Golden wonders of a 50-year feast
FIFTY years ago today I became a real birdwatcher. Before Sunday, May 17, 1970, I was merely a watcher of birds. I had binoculars and bird books. I could tell a blue tit from a great tit. I went to the local sewage farm – much to my parents’ chagrin – to see waders. I also had a kestrel badge declaring my membership of the Young Ornithologists’ Club.
It was around 9am on that auspicious day I had my epiphany. No longer would I merely look at birds, I would be absorbed, fascinated, excited and enthralled by their shapes, colours, songs and mastery of the skies.
This dawn of realisation came, by quietly entering a wooden hide at the RSPB’S flagship reserve at Minsmere on the Suffolk coast. I was the grand old age of 14.The beguiling moment is laid out for posterity in a book titled Best Days With British Birds, in which I write: “Flipping up the wooden slat to look out, I experienced a sensation that, I guess, will never be repeated in my lifetime. Just like turning on a television, a whole kaleidoscope of birdlife was revealed in glorious, panoramic technicolour in an instant. I did not know where to look first...”
The account goes on to detail some of the waders tiptoeing about in the brackish lagoon known as the Scrape, including the mythical avocet, RSPB emblem bird and, until that moment, only a black-and-white image looking out from the pages of my AA Book Of British Birds.
Back then, avocets were making a tentative return to our shores after being wiped out in the mid 1820s. A mere two dozen individuals had colonised the Scrape’s small gravel islands, strategically positioned to optimise viewing.avocets would prove to be one of 30 or so birds I saw for the first time that late spring day. Several of them were exclusive to Minsmere during the early 1970s.
I had been lucky to be invited with my school friend John Lynch, on a trip to Minsmere by the local natural history society and, as we made our way along the trails meandering through the reserve’s 1,000-plus hectares of contrasting habitats, so many birds we had never seen or heard before greeted our every step.
Nightingales gave voice in the woods and wheatears flashed their white bottoms on tank traps built to foil the Germans. In the vast swathe of reeds, bitterns boomed and tiny bearded tits pinged. Marsh harriers, arguably Britain’s rarest nesting birds then, gave virtuoso performances on V-shaped wings.
A sojourn along the beach path towards the ominous shape of Sizewell nuclear power station raised the hairs on my neck when a dazzling white little egret flapped lazily across the sky. I had seen these birds on a Spanish package holiday but in the 1970s they were still very rare in the UK.THE mass invasion was still 25 years away.
What nature gives, it also takes. Since that auspicious day, some birds have declined, others have prospered.the red-backed shrikes we saw loitering close to the warden’s hut became extinct as breeding British birds in the mid-1980s.turtle doves today teeter on the brink. Conversely, Mediterranean gulls have colonised and marsh harriers are soaring high.
I am hoping to reprise my visit to mark my Minsmere golden jubilee sometime soon and witness the excellent conservation work carried out by the RSPB.WATCH this space.
‘That day I had my epiphany’