I like to move it, move it

My first trip to Madagascar came as a bit of a shock. The conversation, on a Wednesday in early October as I recall, went something like this:

Paul: I wonder whether you’d lead a Madagascar tour for me.

Marsh tit: Certainly, Paul, I’d love to. We agreed at the Birdfar that I'd go next year.

Paul: I was wondering whether you'd go next Thursday.

Marsh tit: Yikes. I’ve never been to Madagascar.

Thus it was that eight days later, my mind brimming with newly-learned newtonias, with swiftly-swotted needletails, and rapidly-revised rats (can't beat a spot of cheesy alliteration), I tipped up at Heathrow and was thrown upon the mercies of a most congenial group of Naturetrekkers. Together we saw twenty species of lemur superbly, told many tall tales, shared shirts (good old Air France), wept at the heart-clasping song of the indri and rejoiced in the extraordinary wildlife of this shard of Gondwana orphaned in the Indian Ocean. I lost my heart to the dusty red island and, though in doing so I lost many other things besides, I resolved to learn more of Madagascar over years to come.

So it is that on Monday I travel there for this year's tours, and for the final push in my wildlife-blogging year, the sugary vertebrate icing on the cake, so to speak. I realise that in so doing I am faced with a nail-biting race to the line. The numbers speak for themselves. Until now I have seen 856 species of bird in the wild in 2012. On one of last year's three-week Madagascar tours, expertly led by Andy Smith, the bird species seen which I have not already seen elsewhere in the world in 2012 numbered 139. Thus, if my tour starting next week were an exact copy of Andy's last year, I would end the tour on 995 bird species, agonisingly shy of 1,000.

The second tour I'm leading in Madagascar this year is the lemur tour, which is a condensed two-week version of the longer tour and covers no new ground. I'll therefore have no chance to see new species by virtue of geography, but of course the longer you spend in a habitat the more likely it is that you'll encounter scarcer species.

Once I get back to the UK there will only be slim pickings on offer. If by then I have seen 995 birds, will red-necked grebe, corn bunting, lesser spotted woodpecker, great northern diver and golden pheasant bridge the gap and take me to 1,000 birds?

It remains to be seen. The birds remain to be seen, as do many of Madagascar's endemic mammals, reptiles and amphibians. I imagine you're every bit as excited as I am. Tune in next week for Madagascan marshtittery and the nail-biting race to the finish.


Melman: Aaaah! Nature! It's all over me! Get it off!

Madagascar
DreamWorks Animation

A marsh tit washes his feet in a Berenty rainstorm by Jane Starmore

Mora mora

Last year, in the report for a lemur tour I led in Madagascar, I wrote the following of my remarkable colleague Claude Rambeloson:

But without doubt our greatest thanks must go to Claude, our guide, naturalist, mastermind and interpreter of all things Madagascar. He is a rare combination of a charming person, an encyclopaedic mind, a brilliant field naturalist, a gifted linguist and a natural comic. Our experience of his beautiful country would have been half as good without him. 

Last night I learned that I'll be working with Claude again on the three-week tour I'm leading this month and possibly the two-week lemur tour which I lead in November. I went to bed with a giant smile, thinking of the laughs we'll laugh, the couas we'll see and the huge amount I'll learn from Claude's humble, humourous genius.

Claude and a bearded tit by Jane Starmore

Roosts, East Anglian and Ecuadorian

The rooks fly home to the east tonight on buoyant breeze-surfing wings. To the west go the pinkfeet, in lazy skeins, into the sizzling embers of the sun.

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De aquí a un año, se me ocurrió hoy, estaré de nuevo en Ecuador. Así es la vida laboral.

Wind whispers

The wind came from the east and set the reeds a-whisper yesterday at Cley. Readers of Chaucer (all of you, surely) will know whose secret the reeds whisper and why.

And sith she dorste nat telle it to no man,
Doun to a marys faste by she ran -
Til she cam there, hir herte was a-fyre -
And as a bitor bombleth in the myre,
She leyde hir mouth unto the water down:
'Biwrey me nat, thow water, with thy sown,'
Quod she, 'to thee I telle it and namo;
Myn housbonde hath long asses erys two!
Now is myn herte al hool, now it is oute.
I myghte ne lenger kepe it, out of doute.' 

Geoffroy Chaucer
The Wife of Bath's Tale


The whispering reed did nothing to help us though, as we came seeking bearded tits. Leanne had never seen a bearded tit. During my twenty-five years as a naturalist I have seen many. Quite a number of them were birds. Of late the bearded tits at Cley have been numerous and conspicuous, in these joyful gold hours of autumn. So I promised Leanne I would show her one and we chose a day. Thereupon the wind swung to the east, the reeds told Midas' secret, and the bearded tits, so recently so obliging, took to the reed-bed's depths.

We heard them easily enough - pting pting pting - but the wind kept them hidden from our view. A Cetti's warbler plinked for a moment but tailed off, realising no-one would listen until the spring. Two redpolls rattled overhead, then another, and many a teal snipped at the sky with quick wings.

Coyly, the tits (un-tits to the initiate) began to appear. A photographer to the north of us saw a pair perch; we caught a glimpse of them diving into the sky-stroking hands of the reed; then a pair perched for us too, the male's ice-grey head fading fabulously into his autumn-tawny mantle.

