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.

Snow notes

What day is it today?  Friday, I think.  Do I feel guilty for not being at work?  No, I do not.  No-one is. 

It’s strange how a fall of snow changes things.  The change in the outdoor scene is well known, how everything seems cleaner, softer, enchanted, but what is less so is its psychological effect.  It’s as though the white layer coating the land is also numbing the brain; we go into a mental freeze, waiting things out. 

This end-of-winter storm had been expected, and when it came, my reaction was interesting to experience.  Like almost everyone else, I had decided not to risk trying to get to work, and so settled quickly into a relaxed cabin mentality, waiting for the white blanket to be spread upon us. 

It had been cold for days, with a searing east wind compacting the ground, fostering strange swellings of ice on the hillsides and scouring the way for the snowstorm.  When it came, on the morning of the first day of March, it was a signal to forget about time.  Immediately I needed reminding what day of the week it was.  The fact that it was theoretically the start of spring only made things more unreal. 

The world went monochrome.  It snowed nearly all day, a fine dry powder stirred by a south-easterly gale, puffing in spouts from the roof.  We were eager but didn’t know what to do with ourselves.  We walked, examining ice formations by waterfalls.  We called in on friends while the storm gathered itself.  Returning home, enthusiasm gave way to a tedious lethargy.  The gale pushed smoke back down the chimney, so we gave up on the fire and retreated to bed to watch the expectant dusk go blue and the woods pile up with white.

The predicted half a metre proved to be merely the depth of my hand.  On the second morning, the powder had frozen into a solid crust that made footfall inordinately loud.  Every twig, blade of grass and stem of rush was layered in a glaze of ‘ammil’ ice.  We listened for cars on the road; there were none.  Fugitive lapwings barrelled westwards, pursued through a grey sky by a wind needled with a million points of ice.  What was it that was falling?  It was neither snow, nor rain, nor hail, nor sleet.  Glinting concave sections of tubular ice lay on the hard surface of the snow where the wind had rattled them down.

All this time, and a lack of motivation to make anything of it except look out of the window at what winter might do next.  I must write something – but the new page waited white and empty.  Blackbirds, seeming twice their normal size, bounced around on the snow in search of protein.  You retreated to bed with a headache; I reached for the whisky, devised pointless chores and thought of my children down in the town.

A stiff, dishevelled song thrush lay where it had died, eyes open, in the lee of a stone wall.  When I went back to show our friends’ children, just the wings and legs remained – it had been scavenged within hours.  Feebly fluttering redwings, their cream eye-stripes pushed up into a surprised expression by the cold, bobbled around the bases of trees and woodpiles, woozily striving to avoid the same fate.  I raked the snow off a pile of woodchips for the goldcrests to forage on invertebrates, strewed seeds on a table.  There was a firecrest here a few days before the storm.  The thought that so tiny a bird might survive it seemed far-fetched.

On the third day, rain began to grey the ice, washing the snow and our malaise away.  The occasional car started to nose along the road.  Your headache eased and you got out of bed.  The start of the thaw was too late for another song thrush that died in a box just inside the back door.

The sun emerged on the fourth day, producing green patches among the white.  A bee flew past; woodpeckers drummed and birds began to sing.  Still we did not drive anywhere, the roads slushy and opaque.  With the hint of warmth, relief.  Am I losing the thrill of snow I felt as a child?  The excitement of snowfall has been superseded by boredom and relief when it has gone.  Now we are impatient for the rewards of spring.  Will I never learn to take what comes?

Grey Ghosts and Ringtails

Late afternoon on Dartmoor in January.  The hills are merging their greyness with a murky sky.  The sun appears briefly as it descends through a narrow orange band below the western skyline.  As I ascend a slight rise towards the open moor, a low-flying bird of prey scatters a flock of fieldfares preparing to roost on the ground amongst the scattered gorse bushes. 

It’s rangy, all wings and tail, wings canted upwards and forwards, pumping in an uncharacteristically undignified fashion as it struggles to maintain its course through the insistent north-easterly.  This is what I’ve come to see, and I’ve been lucky enough to see a hen harrier within minutes of starting my winter dusk walk. 

