MY FAVOURITE BIRDS - PART TWO
Posted: 14.11.24 in Articles category
My website article for December 2022 was intended to be the first in a series about my favourite birds. In that article I explained that I often ask people at the start of an even Sparrows retreat what their favourite bird is. I admitted that it perhaps isn’t a fair question for me to ask as I personally don’t have a single favourite bird. Being lucky enough to have seen nearly a thousand bird species around the world, I have compiled a top ten list, beginning in alphabetical order with the Barn Owl which I profiled in my article. Now it’s the turn for the next three birds on my list:
COMMON CRANE. I will never forget the day I saw my first Common Crane... and neither will my wife! We were living in Newcastle at the time, just round the corner from the maternity hospital where Sheila was booked in to give birth to our first child. By 11 June 1988 she was eleven days overdue and showing no signs of imminent delivery, so she kindly 'agreed' to being driven seventy miles to Greenlaw in the Scottish Borders to see a Crane feeding among sheep in a field. I shudder now at the craziness of it, but we went with hospital bag 'packed to go', saw the bird and got back to Newcastle without incident. Our baby son waited a further forty-eight hours to stir and was eventually born on the morning of the fourteenth day, delivered by a young midwife who bizarrely hailed from the village of Greenlaw and knew all about their 'celebrity' crane!
'Common' is a UK misnomer for a huge heron-like bird with a bushy tail that is still rare in Britain today, although breeding numbers are increasing in East Anglia and in Somerset where they have been re-introduced. I have seen cranes plenty of times abroad since that tense occasion and some have been as memorable. I flash back to seeing wintering birds feeding on acorns in central Spain, spotting a distant flock in Cyprus fly ever closer to pass overhead and turn sharply northwards on their spring migration, or watching a pair on a May morning in Poland copulate and hear the male's ear-piercing cry of triumph as he dismounted.
HOOPOE. Exotic looking and unmistakable. A bird of the Bible, mentioned in the lists of 'unclean' birds that Jewish people were forbidden to eat - unsurprising if you consider the Hoopoe's penchant to probe for food among waste and rubbish. Dove sized, buff-pink body, black and white rounded wings, long curved bill, and a striking pink crest tipped with black. It also has a soft and distinctive trisyllabic song which the Collins Bird Guide describes as “oop-oop-oop”, but to my ear sounds more like “epop-pop-pop, which chimes with its Latin name ‘Upupa epops’ and makes me inclined to think its name is onomatopoeic. I recall being woken up by a male bird in Spain’s Ebro Delta in May 2008, more than thirty years after seeing my first in Kent as a teenager. My first bird in Northumberland on 4 April 1992 was memorable as it chose to feed on a country road and spent much of its time dodging traffic! Since then, I have seen many across Europe, Israel and India, but still only a handful in the UK to this day. That is a very sore point. One turned up in my village in October 2019 and was photographed by a dog walker, but I missed it!
LONG-TAILED DUCK. Small sea duck with a circumpolar breeding range, found across the entire Arctic. In North America it is known as Old Squaw, but the name we use in Britain denotes its key feature - the male's very long tail. The bird's complex hues of plumage vary considerably between the sexes and the seasons. Unusually, the bird looks best in winter. The adult male in winter is a stand-out stunner, unmatched in my opinion for its beauty. Essentially, it is black and white, but that does not do it justice. There is charcoal smudging on the cheeks and the long scapular feathers that cover the wings look pale silver when the male bird is on the water. Even the bill is exquisite - black, grey, and soft pink. And of course, there is the tail. Narrow, black and elongated, and often held erect as the bird sits on the water.
Long-tailed ducks are offshore visitors to northern Britain in winter, and the north Northumberland coast marks the southern end of their wintering grounds. We can have up to a hundred birds in total, concentrated along a small section of coast between Bamburgh and Berwick. Stag Rocks at Bamburgh is the place to see them between November and April and I try to visit at least once then to see them. Typically, my views are of single birds at distance, picked up flying low over the sea with their long tails trailing, and I watch until they land on water to join a small group of others that I hadn't previously spotted in the swell. However, if I time it right for an incoming tide, I can walk onto the beach and see them close, just beyond the breakers.