how to tune in to the wild
With Springwatch’s Stephen Moss.
UST MINUTES FROM the car park on a brisk March day and our walk erupts into a cacophony of wildlife. Among the pandemonium we can make out the sound of a squealing piglet in the reeds behind us, and a lost pupil searching for their teacher in the tree in front. But it’s an explosive outburst from the scrub-filled ditch that stops us in our tracks.
“That’s a Cetti’s warbler,” says Somerset-based naturalist Stephen Moss, steadying the tripod and telescope he has slung over his back. “It’s a species you’re far more likely to hear than see.
“Psssh, psssh, psssh,” says Stephen, rather perplexingly to the bush. “In theory this is supposed to flush them out into the open. In practice it doesn’t work that well.”
But sure enough, a small bird flashes across the path in front of us, settling just long enough among the brambles for us to admire its nondescript plumage. I would probably have said this was a sparrow, large wren, or slightly squat dunnock. I would have been wrong.
“Confidence is the problem that a lot of people face,” says Stephen. “They think they can’t identify birds, but they already know quite a few. They’ll know robin and thrush, mallard, Canada goose and heron, but they often lack the confidence to identify them.
“Learning bird song gives you another way in. It’s like learning a language and it can help if you give each call a mnemonic to remember it by. So that squealing pig we can hear is a water rail, a bird not unlike the more familiar moorhen. It spends most of the breeding season tucked away in the reed beds so it’s another species you’re far more likely to hear than see.
“That ‘tea-cher, tea-cher’ is the great tit that you can see up there, and the explosive call of the Cetti’s warbler is unmistakeable. It’s the loudest British bird and it’s almost saying: ‘ What’s my name? Cetti! Cetti! Cetti! That’s it!’”
This bird arrived from the Mediterranean and started to colonise the UK in the 60s and 70s. It’s a sedentary warbler that’s here all year round even if you don’t hear it in winter.
There’s something rather magical about the way birders like Stephen can isolate the call of a single species from an indecipherable wall of avian chatter. As we walk along the reed beds he picks out the vibrant call of the wren ( loudest for its size), the more familiar robin, the onomatopoeic repeat of the
“Learning bird song gives another way in. It’s like learning a language... that squealing pig we can hear is a ‘tea-cher’ tit.” water rail. The is a great
chiff-chaff and a black headed reed bunting, who, according to Stephen, is saying: ‘Eat my liquorice!’ (although ruder alternatives are also available).
“If you want to start learning bird song, you need to get out on New Year’s Day when only a few birds like the robin are going to be calling,” says Stephen. “But you can start at anytime by adopting a local patch, somewhere you walk regularly, so you can get familiar with the species that live there.”
Walk that route often enough and you’ll naturally add species as they arrive or start calling later in the year. The Somerset Levels are Stephen’s local patch and they represent a real UK conservation success. Just 30 years ago this was a barren wasteland, marked by the scars of the peat digging industry. The RSPB, Somerset Wildlife Trust and Natural England all owned chunks of this area and they joined forces, with a simple mantra: ‘Just add water’.
“They thought it would take 30-40 years to restore the landscape,” explains Stephen, “but it took just four. It’s like when you dig a garden pond and there are water skaters floating on the surface before you’ve finished filling it.”
Water was the magic ingredient that drew new species towards the Avalon Marshes. While it takes hundreds of years to recreate woodland or moorland habitat, wetlands have a magical ability to establish vibrant eco-systems in a fraction of the time.
In the early days, volunteers in Somerset would take reeds home to propagate in greenhouses and then replant. Today millions grow here, providing a perfect habitat for a number of rare and endangered species.
“We now have more than four times as many bitterns here on the Avalon Marshes than there were in the whole of Britain just 20 years ago,” says Stephen. We’ve been straining our ears all morning to hear the famous ‘ boom’ that the male bittern uses to establish its territory and find a mate. As we slowly tune into the avian chatter all around us, it’s the one sound that is proving elusive.
