produce and tended by shawled, bow-legged women and behatted, kindly little men, bringing cheese in goatskin buckets in from their farms in the hills, largely unchanged since 1952.

The shadows of swallows flick over the white awnings of the market.  The river slips rapidly between concrete banks, efficiently bearing bluish, clean meltwater from the mountain snows into the bay.  The husks of pumpkin seeds, the remains of leisurely snacks, litter the steps of the town as they have done for ever.  A smiling teenage girl, her face immaculately made up and her jeans carefully torn, carefully helps her gruff-voiced, shawled grandmother off a dolmuş.

Walking through the suburbs out towards Calis, where one town blurs into the other, I came upon a scene that went to form one of my many impressions of Fethiye.  At one end of the road, backed by mountains still covered in snow, a Volvo digger was filling a huge hole next to a now incongruous patch of reeds.  Water was being pumped out of the building plot as the digger scraped and toiled.  Further down the road, just behind the seafront esplanade, an old man had struggled down into a steep drainage channel to retrieve scraps of firewood and stack them in a wheelbarrow.  I offered to help him out of the ditch, and was prepared to help him load his barrow.  He crossly refused.  Should I have offered him money instead? 

I continued my walk along the slide-rule seafront.  Back in the currency exchange, standing by its image of a much-changed but still recognisable Fethiye, I took advantage of the exchange rate and the clerk’s good English to change another £50 for lira.

Terrapins

reeds

still grow

in the suburbs

where diggers delve and scrape

in hope of more houses. Quiet ditch-water

seeps past terrapins, mud-shelled in the sun, pinstripe-limbed, craning. A bluish bird twitches through

green stems and Coke cans, dropped from Africa to this street like moonrock on ice cream, still

 feeling the gist of the wetland that was.  Reaching, humbug-

legged, a terrapin wets its caked shell and swims through

sliding green dish-water.  Each leg kicks solo against the current.

Dead fish floats and disappears down wrinkled reptile throat.  Overlooked by empty houses,

a preoccupied old man is dragging firewood up the bank above squelching glassy-eyed

bath-toy frogs, scattered like litter in the ditch

where reeds

grow

still.

Spiderman Likes Shark

He runs a diving club.  He is here with its mainly younger members.  We are on the dive boat Meliss, pitching about on the green Mediterranean.  He is in his fifties, perhaps excessively confident, with a neat greying moustache, a smug wolfish look and a perfectly bald head. 

It is onto this compellingly shiny surface that Mr ADC, as the leader of the team of divers, had attached a comical clownfish diving hood.  It is here too that a small black spider is now ambling about, trying to gain some purchase or to find a way off.  Mr ADC is very pleased with himself, but it’s hard to take him too seriously, what with the spider.

Meliss is anchored just off a deserted cove south of Fethiye (glassy water, scrubby pines, stone goatherd’s hut).  We have scuba dived and swum, and now we are eating an excellent lunch prepared by a charming young girl who seems little older than my daughter.  I am delighted to have swum off my sea-sickness. 

I scan the sea and the land for life, but both seem deserted.  My binoculars have won me the nickname Mr Google among the crew.  High above the hillside dotted with pines and maquis, a lone long-legged buzzard tilts back and forth, wailing.

Mr ADC is telling me about his life while the spider circumnavigates his pate.  He is a computer engineer who used to make F15 fighter jets (single handed, by the sound of it). 

He is well travelled; he wants me to know this.

 “I like shark.  I go to Maldives, Seychelles, Philippines for shark.  Shark very friendly.”

Have you ever seen a shark here, in Turkey?

“I have been diving since 1978.  Three times shark – that is all.”  He shows me three fingers to illustrate.  I wonder how he feels about having to travel so far to get his sharks, and what has happened to the marine life here.

Have you seen changes in that time?

The thumb goes down.  “Bad changes.  Same everywhere.  Same in desert as in sea.”  By this I think he means: it’s alright, other habitats are devastated too.

How do you feel about this?

He shrugs complacently.  “We are animals.  Is okay.”

