It was my birthday a couple of days ago - again. It comes round just once a year apparently, but the gap between one birthday and the next seems smaller every time. Birthdays, and the wine that accompanies them, always make me reflective - a mid-summer stock-take if you like. So, what's the state of this union of blood, bone, and emotion? All in all things are going pretty well: I'm in a great relationship with my partner Jo; I have a daughter I adore and who - though a little embarassed by me sometimes - adores me back; I'm a little older and more worn on the outside than I want to be, but I'm getting to be a good age on the inside; I have a collection of friends - a mixed and to be honest fairly small collection, but it's mine and I'm quite proud of it nonetheless...
And I have birding...
Those who know me well would probably joke that I'd've put "Birding" at the top of the preceding list if I thought that Jo or my daughter were never going to read this - but I don't think so (and Jo is endlessly supportive anyway). I can see why they'd say it though: I spend far too much time thinking about birds and birding, and I've been thinking far too much lately. I guess part of the reason has been starting this blog and wanting to write cogently and coherently again. Without the blog, anyway, I wouldn't have posted a short entry about a paper I'd been working on with my brother Nial (who is a conservationist living in South Korea) on "Narcissus Flycatchers", and I wouldn't have been sent a perfectly-timed email by a fellow birder and blogger congratulating us both on the obvious efforts we'd made but asking - melancholic tongue lodged firmly in cheek I hoped - "Why bother?"
Now if Jo and I hadn't been having a post-birthday-evening wind-down with one of several bottles of Dornfelder Portugeiser left behind by two German friends, G and H, who'd visited us the day before, I probably wouldn't have mentioned this email to her - and we'd never have had the conversation that followed. Whether after reading this you'll have decided that wouldn't have been such a bad thing I'm yet to find out of course, but for me - already in the midst of that "mid-summer stock take" mindset I mentioned earlier - it was a conversation I wouldn't have missed. Why? Because I learnt why I go birding...
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...I think I'm naturally curious. I like to understand things. Not everything - as long as the wheels keep turning I've never really wanted to know how an engine works - but I do sometimes feel like one of those actors who are always asking, "So - what's my motivation?"
I spend hours every day working on this blog and on the website I set up with my brother for the work we do in Korea. I enjoy it but I almost feel compelled to do it. I don't get paid for it and wouldn't want to, yet - like many of my friends - I'm in debt: not by much, but I'd be able to get out of it easily enough if I committed the time to do so. My job with British Airways takes me away from Jo for days on end, yet when I'm home I sit on my own for hours tap-tap-tapping away. I've been doing this for nearly five years now - and just recently I've been wondering why.
The problem is this: I really enjoy going birding but always feel that I should be doing something more creative than just "going birding". I really like to write, but then again if I spend my time writing I don't have time to go birding, and if I can't go birding I resent the time I spend writing. If I'm not writing I don't feel like I'm doing any conservation work and I wonder what's the point of being a birder at all if I'm just going to sit and watch the birds gradually disappear and not do anything about it. Maybe I should just strike a compromise and do a bit of birding and a bit of writing - except that as I'm away all the time I really feel that when I'm home I should do neither...
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"So why don't you just stop?" a good friend asked recently.
"Stop? Stop birding?"
"Something's got to give, may as well be birding."
"You're joking right...?"
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When our German friends G and H - the ones who'd brought the bottles of wine - were visiting they'd asked me to explain what it was about birding I enjoyed so much. They've known Jo far longer than they've known me, and though their English is pretty good (and my German non-existent) I was sure they were just being polite and probably didn't want a very in-depth answer. Had they asked me the same question in January - or at any time when I wasn't due a birthday and another "stock-take" - I'd probably just have smiled and said something like "Because I love getting outside and I love birds". Unfortunately it was late-July - and casting language-related difficulties to one side I just had to try and answer them properly.
They live on a farm and go horse-riding, and that seemed a good place to start: "You know how when you're out on your horse you can leave everything else behind, and you have to concentrate on the horse, and where he's going to put his feet, and you're focussed on a point in the distance and how you're going to get there? Well," I said, "it's a bit like that..."
They looked at me doubtfully - not sure how it was like that at all. "Don't you just lie still and wait for a bird to fly over?", H eventually asked.
"Sometimes I do that," I said slowly, " but when I go birding I like to walk. And if I walk long enough I begin to 'fit in', to feel sort of part of the environment. If I'm in forest, I feel like I'm part of the forest. I move differently. I use different senses..." I pointed to the back of my head. "I feel like I'm using a different part of my brain when I'm birding...maybe like you feel when you're riding? You sense the horse, the movement, become more aware..." I was faltering. "It's not just about the horse...it's everything that goes with it..."
I paused wondering if this was making any sense to them. I was about to try and explain some more when G said, "I thought it was because you liked birds..."
"And because I like birds." I nodded, and changed the subject.
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"I know why you go birding," Jo said. "You don't like people. It gets you away from people." It has always struck Jo as ironic that I work for an airline and say that I don't like people. That I spend hours trapped with them, circling the globe with no way out. In fact - as she well knows - it's not that I don't like people, it's that I don't like humanity particularly. I mentally separate 'individuals' from humanity, and I don't have much of a problem with 'individuals'. In fact, I like people, and - I hope - people like me. But humanity...en-masse...we're awful...
"You're humanity too," Jo said when I explained this to her, jabbing her finger at me to make sure I knew that she was making 'a good point'.
