Twitching the night away
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My mother called them "the bloody birds", because my father dared to get up at dawn on Sundays and head for reservoirs to spot them. I wish she were around to read this book and forgive him. