Happy accidents
Looking for just one bird on your local patch can reap many other avian rewards for the birder
I’ve long had a theory that a huge part of the appeal of birdwatching is down to what I think of as happy accidents. Let me explain. Even as a beginner, you’ll quickly find you have a target list of birds you desperately want to see. It might include rarities, but it’s more likely it will just be locally scarce species, or, as in Amanda’s account, elusive migrants such as Waxwings.
You’ll start going out to particular places to find them, and you’ll probably surprise yourself with how much disappointment you’re willing to put up with. Nonetheless, if you keep failing to see your targets, it’s easy to become discouraged.
Hopefully, though, this is where things change. You start to experience these happy accidents, and you move from being someone who sometimes watches birds, to a genuine birdwatcher.
An example. At the end of the summer, I did a little bit of local twitching, to see the adult male Red-backed Shrike that spent several days in Sutton Park, in the West Midlands.
I’d never seen an adult male RBS in the UK before, so connecting with it was brilliant, but there turned out to be a lot more to it than that.
While watching it, or waiting for it to return from one of its brief disappearances, I saw umpteen Redstarts, plus Spotted and Pied Flycatchers (all birds I generally have to make quite an effort to catch up with), and a good variety of warblers. Whisper it, but that was almost more of a thrill than the shrike.
Another example. On my birthday 13 years ago, I went birding at a site on my then patch, looking for a reported Great White Egret (amazing to think that, even that recently, it was a very twitchable bird in the county).
I didn’t see it, and was about to head for home, when I thought I might as well check a smaller site on the other side of the road. The egret wasn’t there either (no suitable habitat), but as I watched a couple of Snipe, I noticed, from the corner of my eye, Black-headed Gulls swirling over a neighbouring farmer’s field.
After a couple of minutes, one of the ‘gulls’ came over the hedge and started to fly towards me, I turned and took a proper look, and realised it was a male Hen Harrier, which then flew straight
over the hide, giving amazing and memorable views.
There are far more everyday examples too, though. During lockdown, I settled down for five minutes to check the gulls that pass over our house every morning, on their commute from a nearby reservoir. And if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have noticed two Hobbies, one of which appeared to be displaying to the other.
Or there was the balmy evening that I was looking out of the bedroom window, enjoying the songs of Blackbirds from nearby bushes and TV aerials. Pretty much one of my favourite birding experiences anyway, but if I hadn’t been doing it, I wouldn’t have seen a Spotted Flycatcher, presumably a just arrived migrant, settling on top of a bush in the grounds of the nearby community centre.
What I’m saying, I suppose, is that birdwatching is about exactly that – watching birds, any birds, all birds. The great golfer Gary Player said that the more he practiced, the luckier he got, and so it is with birding. The more you do it, the more happy accidents you have.
With that in mind, remember these three key points when you’re birding…
1 TAKE YOUR TIME Birds are not always entirely co-operative, so resisting the temptation to rush will help you see your target species, and those pleasant surprises.
2 SIT STILL A certain amount of moving around a site is always going to be necessary, of course, especially if you’re looking for a highly mobile species such as, for example, a raptor. But more often than not, the best strategy is to stay put at the spot the bird was last seen at, in a hide if possible, but just sitting on the ground if necessary (a low profile reduces your threat potential to birds). I guarantee you’ll be surprised at how quickly birds start to come close, really close. Mammals too – I had a Fox run practically across my legs while doing this earlier this year.
3 THINK ABOUT HABITAT Let’s say you go looking for Bearded Tits. They can be very elusive, so think about what other species you might find in the same reedbed habitat. Not seeing a Bearded Tit is frustrating. Not seeing a Bittern because you were so totally engrossed in looking for that one species is even worse, believe me.
Having said all that, I’ll close with a few words of caution to anyone who, like Amanda, is tempted to give up, even temporarily. Last January, I was accompanying a Bird Watching/ Heatherlea readers’ holiday in Scotland.
On one of the days, there was constant heavy rain, so we decided to go and look for the Waxwings reported in an Inverness cemetery. After a long, wet, fruitless search, we decided we were out of luck, and loaded up into the minibuses to head for some coastal birding, feeling rather disconsolate.
As we went round the roundabout next to the cemetery, our guide Toby suddenly yelled out that there were some very Waxwing-like birds atop one of the trees. Surely not? It would be a great spot at such distance, and while on the move. Cue a rapid return to our parking spot, and the cemetery, and sure enough there they were – four glorious Waxwings. They made the day for us, the week, even, and they were proof that you should never stop looking.