There comes a time when those, often young people, with slightly less conventional hobbies question what it is about birding, trainspotting, unicycling or vintage knitwear that really gets them going. As a long-time birder this is an almost annual occurrence. But why dwell on the why when the what – the guidebook ‘bibles’, the choice of twitch, the whole enjoyable thing itself – lies in front and ahead of you? Why not just … get out there? Origin stories risk embellishment and half-truths, and somehow these properties just don’t square with the birding image.
When young, unusual hobbies rarely spawn from gaping summer breaks, schools’ extracurricular catalogues or simply blundering in by happy accident. Often they need a personal source. A cultivator. This person’s oddities, their whole-hearted embrace of the strange, you find endearing, then addictive. Perhaps you wonder why they themselves picked up the habit; the pattern of spread through the family tree. What began my obsession with birding was hardly the birds; it was instead a long series of questions about how it was that lists, maps and 8x40 binoculars came to jostle for desk space with times tables, diaries and vocab books.
My grandfather cultivated this in me. While sharp enough still to enjoy daily crosswords, or thrash me over several wordless games of Chinese Chequers, he reached an inflection point some years ago. A stroke eight years ago eliminated most physical ambitions overnight. Wanders around the block, much less tracking long-shot megas over miles of rutted terrain, was now a chore in itself. I felt that this specific absence, the pursuit of the no longer there, would be unbearable. But I sense this prediction mostly hasn’t come to pass.
He no longer watches birds. Not in the literal sense, at least, with binos and a guidebook. He has reached an age and physical condition where casting himself forward, reckoning with what’s next in birding, is less important. Harder, I sense. What counts nowadays, what may always have counted the most, is reminiscence – tales of ID heroics or, more humbling, and sometimes revealing, tragic dips. The value of this ‘virtual’ birding is now clear. I get to live this world, his dramas, vicariously, pushing me to seek experiences of my own. But, more to the point, in confiding in me – for at times it really feels like this – I sense he is immortalising in himself these stories; moments from deep within a period that might otherwise, unless regularly dredged up, be lost to time.
These days I may get multiple, subtly different iterations. Surfacing a fond shared memory I’m also prone to this kind of storytelling. Whether a Sparrowhawk actually did get to the Grimsby American Robin back in 2004 just as he was pulling into the car park I’ll probably never know. But the outline of that story and others like it – the snatched grin as we both bring up a birding moment the other may have forgotten, the hazy details resolving into something acceptably imperfect – plays to that jittery suspense all birders at some stage crave. I seek answers just as we once both sought elusive Bearded Tits flitting about the reedbeds in the marshes of East London. Slowly, deliberately, knowing the bird, the story, is likely to come in good time. While the bird remains hidden, there’s a case to solve. The two of us, and I’d bet most birders, liked this phase – the hunt – best of all. Unlocking these memories, teasing out an admission, a trivial detail, all these years later is tantalising – but it’s the closest that we’ll ever return to what it once was. He seems content with this, so I am too.
When you’re young, hobbies that don’t conform can be a point of secrecy and shame. Entire half-term breaks spent birding with my grandad I’d advertise instead, to my friends, as simply a visit with relatives. Something routine. Incomplete truths are an easy sell done once; repeated year after year, the whole raison d’être for the trip tucked just behind the conversation, they are corrosive. You have concealed too much of an identity for just too long. The title of this post is a nod to this, an often well-hidden bird that’s had me chase around after it in the heathlands of southern England.
If there’s a takeaway here, maybe it is this. Nurture the birding, or any other passion, in your life, and try to understand its value to those who’ve passed it on to you. You’ll realise what it takes, and what it means, to hold on to the things that matter most in the long run. And I’d say that’s worth it for the occasional raised eyebrow.
Author(s)
Felix Adams