The birds and the bees and the picathartes

Katie Parry

This week’s winner: goes on a romantic flight of fancy in Sierra Leone

Love can take you in many directions. Including, it seems, to a parched corner of Sierra Leone’s only golf course at 6am on a Sunday. I have just started dating a blue-eyed South African. Since I am also 22, I have yet to learn that you can love someone without loving their hobbies.

Which means I am now a devoted birdwatcher. I am learning that not all birds that soar and wheedle over the dugout canoes that speckle the ocean are seagulls, that sunbirds sing most beautifully in the first silent minutes after a June rainstorm, and that the ducking and diving of the stiff-winged swift provokes an answering swoop in my own stomach.

The avian holy grail, however, is the picathartes. This incredibly rare bird looks like a rather startled anorexic pheasant made of black Plasticine, but fortunately love is blind. We search for it whenever we can, slotting our limbs like pieces of a jigsaw into the overcrowded minibuses that wend their way outwards from the laughing, colourful streets of Freetown.

One journey brings us to the Liberian border, just as the sun is rising. Even at this hour the thick, dark forest

pulses with heat, and a miasma of leaf mould permeates every thought. Each branch hides vicious thorns, and as we stoop to wait under a boulder the cool moss soothes the ragged skin of my fingers.

The hours inch past. We see nothing. This may be due to our guide, Kenneth, who periodically brings his flip-flop down with a resounding THWACK on some tree trunk or body part, before pausing to admire whatever vaguely insect-shaped smudge he has created. My boyfriend

The bird looks like a startled anorexic pheasant made of black Plasticine

bristles, and gives Kenneth a small leafy branch instead of the flip-flop. Kenneth is delighted. He ties it so that, when he launches his next attack, it makes an enormously loud, whipping WHOMP.

This, it seems, is the entrance music our quarry has been waiting for. She is unmistakable, even at 50ft. Her yellow head bobs in what is left of the evening light, and she hops from rock to rock cocking her neck thoughtfully, before disappearing off into the gloaming.

We stay seated, frozen in reverent silence. I am struck by the idea that to this bird I am just another animal – another crooked stitch in the enormous rambling tapestry of the natural world. It is, surprisingly, a good feeling.

This is followed swiftly by another, smugger thought: I am clearly a better birdwatcher than David Attenborough, who had to wait until he was

28 to encounter the picathartes. I’m expecting a call from the BBC any minute now…