Lies, damned lies and black redstarts

Once upon a time there was a little boy who lied.

He didn’t do it all the time. No no not at all. Uh uh. Only when the mood came upon him, and when it was advantageous to do so. They were routine little lies, the everyday kind.

‘Have you done your homework/brushed your teeth/tidied your room?’

‘Yes Mum.’

As lies go, they were pretty pathetic, because they were so often disproved by easily collected physical evidence. Yet he continued to tell them, and no real harm came of it.

Some of them were real doozies, leading to moments of distress. The Great Swimming Test Embarrassment was one. The Stolen Tooth Brace Disaster another.

And then there was the black redstart.

Now before you get all judgey, let’s just stop and examine, shall we? Which of us hasn’t at some time or other indulged in a little harmless truth economy?

Here’s a little checklist for you:

‘Sorry mate, I don’t have any change.’

‘Mm yes, it’s delicious thanks.’

‘No it’s fine, I’ll stand.’

‘No no you look great.’

‘Go on, I’m listening.’

‘I really enjoyed the way you phrased the slow movement.’

‘I love you.’

‘I am not a crook.’

‘Immigration is out of control.’

‘Nobody ever said 350 million.’

Thought so.

Anyway. The black redstart.

Gorgeous bird, the black redstart. About the size of a robin, and perky as all get out. Its name gives a clue to its appearance, but only if you know that ‘start’ is an old word for ‘tail’, coming from the Old English steort, which is one of those things I’m sure you were itching to know without realising it. The black redstart looks to me as if nature intended it to be red all over but then decided to play a prank on it by holding it by the tail and immersing it in a bucket of coal dust.

For the young liar under discussion (it was me, by the way, but you knew that all along) the black redstart held a peculiar fascination. Like truth, it was rare and elusive. Its natural habitat was in cliffs around the coast, but it also liked hanging out around derelict buildings and rubble, so experienced a resurgence in cities after the war. These were not environments readily available to a young lad growing up in Oxfordshire in the 1970s, so the black redstart eluded him. Me, I mean me.

And yet…

There, in my battered copy of The Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, against the little illustration of the black redstart, is a discernible tick. A slightly shaky tick, as if I knew all along that fate would one day extract its revenge, but a tick nonetheless.

Where did it come from, this lie?

I was desperate to see one, I remember that much. Its rarity in Britain made it part of a select group of birds I yearned for – Dartford warbler, red kite, golden eagle – the romance of their unattainability enhanced by a distinctiveness of appearance that set them apart from the run of ordinary things.

At some stage this desperation must have manifested itself as barefaced mendacity.

‘Sod it,’ I would have thought, ‘I’m ticking it. Nobody will ever know.’

When I came back to birding a couple of years ago after a thirty-odd year absence, there it was, staring at me, the boldest lie you ever did see.

I’m not quite sure why I was so outraged by this lie. I laughed about it, of course, in an ‘Oh look – how sweet I was, lying about my bird sightings’ kind of way. But I was also at some level actually shocked at myself. Perhaps it was because by now I was a parent, hoping to instil in my offspring some sense of honesty and good conduct. Perhaps it was because the lie that nobody will ever discover is somehow worse than the one that is easily exposed, gnawing at the soul like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.

So I decided to write a book about it.

You may think this was taking things too far.

The book isn’t all about lying – it was also a handy way for me to write about birds without being in any way an expert about them – but it was spawned by a lie. If I hadn’t told that porkie pie all those years ago I wouldn’t have discovered it in years to come, wouldn’t have been outraged, and wouldn’t have found the little thread that led to a book being written. It was, in its own way, a life-changing event, that lie.

So what I’m saying, kids, is this: lie your little arses off – you never know where it may lead. Who knows? You might even become president.

Cut to last Friday. I’m out birding, as has become my weekly habit. I’ve risen at lark’s fart and driven to Dungeness, there to commune with egrets and other water birds, and also to participate, in my own small way, in the wonder that is autumn migration.

Reader, I saw my black redstart. And I saw it as the result of another lie, an innocent and honest lie told in order to avoid small talk. How British can you get?

‘I’m going to head that way.’

Needless to say, ‘that way’ wasn’t where I was heading, but the birder I’d just run into, and with whom I’d exchanged the usual ‘anything-about-no-nothing-much-just the usuals-oh-really-I-saw-a-firecrest-yesterday-have-you-heard-about-the-grosbeak-that’s-just-turned-up-on-the-Scilly-Isles’ banter, was beginning to warm to his subject, and I…well, it’s not that I don’t like other birders. But (and at this point feel free to call me an antisocial curmudgeonly berk) I have an allergy to the extended random encounter. I’ll always say hello – even thirty-five years of living in London hasn’t expunged that natural layer of friendliness – but given the choice between small talk with an unknown birder and a brief communion with a stonechat perched on a bush, then I’m taking Saxicola rubicola any day of the week, and not just for the superior conversation.

As I trudged my circuitous route towards the car, leaning into the squall whipping towards me from the sea, my brain registered a sound, a rising chirruping whistle (whirrup? chistle? – we need more words). Familiar but not familiar. Familiar because I’d listened to it on recordings; not familiar because it wasn’t part of the regular soundtrack to a day’s birding. Not to me, at any rate.

Brains can be slow. It took at least half a minute for mine to register that this was unusual, and then, with a surge of elation, what it might be. It treated me to a couple of minutes of expert perching on the chain link fence, then it buggered off, leaving behind it a disproportionate sense of joy and resolution.

The significance of this one rusty-sooty little bird lies not just in its personal resonance for me. Sure, it represents the tying up of a loose strand, the end of a thirty-five year quest I didn’t even know I was engaged in for most of that time. The lie – long forgotten then recalled with vivid outrage – can finally be laid to rest and forgiven.

But it’s not just that.

It’s about communion with nature, the reestablishment of contact with a world we can so easily lose sight of, the deep and relaxing in-breath we take as we look outwards beyond ourselves and begin to acknowledge the existence of other creatures on this planet.

All of that. Blah blah blah.

But it’s not just that either.

The black redstart on the chainlink fence belongs to everyone who cares to see it; at the same time it belongs to nobody but itself. But for those couple of minutes, it belonged to me and my mendacious twelve-year-old self, who somehow knew his lie wouldn’t be a lie for ever.

But, as Columbo would say at this point, there’s just one more thing.

All these encounters with nature, from the moth round the light bulb to the condor over the Andes, represent the slotting-in of a tiny piece of our universe jigsaw. We’ll never come close to finishing it, but nonetheless we persevere, constructing our own little corner of it in the hope that one day we’ll be able to stand far enough away from it for some of it to make sense.

And that’s why I go birdwatching every Friday.

I’d love to provide you with a photograph of the bird, just to prove it to you. But you’re just going to have to trust me. It was there. Would I lie to you?

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