In a life comprising inexplicable and mainly unimpressive lists, there is one that stands out for me.
Since I was about 8, I have kept a life list of every bird species that I have seen. You’re not interested and, frankly, neither am I but, for the record, it currently runs to 1202 species, in all. The first was a chaffinch in my parents’ garden in the late sixties, and the most recent a Cordilleran Canastero in a car park in Patagonia last Autumn.
I no longer really look to add to it, but I still get excited by vagrants, things that aren’t where they should be. The most interesting of all was Albert Ross, a Black-Browed Albatross, who spent 30 years or so around Bass Rock getting the sexual brush off from surprised gannets towards the end of the 20thcentury. For Albert, the ugly-duckling-turned-magnificent-swan moment never happened, and he died a disappointed soul, a bird out of time and place, and in the wrong hemisphere.
But you can imagine my happiness when I looked up from my desk early this morning and saw, for the first time for me in Britain, a Bee-eater. It was perched on a telephone line that runs through my neighbour’s garden, and was more obviously a bee-eater than an ostrich is an ostrich.
The human brain does fast thought and slow thought, depending on whether it has the time or inclination to think through something. So my fast thought was: ‘how fantastic- a bee-eater. I must go and wake Caroline to tell her’. It wasn’t until half way up the stairs that my slow thought got going, running something like this.
A bee-eater eats bees, normally about 250 of them a day. (It picks them up by the head, and then bashes them on a hard surface to remove the sting). Bee-eaters also tend to flock, in groups of up to 200, which means that a flock of them will get through around 50,000 bees on a good day. I have four hives of bees in various stages of development, a total of probably 100,000 bees. 100,000 divided by 50,000 is 2. Worst case scenario is, therefore, that it takes 2 days to clean out my four-year bee project.
I suspect that I may be over-worrying this one. At the moment, there is only one of them, and it hasn’t gone anywhere near my hives. I love that it has travelled thousands of miles to be here, and I secretly want it to feel free to help itself to some of the older ones, and maybe a handful of useless drones.
The point of all this, if there is one, is that I judge the birdlife in my garden by how much it has changed since 14th October 1994, the day my dad died. He and I would go bird watching together, and I like to think of how surprised he would be at some of what is knocking around 25 years later that wasn’t here when he was alive. Buzzards, peregrines, red kites, egrets, ravens, cormorants, Egyptian geese and now, Bee-eaters.
Sometimes, we don’t quite give nature enough credit for adapting to climate change quicker, and better, than we think it might.
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