"I know that..." I was just thinking that what I needed was a clever answer, and that how clever answers and Dornfelder Portugeiser were mutually exclusive, when it struck me just how right she was. "Oh no. I go birding because I'm guilty...I'm part of humanity. I pollute - I work for an airline, for God's sake...I have a child...I use electricity, I use water, I buy STUFF...I go birding and I do all the conservation work because I'm guilty, guilty as Hell." I looked at Jo (somewhat blearily I will admit) over my wine-glass. "That's not much of a reason to do anything..."
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If anyone were to ask Nial and I about our experiences of each other when we'd been growing up, I'm pretty sure that they'd get two very different answers. I hardly knew Nial was there, and as the younger brother Nial was all too well aware that wherever he went it seemed like I'd been there first. Nial was determined to plough his own furrow though. He'd been in Japan for five years, working desperately hard on wetland conservation, before I really became aware that he'd left the UK and was living somewhere else. In the meantime I'd been birding. I'd joined BA primarily as a way to go round the world watching birds - and that's what I'd been doing. I saw species I'd never heard of in places I didn't know existed, and then a year later I'd be back to try to find them again. I lived the life of a birding hedonist and it was hugely enjoyable. But after a while I realised I was going back to places that weren't there anymore, and looking for birds that weren't there any more either...
Nial on the other hand had settled in the Far East and was working unbelievably hard to protect the region's wetlands and wetland birds. When I finally realised what he was up to I remember feeling very guilty indeed. I'd just made a video about the wildlife of Portland Island in Dorset and showed it to Nial, who by now had moved to South Korea and was back on a quick visit to the UK. He watched the video with interest. "If only," he said, "we had something like this on the birds of Korea...we could do so much good..."
We talked for hours. We probably talked more that night than we had done in the preceding twenty years. He had no car, was vegetarian, and lived in a tiny apartment surrounded by papers and books. He must have read them all he knew so much. I felt that for all the travelling and the birding I'd done I'd learnt nothing. Nial had plans, a strategy, a passion you could touch. I'd made a video and it had been fun, but I felt oddly detached from it. In my heart of hearts I felt it wasn't making up for all those years I'd been going round in circles enjoying myself. "Let's make a video," I said to him (somewhat blearily) over my wine-glass...
The thing about "getting involved" is that it never seems to stop. There's always more to do. We made a video and then we needed to promote it. We needed a group to give us a voice. What we really needed, I thought, was a website to promote the video and to promote our ideas. A group would surely follow. Neither of us knew the first thing about putting together websites, but I figured I could learn the basics in a couple of months. I was wrong of course, but that didn't matter. The harder things were the better as far as I was concerned. I was doing something worthwhile at last...
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"You're not THAT guilty," Jo said pointing at me again. "You do stuff. You spend hours on that thing," she jabbed her finger very hard in the direction of my lap-top, "doing it..."
"Maybe," I said, "I'm offsetting some of the damage I do as part of humanity by going birding."
"By getting in your car or a taxi or a bus and going birding?"
"Hmm. No, that's not offsetting anything...," I conceded. "Maybe writing about going birding then."
"You think?"
"I reckon," I said trying to think about it through the increasingly fogging effect of German wine. "Maybe someone might read about me going birding and think that they'd like to go birding too. Or that birds are...," I struggled for the right word, "great. Really great. That would be good. Not much offsetting - but some. And all the Birds Korea stuff - I'm helping Nial do some offsetting - though to be honest he has far less to offset than I do..."
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Actually my blogging friend had asked me something I'd been trying to answer anyway. Sometimes I really wasn't sure what the point was of all the hard work Nial and I were doing. I knew why Nial did it. He believed passionately that what we were doing was going to make a difference eventually. But sometimes I wasn't so sure. Our group was still too small to make much of a difference. It had been growing, but not growing fast enough. We'd been reaching a few people I guess. And meeting and talking to them was always inspiring and exciting. That feeling when you connect with a like-minded soul - can't be beaten...
But on the down side wetlands were still being reclaimed, birds were still threatened, and I'm forever trying to catch up, forever finding new things to add to the pile.
What I needed was a reason for all the effort. A single, well-wrapped reason on my birthday...
Reasons, though, just don't come in neat packages. They're awkward and layered. They come all tangled up with experience and hope, joy and disappointment, the past and the future. The tricky little rascals shift about when you try to pin them down. Catching one's like trying to ladle smoke into a box...
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"Dwyiaccherllyneedareesunanyway," I asked Jo, waving a finger around in an increasingly unco-ordinated way.
"Tugobirdingortowritestuffonnarcissississthings...?"
That may well have seemed like a very good question an hour or so ago, but right now I wasn't sure I could answer. That or any other question in fact. It was getting far too late. "MaybeswatIdo - thatsall..."
"Thatsproblyit...happybirthdaymistabirdwatcher..."
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I'm writing this in Seattle, in a hotel room nineteen floors up, and it's raining. I'd be birding right now, but everything outside's turned a wet slate-grey and I suppose I wanted to finish this anyway.
You know, it's been almost a week since I went birding. A whole birthday has come and gone since I last went birding...unbelievable. I miss it. I'm starting to miss my binoculars too. I know it sounds silly, but I really love the way they make the world look. Really sharp. My eyes just don't do the "sharp thing" anymore. And the colours are so much brighter. And clearer. It's not that I can't see well - I just can't see THAT well. The world just comes into focus when you can see properly.
I guess a lot of things come into focus when you're doing something you really like...