While our bitterns skulk secretively in the reed beds another heron, the great white egret, is offering the perfect floorshow. “This is one of Britain’s largest birds,” says Stephen as we settle into the bird hide. “You can see it foot paddling in the mud trying to bring up invertebrates to feed on.”
This egret (one of seven heron species found on the Avalon Marshes) is genuinely spectacular. And like the Cetti’s warbler, climate change may well have encouraged it to head north from France. Somerset’s rewilded marshes offered the perfect home and the first recorded UK breeding took place right here in 2012.
And although the great white is now a common site on the Levels, Stephen is clearly excited to spot something rather unexpected. “Look through the scope and you can see its bill is changing from its winter yellow to its summer grey,” he says, ushering me to look. “It’s almost green around the eyes and I’ve never seen that before.”
Sitting in the hide is like being dropped into my own personal episode of Springwatch, the awardwinning BBC series that Stephen first worked on in 2005. His natural history TV career started with working on Birding with Bill Oddie in the late 90s. “I’d known Bill for a long time and we often talked about making a programme about birdwatching. Prior to Springwatch we worked on Wild In Your Garden in 2003. They asked us to do a show at 8 o’clock and another at 11 o’clock. We said ‘well we can but there won’t be anything happening’ but they insisted. So we had this ridiculous situation with Simon [King], Kate [Humble] and Bill all saying to each other ‘Anything happening?’ ‘No, nothing happening here’. We ended up with one solitary mouse on a bird feeder.
“From there we started running in recorded feeds from other locations earlier in the day and that set the grammar that developed into Springwatch: you’re in a location but following stories from elsewhere too.”
And one of those stories is developing right in front of us as two great crested grebes dart gracefully for an already occupied clump of reeds. “They are going to kick that moorhen off,” says Stephen, pulling a pair of binoculars from his pocket. “I can remember watching slow-motion filming of these birds on Springwatch and realising that they pull their crest back momentarily before they dive. This pair are definitely thinking about nest building and if we’re lucky we may see their courtship display. They are the most aquatic of birds: they build a floating nest and never come to land.”
Floating in front of us are winter migrants such as wigeon and tufted duck waiting for their signal to head back to breeding grounds in Siberia, and a group of male coots engaged in the most vicious of battles. And at the back of the lake the electric blue of a kingfisher skirts the water to a collective ornithological ‘Oooh!’. We train binoculars on the branch where it’s preening, hoping it might stay long enough to hunt.
These are all species you’d expect to see in wetlands like the Avalon Marshes. Thinking about the habitat you are going to be walking through primes you to really appreciate the wildlife you are likely to encounter.
“When you step away from your local patch you have to think harder,” explains Stephen. “You need
to start to consider different habitats and anticipate the species you’re going to see.”
I’ve already done my reading on the Somerset Levels, and I’m hoping to spot marsh harriers today. When they finally appear, we see three at once: a female and males are seen tussling in midair. Their courtship displays are a spectacular series of wheeling, diving and heart-stopping tumbles. Once rare in the UK they have spread to wetlands like these, where they feed on small amphibians, mammals and other birds.
And as we head back to the car at the end of a long morning we finally hear that elusive boom. A solitary male bittern makes its presence known and moments later we see one flying overhead. As an author and local bird guide, this is exactly the kind of moment that inspires Stephen’s work.
“For me there’s a religious or spiritual element to converting people to the joys of wildlife,” he tells me.
“So what should I do next to really start to build my understanding of British wildlife?” I ask.
“Start a nature journal,” says Stephen. “When I wrote Wild Hares and Hummingbirds it was inspired by the works of great British naturalists such as Gilbert White and John Clare. Tracking and recording wildlife through the year is the best way to watch the season, start to link habitat and species and to really build your confidence with identifying different species.”
And so I start that evening. My first entry: flying bitterns, riotous warblers and courting harriers. Not a bad start.