As I rise towards the tor, the wind gets stiffer and the light dwindles still more.  What was a sombre sunset now produces a dull glow like an amber traffic light.  White banks of raffia-like dead purple moor grass have piled up on the windward side of every clump of gorse.  A female merlin rakes her way through the wind. 

Further away, above the darkening slopes of the tor, more hen harriers are tilting back and forth.  Three – four – with careful observation and patience, I clinch five above the horizon at once.  At least two of them are ghostly grey and white adult males, especially visible as the light fails.  I keep my distance, careful not to disturb them as they prepare to roost for the night.

I’ve always thought that ‘hen harrier’ is an unfortunate name.  Unique among British birds of prey in being named after its supposed pest tendencies, the handle seems a little unfair.  It’s hard to imagine these shy, graceful open country birds getting close enough to habitation to harry a chicken.  It’s also fairly unusual for males to take anything larger than a skylark. 

Yet like many predators, they used to be more common in our landscape, before changing land use and persecution pushed ever-dwindling numbers to remote northern moors as a breeder, and to heaths, moors and saltmarshes as a wintering bird.  The larger, more powerful females would certainly have killed domestic fowl, a tendency that began a story of conflict with humans that is sadly still as prevalent as ever.

In France the hen harrier is still a relatively common bird, nesting in a variety of open habitats including arable fields, but here in the UK, the parlous state of their breeding population has recently been in the news.  In England we’re down to a handful of birds; last summer only three pairs nested successfully. 

In the uplands of northern Britain the decline of the hen harrier is clearly linked to persecution by gamekeepers who see them as a threat to red grouse stocks.  As a low flying, ground nesting species, it is especially vulnerable to the illegal persecution that has led to calls for a license system for grouse moors, with some even demanding a ban. 

Here on Dartmoor, where it hasn’t conclusively bred since Victorian times, the hen harrier is a very scarce winter visitor and passage migrant, with fewer than ten birds - probably birds from the continent - present in a typical year.  Recently, however, a story appeared in the local press about a proposed scheme to reintroduce nesting harriers to the south west of England, beginning with the translocation of nestlings from the French population to a trial site on Salisbury Plain.  If this scheme is successful, birds might then potentially be reintroduced to other areas such as Dartmoor and Exmoor.

Exciting news, but I must admit to having mixed feelings.  IUCN guidelines state that for a reintroduction to go ahead, the factors that previously limited its population must no longer apply.  In the case of ongoing persecution of hen harriers on grouse moors, this is clearly not the case.  Is the government fudging the issue of illegal persecution?  Will the French authorities allow the translocation of ‘their’ birds for a risky, contentious scheme?  Is Dartmoor still a suitable place for nesting hen harriers?  With ever-increasing disturbance and the poor state of the moorland habitat in many areas, I’m doubtful.

But a part of me wants this scheme to happen.  Given that the illegal persecution of nesting harriers is proving hard to stamp out, perhaps it would be a good idea to establish new populations as buffers against declines elsewhere.  Raptors are always controversial (witness the debate about reintroducing white-tailed eagles to East Anglia), but reintroductions with this group of birds can work, as proved by the extraordinary recovery of the red kite.  Without direct measures, we may lose the hen harrier as a breeding bird. 

Speaking to Simon Lee, the project leader for the Southern Reintroduction Project (one of six government measures to help hen harriers), I’m reassured that the vexed future of these birds is in expert hands.  He believes that establishing a crop-nesting southern population of hen harriers will benefit the species by creating a new stronghold and generating public support, as has happened elsewhere with red kites. 

Despite opposition to ‘brood management’ or so-called ‘nest meddling’, I learn that hen harriers are surprisingly resilient, coping with well-meaning interventions while breeding.  Up to 80% of French nests are routinely rescued at harvest time by volunteers, who move them out of harm’s way in an ingenious procedure involving a chicken-wire cage (the name ‘hen’ harrier becoming all the more apt in the process).  The parents circle overhead and resume feeding their young as soon as the humans retreat.

