I was keen to give Mark something in return for all the plants he had kindly donated, and I noticed that his eye had been caught by some of the snowdrops from our front garden which had finally gone over after putting on a fine display over the previous six weeks. The best time to dig up and split snowdrops, Mark explained, was just after the flowers had faded. Removing some of the bulbs would not only give the opportunity to introduce snowdrops elsewhere into the garden but would ensure that the remaining bulbs would have more than enough room to put on an equally impressive show the following winter. Following Mark’s lead, it really was child’s play as we carefully dug up a few bunches with trowels, which were then split into smaller clumps of, say, half a dozen bulbs. Some of these small clumps were then either given to our horticultural consultant as a gift, or planted down in the woodland to repopulate our bank the cheap, easy and quick way, rather than having to wait the decades necessary for the snowdrops to spread under their own steam. This was also the first time that we had played ‘botanical swapsies’ – a game which hopefully we would continue to enjoy during the up and coming months.
After lunch, Mark and I headed off to Bristol, Mark to enjoy the rest of the weekend back in his own garden whilst I was away to feed one of my other addictions – watching football. Both watching and playing sport has often come a close second to my obsession with natural history, to the extent that Christina has long since given up fighting the constant drone of BBC Radio Five Live that I usually insist of having on in the background all weekend. Having chosen to support Bristol City since my move down to the West Country, it has to be said that, while skill levels are often seriously lacking, it is still a fun way to spend every alternate Saturday afternoon. Making me feel only slightly guilty that she was determined to carry on working whilst I was off enjoying myself, Christina wanted to begin digging up the weedy section of lawn running the length of the garage. Our aim was that this section would be turned into one of the real highlights of the more formal part of the garden – what better place to plant a huge herbaceous border?
I returned some three hours later, buoyed by an uncharacteristically adept performance and a 2–0 win by The Robins, and I couldn’t believe how much Christina had achieved in such a short space of time. Having removed the turf, she had then created a lovely sweeping curve that would mark the front edge of the bed – the neck of which began at the defunct garage side-door, and widened out to a depth of three yards past the wisteria and newly erected trellis, before then swinging sharply back in to meet the corner of the garage wall underneath the hawthorn standard and by the water butt. This shape had the effect of a drawing the eye away from the garage and down the garden towards the apple trees. Not content to stop there, she had also turned over most of the soil, incorporating three or four pre-purchased bags of compost to create the perfect growing medium. In the space of three hours and out of nothing she had just created a herbaceous border in which to put all Mark’s plants. This girlfriend was a keeper!
In fact, it would turn out to be a weekend of guests. I met Ed when we both worked on Springwatch; I was employed as Bill Oddie’s researcher, and Ed and I have since become the firmest of birding buddies. Not content with regular birding excursions around the UK, we have also satisfied our unquenchable thirst for birdies with a whole array of trips to Europe, the Middle East and West Africa. A full decade and a bit younger than me, Ed is without doubt one of the finest birders of his age in this country, and in addition to having the largest private collection of feathers, skulls and wings I have ever seen, he has also found time to be one of Britain’s top peregrine experts. Another addition to his mightily impressive CV was his recent qualification as a bird ringer, and it was in that capacity that I wanted to invite Ed round. Hopefully a siskin or reed bunting in the hand would on this occasion beat two in the bush!
Even penetrating above the buzz of my electric toothbrush and through the double glazing of the bathroom I could still hear the deep timbre of male wood pigeons serenading prospective partners with their endlessly repetitive ‘I’m bor-ing I am, I’m bor-ing I am’ call as I got ready for a morning’s bird-ringing. The wood pigeon’s call is possibly the sound that reminds me most of my childhood, as I have strong recollections of their call droning on in the background whilst I prised myself out of bed each morning for my paper round before school.
Befitting a man who’s time-keeping is always nothing short of perfect, Ed pulled onto the drive exactly at our pre-arranged time of 7.30am, and without further ado we barrelled straight out into the back garden to work out the best locations to put up his mist nets. For those not familiar with mist nets in action, they are made of nylon mesh vertically suspended between two poles, giving a vague resemblance of an oversized volleyball net. When properly deployed, the nets are virtually invisible and, most importantly, are able to capture birds without causing any injury whatsoever. We decided to place a six-yard net alongside and parallel to the wooded bank and a 12-yard net running lengthwise along the garden just to the right of the feeders, so that any birds flying in to feed would hopefully become ensnared.
With a little cloud cover and no wind, weather conditions for trapping were initially perfect, but no sooner had we trotted back inside to leave the nets in peace, than the double whammy of both the sun coming out and a breeze picking up instantly made it trickier to catch large numbers of birds, for the simple reason that a billowing net is more easily spotted, giving the birds that vital extra millisecond to take avoidance measures. The protocol is that the nets should be checked at least every 15 minutes, so we were delighted on our first inspection to have caught both a blue tit and a great tit in the biggest net. Of course, extricating birds from mist nets is an art that takes years of practice, as birds can easily become heavily tangled in the net, are frightened and surprisingly susceptible to being damaged with inexperienced hands. So I confined myself to photographing the action whilst Ed carefully twisted, turned and rotated each bird with remarkable dexterity until both were free of the net and safely slotted into his ringing bags. My job then morphed from photographer to scribe as I noted down the measurements Ed took of their wing length, weight, age and sex before he placed a metal ring containing a unique code on each bird’s leg which would identify it if it were re-trapped or found dead. The birds were then released back into the garden.
As someone who has watched great tits thousands of times through binoculars, I thought I knew this common garden visitor pretty well, so I was gobsmacked when Ed told me that the key to sexing great tits in the field is to look at the black breast-stripe, which is wider in the males than the females. I was slightly embarrassed that someone of my alleged repute hadn’t even been aware of this basic fact. How come I had not read this somewhere or even realised it myself from all my years of birding? I suppose one of the most fascinating aspects about wildlife is that the more we learn about this huge subject, the more we realise how little in fact we really know. Even after a lifetime of studying birds, in many ways I was still only scratching the surface. One thing was clear from this revelation; I would have to start looking at my common birds through different eyes from now on!
As the morning went on, although a deluge of birds never materialised due to the weather conditions not working in our favour, we still managed to ring nine blue tits, four great tits, and one each of robin, chaffinch, dunnock, coal tit, wren, long-tailed tit and, best of all, a goldcrest – the latter being a bird I hadn’t even recorded in the garden until we discovered one in the net! In between the net checks we’d also been royally entertained by a couple of jackdaws flying back to our