Behind More Binoculars , livre ebook

Behind More Binoculars
Behind More Binoculars
Interviews with Acclaimed Birdwatchers
Keith Betton and Mark Avery
PELAGIC PUBLISHING
Published by Pelagic Publishing
www.pelagicpublishing.com
PO Box 725, Exeter EX1 9QU, UK
Behind More Binoculars: Interviews with Acclaimed Birdwatchers
ISBN 978-1-78427-109-1 (Hbk)
ISBN 978-1-78427-110-7 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-78427-112-1 (PDF)
Copyright © 2018 Keith Betton & Mark Avery
Keith Betton & Mark Avery assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this document may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission from the publisher. While every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Pelagic Publishing, its agents and distributors will be held liable for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Puffins by Robert Gillmor
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
The interviews
Frank Gardner
Ann and Tim Cleeves
Roy Dennis
Kevin Parr
Tony Marr
Tim Appleton
Tim Birkhead
Dawn Balmer
Jon Hornbuckle
Tony Juniper
Richard Porter
Bryan Bland
Carol and Tim Inskipp
Barbara Young
Bill Oddie
Last thoughts
Selected bibliography
Index
Colour Plates
Preface
This is the second of our books of interviews with birders, birdwatchers and people interested in birds. When it came out a couple of years ago, Behind the Binoculars was well received and we had plenty more people on our list of potential interviewees, so we decided to produce another volume.
Producing a book like this is fun for the compilers – we meet interesting people, ask them impertinent questions and hear their stories. We hope you enjoy reading the interviews too.
One or other of us talked to each of the people in this book, and the interviews were transcribed, edited and then approved by the people we interviewed.
Spoken English is very different from written English, and we have tried to retain the conversational nature of the interviews but also make them relatively easy to read.
There are a few terms scattered through the interviews which might perplex some readers, and most of these are to do with the field sport of ‘twitching’. Not all, in fact rather few, birders are twitchers, even though the popular media can’t seem to get that fact straight. Twitchers are people who rush after rare birds hoping very much to see them. They twitch with a mixture of excitement and nervousness when they hear of a rare bird that they wish to see. If they fail to see it, then they have ‘dipped’, whereas if they see a bird they’ve never seen before it is a ‘lifer’ as it has been added to their ‘life list’ of birds (and by definition their ‘year list’ too). Many British birders have ‘British lists’, some have ‘county lists’, and others might have ‘garden lists’ – some have longer lists of lists.
Many birders do much of their regular birdwatching at a regular spot, often close to home, known as their ‘patch’.
The order in which the interviews appear in this book bears no relation to the order in which they were done – or to anything else, except to what we thought was a good order.
When we paused for breath, with all the interviews completed, we saw that we had been lucky (maybe skilful?) in picking some fascinating people with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. We also realised that this book takes the reader behind the binoculars of famous birders and into their heads, their thoughts and emotions.
Each interview stands alone as an interesting account, but there are also some common themes, or differences, that leaped off the pages. We discuss these in the last chapter.
Keith Betton and Mark Avery
March 2017
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Nigel Massen at Pelagic Publishing for encouraging us to put this book together, our interviewees for their openness and patience, and our partners (Esther Betton and Rosemary Cockerill) for their patience and help too.