Simon believes that using 20 to 30 French hen harrier chicks per year, from a population ‘imprinted’ on farmland nesting, will provide a source of birds that won’t impact negatively on their natal population.  Acutely aware of the controversies over harrier persecution in the north, he thinks that the project could avoid such pitfalls and buy the birds time while raising the profile of key issues.  “This project will help with the issues in the north.  Grouse shooting is a minority interest.  Perhaps this will lead to it becoming more of a mainstream debate.”

Nevertheless, there are tricky times ahead.  There may be a judicial review of Natural England’s license to ‘brood manage’ young hen harriers by moving them out of harm’s way.  The RSPB, among others, is opposed to the brood management approach.  Hen harriers are likely to be in the news for the foreseeable future.  “We need to shelter this from the politics, give it a distinct identity and focus on the pure benefits of a conservation project.”

Simon agrees that it would be preferable to remove the threat of illegal destruction and allow the hen harrier population to recover naturally, but fears that this is not a realistic proposition.  “Even if persecution stopped, their natural recovery would be quite slow due to the birds returning as adults to the areas where they were born.”

If only opposition to brood management were the only potential problem to consider.  However, speaking to a man who has been knocked off his feet by a female hen harrier defending her nest gives me hope for both man and bird.

Watching these buoyant, elegant raptors gathering to roost, I reflect that to lose them would be unthinkable.  The ghostly grey males swing back and forth, easier to see in the fading light than the earth-brown females and immature birds, known as ‘ringtails.’  The five birds conduct their own version of air traffic control, doing some last-minute hunting and sizing each other up to see who gets the prime roost spots. 

This strategy of roosting on the ground seems surprising, especially on such a cold night, but tucking down together amongst the tussocks of grass and dense low stands of western gorse must provide them with shared body warmth, some shelter from the elements and protection from predators.  As the light fails, it becomes harder and harder to see their distinctive slight, long-winged, long-tailed outlines – they’re now just an occasional flicker above the dark mass of conifers on the horizon. 

Roosting communally in winter is a habit that can get hen harriers in trouble.  People connected to shooting interests have been alleged to shoot harriers gathering at their traditional roosts, as it’s easy to predict their presence and to pick off several birds at one time.  The two ringtails allegedly shot on the Queen’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk on the 24^th of October 2007 (a high-profile case that brought national press attention to the persecution of hen harriers) would have been gathering to roost.

One by one these beautiful birds drop to the ground, leaving the sky to the scudding shapes of woodcock flying out from cover to feed on open moorland at night.  I turn my back on the wind and begin the walk back to my car, trying to picture the incongruous image of slender harriers on the cold ground, the wind whistling around their owlish heads throughout the long night. 

Thankfully I have been the only person present tonight.  This roost site appears not to be well known, and no man with a shotgun threatens the elegant raptors that gather here.  The farmer whose animals graze this land is aware of the harriers’ presence and is sympathetic.  It seems that this winter roost site is safe for now from disturbance or burning to ‘improve’ the ground for grazing.  As I walk back,  I hope that I will continue to be able to see hen harriers on the moorland not far from my home.  And who knows, if human interventions succeed, even as a breeding bird once more?

Gull love

Herring Gull

“You’re gonna choke, you soft sod!”  A tobacco-wizened woman in a purple Sainsbury’s uniform is speaking in a West Midlands accent, partly to me, mainly to a bird and a little to anyone who’ll listen.  A juvenile herring gull trots forward to inspect something resting on the grubby pavement by a litter bin.  It proves to be an advent calendar chocolate, which rattles briefly in the bird’s beak before dropping down its throat.

“Oh well – one less to worry about…”  She means one less gull rather than one less festive litter item on the streets of Exeter.  She gives a rasping laugh and grins at me toothlessly, wreathed in smoke.  We are involved in a knowing moment: the idea of ‘seagull’ as nuisance is received wisdom.  It will choke on its misguided dietary choice.  How we will laugh. 