Spiderman is proud that his daughter is getting into diving.  He is lucky: my soon to be 13-year-old won’t see me, let alone dive with me.  He doesn’t seem to note the irony that his 14-year-old will be exploring depleted seas in which his beloved sharks are becoming harder and harder to find.  But it’s okay, because the planet is ours, and whatever we do is fine.  We can’t be held responsible.  We are animals.

He throws his bread roll to a shoal of small silver fish waiting at the surface, poking their heads slightly above the water.  He scrapes the remains of his fresh fish lunch into the refuse bin.

“I like shark” he repeats. 

The spider is still there.

Bird paradise?

At the end of a track on the outskirts of Çaliş, just behind the beach and its line of hotels and bars, is a tall metal gate, padlocked to deter revellers from the nature reserve.  Ali has a key, and he leads you alongside the straightened mouth of the river, through the long dewy grass, past towering clumps of reeds where reed warblers chatter frantically, past flowers encrusted with gatherings of beige snails, and the grinning fisherman who shows you the blue crab he has caught, but says he doesn’t want his picture on Facebook because he looks ugly this morning.  He smiles and tells you his name, but you do not catch it, and you keep walking. 

Ali is in front, the waistcoated wise man of the marshes, long white beard tied with colourful elastic bands, a snug green cap with a peregrine badge on it.  He pushes quietly through the sopping grass and the knee-high daisies, clutching his camera.  A single peeping lost duckling seems symbolic, somehow.  The 8 am sun glares down, already well above the watery glaze of the mountains.  The sea is perfectly calm, like blue milk in a bowl.  Fishermen wade with nets for shrimp.  You have reached the mouth of the mismanaged river, where it disperses its snowmelt into the sheltered bay. 

To one side of the river is what remains of a vast wetland that once spread from one side of the wide valley to the other.  Ali has been instrumental in saving this pocket of ground, so it is without irony that he calls it ‘Bird Paradise’, though when you look at it from across the bay it seems pitiful, a tawny scrap encroached upon by breaking waves of white, rufous-roofed development.  When he said that you would be visiting a place with such a name, you were reluctant, suspecting a sad suburban aviary.

At the mouth of the inlet, next to shreds of litter, a scum of oil and floating detritus, crouches a group of tiny sandpipers: little stints.  Nine purple herons are ranged across the saltmarsh like the remains of rusty wheelbarrows; they creakily sprout wings and tilt over the town towards the mountains, resuming their spring migration.  A dark row of glossy ibises wonkily follows them.  Swallows, terns, plovers, stilts and sandpipers are revealed to be using Bird Paradise as a crucial stopping-off point on their northward journeys, too.

By the beach stands the illicitly built restaurant, allowed to stand nonetheless, where loud late-night music often disturbs the birds.  For seven years Ali fought to have this place protected, and now it is, he is doubtful that it can last.  Monitoring is revealing what survives here; Ali accumulates evidence, carries out surveys, takes photographs to persuade the local government to retain what is, if not paradise, then at least a fragment of what was.  Standing with him, overlooking the diminished marsh, you reflect that a remnant is far better than nothing at all.

Call to Player

It had been coming, and when it came, it was memorable at least.  Was it fitting?  I think so.

Friday the 13^th of April 2018.  I took a path on the edge of town that I was not sure if I should take, overlooked by the new apartments above the green mosque.  It curled round to what seemed a dead end: a dumping ground for garden detritus behind the hotel.  Looking up the gully, I thought I could see a way through among the piles of limestone rubble and the pines tufted with the webs of processionary moth caterpillars.  Climbing up through the quiet woods, I glanced at my phone.  A message with his name as the heading had just arrived.  I decided not to open it yet.

A line of stones marked a hunters’ path up through the woods.  Working around uneven ground and fallen trees, I gained some height towards the ridge.  The blue patches of bay visible through the trees grew as I climbed.  The path roved through swelling patches of warm sunlight, before emerging in a clearing by a small cave full of sticks, a discarded grey man’s jacket, the evidence of fire.  Stone steps of unknown vintage rose above me, cut into a cliff of grainy orange limestone.  At the foot of these I read the message that informed me of what I already knew: that the captain of my cricket team had died of cancer after a shockingly rapid decline.