Abbreviations A-Levels General Certificate of Education, Advanced Level Examination AA Automobile Association AK-47 Avtomat Kalashnikova assault rifle BB British Birds BBC British Broadcasting Corporation BBONT Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Naturalists’ Trust­ BBRC British Birds Rarities Committee BNS Bristol Naturalists’ Society BOC Bristol Ornithological Club BOU British Ornithologists’ Union BOURC British Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee BTO British Trust for Ornithology CAP Common Agricultural Policy CIA Central intelligence Agency CITES Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species DNA deoxyribonucleic acid DPhil Doctor of Philosophy EN English Nature EPC extra-pair copulation FoE Friends of the Earth FRS Fellow of the Royal Society G20 Group of Twenty of the largest national economies GP general practitioner GPS Global Positioning System HSBC Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation ICBP International Council for Bird Preservation IUCN International Union for Conservation of Nature IWRB International Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau ITV Independent Television JBRC Junior Bird Recorders Club JNCC Joint Nature Conservation Committee KPMG a professional service and auditing company M16 a US army rifle MI5 Military Intelligence 5 (UK security service) MP Member of Parliament MSc Master of Science degree NGO non-governmental organisation NHS National Health Service OBE Order of the British Empire OSME Ornithological Society of the Middle East PA personal assistant PhD Doctor of Philosophy RAF Royal Air Force RSPB Royal Society for the Protection of Birds SBSG Sheffield Bird Study Group SCC Stop Climate Chaos SOS Sussex Ornithological Society TRAFFIC Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce TTV timed tetrad visit UCNW University College of North Wales UN United Nations UNEP United Nations Environment Programme UV ultraviolet WCMC World Conservation Monitoring Centre WEA Workers’ Educational Association WeBS Wetland Bird Survey WWF World Wide Fund for Nature YOC Young Ornithologists’ Club
FRANK GARDNER
Frank Gardner is best known as the BBC’s Security Correspondent. He is an avid birdwatcher. While in Saudi Arabia in 2004 he was shot six times in an attack by terrorists, leaving him partly paralysed in the legs and dependent on a wheelchair. He was born in the 1960s.
INTERVIEWED BY KEITH BETTON
Where did it all start for you with birding?
I was about ten, my mother got me into it, and we thought she was a bit mad standing on windswept North Sea beaches in Holland when we lived there. I remember she was terribly excited one winter when she saw a Nutcracker, which sounded quite fun to me at the age of ten. But I couldn’t get her fascination with it, as she usually seemed to choose to birdwatch in very bleak and rather inhospitable places.
But she persuaded me to give it a try, I was given my first pair of fairly basic binoculars and it became quite fun. However, I was completely put off it three years later when I went to boarding school because the housemaster was a birdwatcher, and therefore the epitome of uncool, so I wanted nothing to do with him and his hobby and it took me twenty years to come back to it. And when I think of all the amazing places I backpacked round in central Asia, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Brazil and I wasn’t a birder then! I do remember going through a forest climbing a volcano in Chile and seeing a wonderful big black woodpecker with a red crest, and subsequently I realised it must have been a Magellanic Woodpecker.
It wasn’t until I was living in Bahrain and my mum came to stay in spring. I took her out for a picnic and we sat in this lovely oasis and a bright yellow bird shot past, then a few minutes later a bright red bird went past. I realised it was time to find out what these were so I tracked down the natural history guide there – Howard King, who’s still there today – and of course the yellow bird was a Golden Oriole on migration and the red one was a Madagascar Fody. People in Bahrain keep them as exotic pets and release them, so in Bahrain and Dubai you have these colonies of invasive birds like Zebra Waxbill, fodies and even African whydahs in some parts of Dubai. But what it meant to me was a need to find out what the shorebirds were, as they must be really exotic – only to find that they were plain old European Curlews, Whimbrels and Ringed Plovers – but I found that the tiny island of Bahrain had a very rich avifauna.
It was when I started travelling to Saudi for business that things really opened up. I went to the southwest where there is a wonderful fly route – you can see a lot of the African species in Saudi and Yemen such as Bateleur, Hamerkop, Dark Chanting Goshawk (if you’re really lucky), Yemen Thrush, Olive Pigeon, and Amethyst Starling, which is the most stunning bird.
Was there anyone else in your life interested in birds?
Subsequently Dr Stuart Butchart who worked for Birdlife International in Cambridge. I’ve birded a few times with him in East Anglia and he showed me my first Stone-curlew in Suffolk and also my first Water Rail at Titchwell. He’s also a wheelchair birder but it doesn’t put him off and he goes everywhere.
What was your first pair of binoculars?
They were pretty crude, 7×25, heavy metal. The ones I have now are Steiner, 8×40. About four or five years ago, at my request, my mum gave me a scope and a tripod for my birthday, but to be honest I don’t use it that much as the eyepiece is angled upwards, which is rubbish for me in a wheelchair as I need on