Leanne had seen her bearded tits. So we sat in Bishop's and watched ducks. The one-track gadwall drakes puffed their square crests and tilted tails to flash black bottoms at the ducks. Shoveler pairs swam in tight pirouettes and wigeon drakes moulted, before our eyes it seemed, to reveal their pied posteriors and buttery bright foreheads. With the reed a-whisper still, and in the comfortable knowledge that in a week I shall be in Antananarivo, I was reconciled to this autumn, so unlike the last.

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.

Julian Barnes

Flaubert's Parrot

For old times' sake

I'm not by nature a twitcher. I love to watch birds but these days I spend little time chasing rare ones. I'm not even a lister. I have no idea how many birds or mammals I have seen in the world, though it's certainly one or two. This may sound strange as the ostensible subject of my blog is a list of vertebrates. I chose the list as a ruse, an Elizabeth poet might call it a conceit, to make me write regularly. In this sense it has worked; for two-hundred and seventy-eight times I have written here since my blog was whelped from the womb of a dark cold winter.

If you are still reading in the middle of October, two-hundred and seventy-eight posts later, you have only yourselves to blame.

Lists, though, need feeding and this occasionally requires some twitching. This morning for the fifth day a pectoral sandpiper was seen on the water meadow at Kelling. If you grew up in Norfolk a pectoral sandpiper is lovely to see but it's hardly a highlight of the year. We see a few of them around here. So many over the years, in fact, that we've become blasé about them. This autumn I've neglected to see five other pecs in Norfolk, though I did make some desultory attempts to see the bird which stayed for many days at Cley.

It was time I saw one. You see, pectoral sandpipers and I have history. For ten years I lived in Bolivia and slept under a migrant shorebird flyway. Too often I didn't sleep and in the course of years I heard thousands of upland sandpipers fly over my bed, in the South American night sky. With them occasionally I heard solitary sandpipers and pecs. I saw pecs countless times too, especially around Andean foothill lakes, though also in my own favourite wetlands near Santa Cruz.

So pecs and I have history and, realising I had not seen one in the five years since I moved back to Norfolk, this morning it was indeed time. I saw the sandpiper with remarkable ease. There was one wader on the water meadow. It was close to the shore in the cow-churned mud that pecs love. A few teal dibbled happily in the far corner and a swirl of linnets gossipped along a hedge of hawthorn. In the midday sun a male Roesel's bush-cricket sang, unheard and unwatched by the many birders passing, but closely watched by his female on the next bramble leaf.

I strolled up the muddy lane with 980 vertebrates on this Elizabethan conceit of a yearlist, and I stopped at my parents' for lunch.

Don’t let the bewildering variety put you off. Instead, let it inspire you. Bewildering variety is not an unfortunate occurrence. Bewildering variety is what life is all about. When you try to tell the difference between a willow warbler and a chiffchaff, you are not just posing yourself a puzzle to test your own observational skills. You are also entering into life’s deepest mystery. The name of that mystery is biodiversity.

Simon Barnes
How to be a Bad Birdwatcher

For old times’ sake

	Birds
856	pectoral sandpiper	Calidris melanotos

2012 Totals
Mammals: 85
Birds: 856
Reptiles: 20
Amphibians: 8
Fish: 11

Of mice and women

Yesterday the redwings came, fizzing through the sharp autumn sky in waves. The larks came too, with quiet purrs and a quiver of migrant wings. But my eyes looked down. Three pairs of wellies squelched and sucked through a Norfolk fen: mine, Trine's and Hayley's. These friends from the Hawk and Owl Trust are live-trapping small mammals here, to assist the site's owners in the development of a management plan.

The night before had been the traps' first on a new plot, so the catch was expected to be small. The mammals thought otherwise. The night had been cold and clear - with a star-speckled sky to guide the redwings south - and mouse, vole and shrew had been tempted into the traps by their generous supply of grain, fly pupae and clean hay. Many a trap had been sprung and many a mammal was gently measured and released. The wood mice, largely young females, when freed bounced across the cut sedge, a sparkle in their eyes. Most of them sat at a safe distance to wash; in Trine's words: I'm gonna wash that girl right outta my hair.

The common shrews, youngsters too to Hayley's expert eyes, scrunched up their velvety snouts and plunged their red, spider-crunching teeth into Trine's fleece. Released they dived into the litter at our feet and were lost, resentful squeaks tracking their path away from us. Both species of vole brought more muscle to their squirming. In the hand they are far less different from one another, in colour and size, than the popular books make out. But their tails and ears are subtly different, the field vole's tail a sturdy rudder and his ears better hidden by the fur of his head.

A siskin bounded by, giving his muted melancholy note and a ruddy shelduck, from who knows where, flew east into the rising sun. A common darter rose with it, and a red admiral, crisp with the promise of another spring, turned his wings to the last autumn warmth before his hibernation. Our warmth came from steaming tea made in the back of a happy red Land Rover, from the easy company of friends and the knowledge of a small job done for conservation.

From live traps in a fen

	Mammals
83	wood mouse	Apodemus sylvaticus
84	field vole	Microtus agrestis
85	common shrew	Sorex araneus

2012 Totals

Mammals: 85

Birds: 855

Reptiles: 20

Amphibians: 8

Fish: 11

October

How did that happen?