I climbed to the next outcrop and took off my shoes, sitting down among the sprigs of wild barley, the delicate star-like purple flowers whose name I still don’t know, the scrapings of last night’s foraging boar.  A single Turkish pine jinked skywards out of a fissure in the limestone.  I wondered how best to mark this moment in my own way, how to honour this irascible, combative little man.  I didn’t know him well, but latterly had come to like him rather more through shared sporting endeavours.  I became self-conscious, as though watched.

On the edge of the town below, a click from the loudspeakers on the minaret of the Karagözler mosque announced the commencement of the evening call to prayer.  I rose to my feet to listen and take in the sunlit view of the snowy peaks of the Bonçuk Daglari mountains to the north. 

Allahu Akbar
God is Great…

The muezzin waited for the echo of each preceding utterance to arrive from the far side of the bay before resuming.  In those pauses was an exquisite peace. 

Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah
I bear witness that there is no god except the One God…

After the last line of the azan and its rolling return came a humdrum and rather touching click as the amplification was switched off.

Before the azan was amplified, the splendour of that distant echo would have been unknown.  A nearer one, yes, running through the alleys of the town and mingling with the cries of children and the barking of dogs, but not those rolling waves of praise coming down as if sent from the mountains themselves.  What a moment, the first electric muezzin!  Was he proud?  Did he understand the significance?

Now, shoeless on a Turkish crag, with a tingling, perilous feeling in my belly from my proximity to the edge, I remembered the visiting Bangladeshi cricketers, unrolling their prayer mats and kneeling towards Mecca on the outfield of a Dartmoor cricket pitch.  A more delightfully incongruous sight one could not hope to see.  Simon, who died this morning aged 51, would have stood watching, smirking and smoking a roll-up, waiting impatiently for the game to begin.  And now…

What would he have made of this?  Me learning of his death in a south Devon hospice, the same one that provided care for me, while a muezzin issues the call to prayer over the bay.  Torquay to Türkiye.  Wanting to do something, I reached down for a knuckle-sized piece of limestone that had broken off from the outcrop.  I did the only thing I could think of before putting on my shoes and pushing on up the hillside, which was to hurl the stone off the precipice using a cricketer’s bowling action.  I gave it my characteristic tweak of off-spin just for authenticity, and watched it drop into the dark pines below.  I imagined my captain’s cry of derision or praise, as so many times before - but now never again.

Crow in the Snow

It’s suspiciously quiet outside.  Tuning in to the muffled whiteness of the world beyond the purple curtains, as soon as I note that I can hear no birds (despite it being mid-March) a crow answers me, twice.  Your fingertips on mine, heard through drifts of bedclothes, sound like ice floes shifting.  How does such delicate contact transmit through finger, arm, pillow and produce a sensation so great it fills my head?

We walk out to the ruined farm.  It’s coming down widdershins.  We’ve never seen snow so fine, so loose.  Sent on an east wind, it starts to pain our faces.  If we stood still we’d wear domed snow-hats like every fencepost.  John Bishop’s dilapidated house is lonely and lovely; snow is scudding through his missing roof and caking his fireplace, and the sycamores that ring what was his yard are catching whiteness in their lichen beards.

By the miners’ old ale-house I inhale a snowflake.  It goes down my windpipe like a torch down an adit, gutters out with a sharp metallic sensation in my lung.  The snow gathers on the horns of the black-faced sheep that cluster round the gate to be fed.  The road has gone from damp black to powder white.

Winding along the path through the woods, kicking a bow-wave of snow-spray ahead of my boots, I press my cheek against a gorse bush, displacing a pile of snow.  Deliciously soft at first, then the cold registers, enough to produce an instant headache.  My numb face fails to feel the thorns.

The next morning, I realise that when I move my fingertips on the wall of our white cave of bedclothes, the sound my ear receives through the pillow is the same haptic throb as yesterday’s pristine snow under our feet.