Ingham’s W RLD

SOME days everything just goes to plan in an effortless glide to happiness. And so it was last week when I when I got my first chance of the year to put my binoculars through their paces at our local Wildlife Trust bird reserves.

Some days the birds just skulk, taunting me with cryptic calls from the undergrowth.

On this overcast day they seemed determined to say hello. There were grebes and parakeets, gadwall and snipe, herons and herring gulls, thrushes from Scandinavia and the sleek hunter’s silhouette of a kestrel slicing through the clouds.

At home, the birds just kept coming. A marsh tit joined the long-tailed tits on my feeder and then, while I was gardening, the 50th species of the day dropped in, a female goldcrest, her yellow crown like a torch in the deepening gloom.

That evening, as my son-in-law and I walked to the pub with my dog, species 51 announced itself: a lovesick tawny owl hooting in the woods.

Then I came home and learnt that my football team, Crystal Palace, had won away. It was pretty close to the perfect day.

But a little book my daughter got me for Christmas suggests a different approach. The Art Of Mindful Birdwatching advocates quality rather than quantity. Instead of frantically ticking off as many species as possible, I should have savoured what I saw – and even relished the absence of birds.

Author Claire Thompson argues that by absorbing ourselves in the present we can dispel the everyday pressures that make life less than pleasant.

So rather than clocking a shoveler and moving rapidly on to a coot, I should have focused on the duck which sifts the shallows for plankton with its shovel bill.

I could have taken the time to appreciate the male’s bottle-green head and neck, chestnut flanks, white chest and pied back.

Claire has a point. Studying birds is relaxing. As stress must be one of the biggest killers, anything offering moments of calm has to be a good thing.

So why not try looking closely at the next bird you see, trying to guess what it is doing and thinking in its daily fight for survival?

Try it with a bird you would normally dismiss as drab, such as a male house sparrow.

Its colours are actually very varied – grey cap, chestnut head, jet black bib, grey-white flanks and black and brown wings and back.

It is also one of countless species that are getting rarer. And if we could all see the beauty of a sparrow, saving the planet would be easy.

The Art Of Mindful Birdwatching by Claire Thompson, £9.99, Leaping Hare Press.

lWHALES can’t resist a catchy song. Humpbacks from the Atlantic and Indian oceans learn songs from each other, adding new phrases to their own hit tunes, Wildlife Conservation Society and St Andrews University experts tell a Royal Society journal. Whales from Gabon to Madagascar can be singing from the same songsheet.

CLIMATE change has triggered a war in the oakwoods. The number of pied flycatchers – summer visitors from Africa – killed by resident great tits has risen “dramatically”, reports Current Biology. In mild springs the tits nest early, grabbing the best nest boxes before the flycatchers arrive.

The visitors try to turf out the tits who kill up to one in 10 of their rivals. Getting out of sync with the seasons can be deadly.

GREEN TIP: Try draught excluders on letter boxes to keep out the cold. WHAT was more powerful – mighty Tyrannosaurus rex or a tiny finch weighing just over an ounce? You guessed it. The Galapagos large ground finch has the world’s strongest bite in relation to body size. Pound for pound its seedcracking bite is 320 times more powerful than T rex’s, Reading University experts tell a Royal Society journal.

MY pal Piers and I have talked for 20 years about walking the Pilgrim’s Way. Last week we at last began walking in Chaucer’s footsteps along the North Downs towards Canterbury. We were inside the M25 but did not see a shop for 16 miles. Remote spots exist even 20 miles from London.

BEFORE Christmas I suggested some beautiful reserves where you can see owls hunting in daylight. Well, I practised what I preach. At Kent Wildlife Trust’s Bough Beech reserve I found a barn owl snoozing in a tawny owl nest box.

I could even see the ring on his leg. Meanwhile, tawnies are hooting away in a winter orgy of courtship. I heard one female tu-whit and two randy males hoot back just before dawn yesterday. But tawny numbers are falling and the British Trust for Ornithology wants your records to help estimate the population size.

Please send them to bto.org/owls