Her pronouncement surely unites us in a shared distaste for these winged vermin.  In two short utterances, so much.  Sentimentality crossed with an affectionate harshness, the British habit of talking to animals, a relationship with a familiar facet of nature that she believes to be universal, resentment towards our competitors.  Serves the damn thing right.  Things have got out of hand and everyone knows it.

Across Britain, herring gulls are at the centre of a bitter irony.  They are protected by law, and have been placed on the ‘red list’ of Birds of Conservation Concern due to an alarming decline in their breeding population.  Yet they are coming into contact with people more and more as they adapt to the opportunities provided by our disposable society.  Herring gulls are stealing more ice creams, scavenging more fish and chips than ever before, and by god, we hate them for it.

Everyone’s got a ‘seagull’ story.  An ex-colleague of mine once grabbed a herring gull that had swooped down to pinch his pizza in Plymouth.  It pecked another colleague on the arm; she ended up with ringworm.  My daughter had her finger hurt by a gull that swiped her pasty in flight.  And so on.

Along with foxes and feral pigeons, herring gulls occupy one third of a red, white and blue-grey triumvirate of familiar and resented wildlife, sharing our habitats, our habits, even our food, and starkly dividing opinion.  Yet foxes have hunt saboteurs and their genuine admirers, and even town pigeons are fed deliberately, often by lonely people glad of their company.  Not everyone shares the ‘rats with wings’ position, egging on the small boys who perennially seem to be chasing them.

But where are the gull-lovers?  Who’s sticking up for them when their necks are being wrung on YouTube, as a fisherman from Northumberland is alleged to have done?  Is it only specialist birders with a penchant for rubbish tips who really care about these birds?  If we do lose them, will they be missed?

I’m a lifelong lover of birds, but I must admit, even I struggle with the larger gulls.  It’s not that I bear them any animosity, it’s just that they don’t especially appeal to me, although I do admire their cunning, power and adaptability and their prowess in flight.  There’s something in that cold pale eye that rebuffs affection and warmth.  Here I, like so many, am missing the point.

‘They’re not nice’ – people will say, but niceness or nastiness is not the issue.  Perhaps one of the reasons that herring gulls are so unloved is that they confront us with the bare facts of nature.  They are highly evolved flying, scavenging, breeding machines, with not an ounce of humility or compunction.  That singular lack of conscience is ubiquitous in nature, but we often choose to dupe ourselves on this fundamental fact. 

With gulls we can’t.  That sleek yet hefty form in white and grey conceals a shark-like void.  In their opportunism they remind us of ourselves, but we can’t love them for it, or paint them in a stereotypical likeness.  Unlike the clever fox, the cheeky squirrel, the analytical crow, we look for something anthropomorphic to admire and find it lacking.

“It’s after your flaming pasty!”  An elderly man clad in a red tartan jacket waves his walking stick in my direction.  A lady in maroon on a mobility scooter grins and chuckles as she glides past.  The sullied puddle, its bed riddled with cigarette filters, reflects a clear segment of bitter blue sky.  A cellophane wrapper sails back and forth across the surface.

At my feet, an adult herring gull observes me meekly, its small, greyish eye alternating between hot food and cold sky, which it tilts its head to examine every few seconds for competition or threat.  Its head, neck and nape are smeared with muddy brownish streaks.  The soft grey tips of its secondary feathers curl up slightly with each rasping gust of wind that dashes at us around the sunless corners of buildings.  The white spots on its black primary feathers are as soft as snow.

A piece of pasty falls onto my shoe and bounces, steaming slightly, towards the gull.  It takes a few furtive steps forward on silent pink feet, before retreating at the loud approach of a street-sweeping machine.  It opens and closes its bill rapidly as though rehearsing the business of eating.  Finishing my snatched lunch, I step into the stream of shoppers, balling up and binning the greasy bag.  I look back as the gull pats forward in final triumph to bolt its morsel before being shooed away.

