Bird rage

I never feel my week has truly started until I’ve been repeatedly told to fuck off by an angry stranger.

Judged on those terms, my week starts at 9.22 on Monday evening.

The man – sixtyish, white, ruddy-faced – is angry. That much is clear. His train (it’s my train too, but that’s by the by) has been cancelled, and he’s venting his spleen at close quarters towards an admirably calm and polite Southern employee. She asks him please not to raise his voice.

‘I’M NOT RAISING MY VOICE.’

Uh huh.

I attempt to intervene, mildly pointing out that he is, in fact, raising his voice. The seconds that follow include a fair amount of fuck-off-ing, a bit of what’s-it-got-to-do-with-you-itude, and some pungent do-you-want-to-make-something-of-it-eh-well-what-about-it-ery.

‘Make something of it? Why of course! How about a nice brooch, or a pair of earrings?’

Ah, l’esprit d’escalier. My actual retort is a flimsy ‘Please don’t tell me to fuck off’, as if my insistence on being polite is going to dent his barrage of belligerence.

But it’s clear he’s never going to make anything of it. He’s just a shouty arsehole who wants to get home. I know how he feels. I too want to get home, and I too have been that shouty arsehole, more times than I care to remember. Perhaps this hard-learned self-knowledge, an awareness of the power of my own suppressed rage, enables me to identify its true meaning more easily in others.

What he really needs, I think afterwards, is to go out birdwatching. I can count instances of birding rage on the fingers of one finger.

I am in a hide at the London Wetland Centre with my son. It is half term. Quiet places, bird hides. Usually.

This man is also sixtyish, white, ruddy-faced. But instead of the machinations of an under-resourced public transport system, his adversaries are a telescope and its tripod. The equipment is clearly new and clearly expensive, and he is clearly having one of those days.

Oliver and I scan the grazing marsh, aware of the wrestling match playing out behind us, but determinedly admiring the acrobatics of lapwings, the serene floatings of pochard, the prehistoric legginess of herons. The man’s struggle starts as background noise to this tranquil scene.

click thud clunk bugger scrape rattle clank sodding thing will you just bloody well shuffle clink thlunk bollocks

A little egret takes off, Persil-white stark against the drab marsh behind, wings languid, legs trailing.

smiffle clump thwack THUDDDDDD

An instant of silence containing all the suppressed energy of one man’s frustration, its intensity signalling the strength of the outburst to come.

‘FUUUUUUUUUUUCK! YOU FUCKING CUUUUUUUUUUUUUNT!’

Oliver is twelve. He has never heard any of those words. No honestly, he hasn’t.

He has now.

As one who has broken more new and expensive things than I care to remember, I feel for this man. His struggle is lonely and unwinnable, his face registering despair as much as anything else. All he wanted to do was look at some birds, his ambition cruelly thwarted by the impersonal cruelty of unfathomable technology. As anyone who has ever shouted at an inanimate object will testify, it’s that feeling of powerlessness that smarts.

The powerlessness I feel when it comes to finding hawfinches is of a different kind, and luckily it’s tempered by a feeling of bland resignation to my fate. Everyone else and their dog has seen them. It’s just a club I’m not going to be allowed to join. But it won’t stop me trying.

Scarce and declining as a breeding bird, the resident hawfinch population is usually boosted by winter migrants. This is a bumper year, the cheeky blighters irrupting all over the place like acne on a teenager’s face; except, inevitably, anywhere near me. As so often, the birds choose to be where I’m not.

A lot of the sightings are fleeting, the birds alerting the keen-eared birder to their presence with a peremptory ‘tik’, then passing overhead and disappearing from view in an instant, but a flock of twenty or so has been hanging around a wood in West Sussex for a few days, so off I go on Friday morning, rising at blackbird’s fart to beat the traffic.

Never having seen one, I read up beforehand. ‘A giant among finches’, ‘shy’, ‘elusive’, ‘handsome’, ‘softly coloured’. These descriptions are all very well, but they skirt round the subject, for the one defining feature on which all the guides are agreed (one of them even says it twice, in case you didn’t get the message the first time) is that the hawfinch has a simply massive conk. If you were having Sunday afternoon tea in polite company with a hawfinch, you’d get into trouble with your mum for staring at its bill and giggling.

I arrive; I park; I walk. A marsh tit, my first this year, pops out to say hello. I pat myself firmly on the back for recognising it from its call. I do the same with a treecreeper, a trilling sound drawing my eye to a tree until I discern its camouflaged form at the end of a branch, silhouetted against the sky. Double backpat. I spent most of last year berating myself for my lacklustre aural skills, a particularly embarrassing failing for a conductor, but this year I’m showing signs of progress.

Apart from those two fine birds, though, it’s quiet. Too quiet. There’s a wren in a woodpile, a couple of alarmed robins, a green woodpecker flying away from me as fast as it possibly can – ah well, I can’t blame it, it’s only avian.

Of hawfinches there is not a trace.

I do another lap, knowing it’s not going to happen. I’m not angry, just disappointed. As I tramp back to the car I glance up and to the left, alerted by I don’t know what.

A buzzard. And another one. They fly up from behind a clump of pines and tumble around each other in a quite unbuzzardy way – I’m used to them in more stately mode, rising on thermals or perched alert on a fencepost. These two are full of the exuberance of puppies, playfighting in the air for my benefit alone, energetic and youthful.

They’re not hawfinches, not what I expected, but they will most definitely do. Forrest Gump would have something to say about that.

Fuck off guy seems a million years away. I wonder where he is, whether he is still shouting, railing at life’s unfairness, his ruddy face glowing with disgust at a universe bent on thwarting him at every turn.

I thank the buzzards, mumble an amused curse at the absent hawfinches, and walk down the hill to the car.

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