Earlier this year I noticed that the sparrows that live outside my office window had become especially fat and hilarious – I couldn’t tell you the probable environmental reasons, but they had obviously spent the winter enjoying various snacks, and had all got so round they were bouncing rather than flying from branch to branch and yelling at each other. Every time they appeared for a round or two of bouncing and yelling, I stopped what I was doing to watch them from the window. I brought them up to other people. I got actively annoyed when I saw a total stranger tweeting about the harm they do to agriculture and was ready to kill when I saw an American calling them an invasive species. As I was signing up to take part in the RSPB’s annual garden bird audit (it’s just what it sounds like: you go to the nearest garden and you count the birds), I let myself acknowledge the truth, which is that at some point I had gone from being a regular bird enthusiast to a Bird Guy. Or, if you like, a Bird Bird.
It’s entirely possible, now that I think about it, that there’s no such thing as being a regular bird enthusiast, and it’s like being a foot person – no-one really thinks “yeah I like a bit of foot, but from time to time, just one item on the menu isn’t it”. Being into feet and being interested in birds are anti-homoepathic – once your interest is piqued, you can’t really isolate it or stop it from spreading. The entire beaker is now blue from one tiny drop of food colouring. With the stills from the Barbie movie out, some nice spring weather and two excellent follow-along news stories, it’s a great time to be a Bird Bird and I suspect not a bad time to be a foot person either. If you’re not familiar with Murphy the bald eagle and his adopted baby or Flaco the Central Park owl (Bubo bubo), that’s something I would personally suggest you rectify even if you think that you’re a bird agnostic. A while ago, a friend of mine said he used to hate birds, and got hold of a giant book about the bird life of Britain in order to find more stuff in there to criticise them for, but as he read he started to change his mind, and by the end had become a total convert. And there is no zeal like the zeal of the recent convert! My own evangelism is quieter and steadier, because I’ve been pro-bird all my life. There’s a picture somewhere at my parents’ house of me at about two standing next to a giant owl, looking like I have every intention of trying to encourage it to come home with us. In the spirit of being two, I send pictures of Flaco to my boyfriend, often several times a day, to which he replies, “Isn’t he nice” and “I’m so proud of him”. If I were to draw a picture of Flaco, I’m sure he would put it up on the fridge. Whenever he goes away somewhere he gets me a small owl: there’s now a little group of them on my desk, a parliament of little guardians.
An interest in and fondness for other bird individuals has punctuated my life, but honestly I like them all. There used to be a terrifically old great hornbill named Josephine in London Zoo, and we used to go and visit her on Saturday afternoons. There was a swan near the place I lived in Oxford that was known as “the king”, who was bigger than all the other swans and liked to hide round sharp corners to surprise ramblers; I once got chased by a group of chickens after apparently trespassing on their land, and it didn’t dim my admiration even a bit. I am to date the only person who still believes that someone I know has a little cousin who stole a penguin from the zoo and put it in the bath. When I was a teenager, my parents took me on holiday for the sole and obvious reason of ruining my life; I refused to change out of my Che t-shirt, and ignored repeated instructions not to smoke in the rental car, and yet as soon as I spotted a small raised pond full of ducks I forgot that I was meant to be staging a one-girl revolution and went belting down the hill to meet them, functionally two years old again. I just really really like birds: water, ground or air! Please consider the above part of my ongoing project to necromance Alfred Hitchcock, and ultimately, to fight him.
I'm just a casual birder who likes to know more about birds because birds are cool, I took part in a BTO count once for tawny owls and I have only ever seen one in the wild during that time, and it was in Notting Hill, she was beautiful.