I have decided to be an advocate for the herring gull where I can.  To point out that it’s ridiculous to blame them for stealing food that we have brought into their habitat, where they’ve been far longer than us.  That we should hold their adaptability and ability to survive in higher regard.  That they are as worthy of conservation efforts as other, more appealing species.  That we should even try to love them.  I will have my work cut out.  I need to start with myself.

Hi, Hi, Eregou

Hi, Hi, Eregou

“Hi!”

He gives a sudden, loud, ascending whistle that rings through the clearing.  He tilts his head to one side, listening.

“Hi!  Hi!  Eregou!”

We have walked for an hour and a half through the thorny bush country that surrounds the Maasai village of Ewangan.  It’s the middle of the afternoon; baking hot, and not getting any cooler.  We have pushed beyond the area where the village goats browse on their hindlegs, far out into the scrub where the only paths are those made by wild animals.  We have found medicinal plants, chewed the refreshing, moist bark of the Senegal acacia and found the tracks of leopards and dik-diks.  Eagles swing overhead and the bush echoes with the calls of cordon-bleus, crombecs and other exotic species.  But there’s one thing I want to see above all others.

Dennis, our guide, has a hunch.  He’s also almost as desperate as I am to find what we came for.  He speaks quietly - so quietly that sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s in English, Maa or Swahili.  He starts to walk uphill towards the foothills above us.  He whistles again; we wait for minutes on end.  One clearing is starting to look much like another, a green-grey blur at the periphery of my vision.  It’s only when we step close to the trees that I notice the thorns as long as fingers.

Last night the hyenas came raiding; the dogs barked frantically all night.  I have not had much sleep. 

“There he is.  Can you hear him?”  I can hear a variety of bird calls – the chuffing of francolins and the crackle of sunbirds.  A glaringly prominent white-headed buffalo-weaver punctuates the khaki tones of the brush like a snowball.  I’m finding it hard to focus on anything else.  Many of the bird calls are still unfamiliar to me, after only two days’ stay with the Maasai.  I can’t pick out the one Dennis is referring to.

I shake my head.  This isn’t going well.  I feel anticipation laced with a growing sense of futility.

Dennis asks to borrow the binoculars.  My Leicas go well with his crimson and purple checked shuka, his bow and spear.  We’re well and truly tooled-up: I have had lessons in Maasai archery and spear-throwing.  I’ve had a demonstration of how the locals dispatch aardvarks emerging from their burrows.  I have been obliged to borrow a hearty thumbstick belonging to James, the village chief.  If a lion were to come charging out of the undergrowth, we would be well prepared.

Since I was a child poring over natural history books I have been fascinated by the Maasai’s relationship with an unassuming grey-brown bird called a honeyguide.  At some distant point in their history, various communities in sub-Saharan Africa noticed that pugnacious critters called honey badgers were often accompanied in their raids on bees’ nests by a pink-billed bird with a distinctive call. 

Working out that the animal was following the calls of the bird to guide it to a shared source of food, the Maasai, Hadza and other tribes decided to cut out the middle mammal, developing a unique understanding with the honeyguide that persists to this day.  The Maasai get the honey, the bird gets the bees’ larvae; even wax, which they are one of the few birds to be able to digest.

In theory - but not this afternoon.  That is as close as we get.  Neither Maasai communication nor German optics conjure the honeyguide into view.  The bird we’re after goes quiet, its fairytale-like attempt to lead us deeper into the woods for mutual gain thwarted by who knows what.  Was the bird there at all?  I have to take Dennis’ word for it.  Everything that this tall, regal young man has said and done so far has inspired respect and trust. 

Cravenly, I add greater honeyguide to my list of birds recorded in Kenya.  It’s okay: Dennis assures me that we heard one.  The fact that I was unable to pick it out is academic, surely?  I have a qualm of guilt and add square brackets and a note: ‘heard by Dennis.’

Still a large part of me wants to return to the Maasai Mara and watch the age-old teamwork of human and bird that I so narrowly missed.  Perhaps remember to ask what ‘hi, hi, eregou’ means.  Perhaps one day I will.