As I filed a recent Guardian Birdwatch column, about the rare Sabine’s gull that turned up unexpectedly on my local patch on the Somerset coast, I realised I have been contributing these short articles for exactly half my lifetime. When counted alongside my Weatherwatch column, this month sees my 1,000th dispatch from the great outdoors.
Coincidentally, my first Birdwatch, in January 1993, was also about gulls. It celebrated both their beauty and their ability to adapt to living alongside us, even though most people don’t appreciate them. Since then, Britain’s birdlife has changed beyond what I could have ever imagined.
When I was a fledgling birder, during the 1960s and 1970s, the number of species either gained or lost as British breeding birds was in low single figures. I recall the surprise and excitement when Cetti’s warbler and the Mediterranean gull colonised southern England, and the sense of loss we all felt when two once-common birds – red-backed shrike and wryneck – disappeared. During a brief spell of cooling in the north Atlantic, snowy owl – and a handful of other species – arrived from the north. But they stayed for just a few years, before beating a rapid retreat as climate change began to take hold.
Yet, as I have documented in the past decade or so, my adopted county has seen the arrival of little egrets, cattle egrets and great white egrets from continental Europe, bitterns and marsh harriers from the east, and (with a helping hand from conservationists) our tallest bird, the common crane. While these exotic new species are a welcome addition to our avifauna, many of them would not be here were it not for the milder winters brought about by the climate crisis.
My life has also changed dramatically since I first began writing for the Guardian. Then, I was living with my young family in north London, with little or no time to watch birds. Soon afterwards, following a move to west London, I stumbled across my first “local patch”, Lonsdale Road reservoir alongside the River Thames, next to the famous Boat Race course.
For the following three years I documented my sightings here in each month’s Birdwatch column, noting the changes of birdlife from season to season. During that time I received a letter from a reader who also frequented this tiny nature reserve, containing a stern admonishment. “You write about your local patch,” she wrote, “But it’s not just yours, it’s our local patch!” Suitably chastened, I duly apologised.
Wherever I have lived since, I made sure I featured each new local patch in my column, contrasting with accounts of my exotic adventures to far-flung locations around the world. These were thanks to my new career as a wildlife TV producer at the BBC Natural History Unit, usually accompanied by presenter Bill Oddie.
Guardian readers vicariously joined us as we went birding at Disney World in Florida, in Trinidad and Tobago, Mallorca and Poland, and on the Icelandic island of Surtsey – a land mass younger than I was, having emerged from beneath the ocean after undersea volcanic activity in late 1963. A trip to Antarctica with Michaela Strachan for the Really Wild Show, and to the Maasai Mara for Big Cat Diary, were also highlights for me – and hopefully for you, too.
By then in my 40s, I began to delve back in time, recalling the birding adventures of my childhood. Most were on the gravel pits and reservoirs of suburbia, a place famously described by the author and broadcaster Kenneth Allsop as “the messy limbo that is neither town nor country”. But there were also visits to the Isles of Scilly, north Norfolk, and the Kentish birding hotpots of Stodmarsh and Dungeness, which we cycled to as teenagers in the days when children were given the freedom to explore alone.
All of these pieces – my first 150 columns – were collated and published by the Guardian and Aurum Press in one of my earliest books, This Birding Life. I now realise that this marked a major advance for me: having turned my hobby into my job, I was embracing the genre of “New Nature Writing” – more personal, intimate and narrative-led accounts of the natural world.
This change was triggered by a divorce, remarriage, and my move to the West Country with my new young family. For the first few years here, I wrote mainly about the birds in our large garden on the Somerset Levels. The swallows, the very first bird I saw as we arrived at our new home on a baking July day; the buzzards, so scarce when I was growing up that my mother had to drive me all the way to north Wales to see one; and the blue-crowned parakeet – an escaped bird – that appeared unexpectedly a few months after our move. I was reminded of London’s rose-ringed parakeets, those impossibly noisy and exotic newcomers which are now all over the capital, but still haven’t made it to Somerset. I miss them.
As the years went by, and the children began to grow up, I explored farther afield. I now often write about the birds of my current favourite local patch on the Somerset coast, which I call the Three Rivers – the Huntspill, Parrett and Brue – and which I visit with my birding companions most weekends. The Sabine’s gull featured in this month’s 1,000th column was the 150th species I have seen there. Yet my excitement was tinged with the realisation that, during my 18 years of living in Somerset, I have witnessed the precipitous declines of so many once-common and familiar species.
It was recently announced that five species of seabird, including that extraordinary global traveller the Arctic tern, have joined the Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern. This has raised the total of UK breeding and wintering species on that list to 73 – that’s more than twice as many as on the first Red List in 1996, and representing three out of 10 of all our regularly occurring bird species. Most shockingly of all, species that even recently were common summer visitors – the swift and house martin –are now on the Red List. This is not just down to climate change, but also the decline of flying insects as a result of the biodiversity crisis.
Meanwhile, the British Ornithologists’ Union’s official list of birds recorded in Britain – including rare vagrants from around the globe – has risen since 1992 from just under 550 species to more than 630. To put this in perspective, I still have my battered copy of The Status of Birds in Britain and Ireland, published in 1971, which lists only 470 species – just three-quarters of today’s number.
This huge increase is down to the effects of the climate crisis on global weather patterns, producing more frequent and extreme weather events. These have in turn led to a higher incidence of vagrancy, such as the unprecedented landfall of North American landbirds on our western coasts, such as the magnolia and Canada warblers, both of which display much brighter and more striking plumage, combining yellows, blacks and greys, than our rather drab Old World warblers.
As well as the newly red-listed swift and house martin, familiar birds from my childhood, such as the grey partridge and turtle dove, have virtually disappeared from our rural countryside. As has that classic sign of spring: the cuckoo.
Soon after moving here, I chanced across Mick, who grew up in our village in the 1950s. “Did you used to get cuckoos here?” I asked. He responded with that look, a mix of kindness and pity, which Somerset folk give to idiots like me from “up London”. “Cuckoos …” he said. “Cuckoos? They used to drive us mad.”
I tried to imagine a time when the call of the cuckoo was an irritation rather than a wonder. And I didn’t hear one in my village for many years, until a timely visitor called twice from the bottom of our garden, on the morning of my 60th birthday, during the spring 2020 lockdown. Sadly, cuckoos have continued to decline on the Somerset Levels and this year I only heard one.
So, having clocked up my 1,000th column on weather, climate and birds, I wonder if I’ll still be writing them in another 32 years’ time, when I’m 96? I was cheered recently by the report that the doyen of Guardian columnists, the chess master Leonard Barden, is still making his weekly contribution at the age of 95, after almost 70 years at the helm.
But what will have happened to our weather, climate and birds by 2056? Looking back to 1992, it would have been hard to imagine the changes I have witnessed since then, so I’m not going to make any predictions. What I can say is that unless we halt the runaway progress of both the climate and the global biodiversity crises, then not only will the weather be unimaginably horrific, but there will be far fewer birds left to write about.
On a lighter note – and my wife, Suzanne, always tells me to end on a positive point – the younger generation is fighting much harder than we ever did to try to halt, and then reverse, the negative effects of our current calamities. Maybe they will, against all the odds, be able to return us to a time when changes in the weather were simply a topic of daily small talk, and common species of bird were just that – common.
• Stephen Moss is a naturalist and author. His latest book, The Starling: A Biography, is published by Square Peg on 3 October
Stephen would like to thank his editors at the Guardian: Tim Radford, Celia Locks, Liz McCabe, Bibi van der Zee and Alan Evans
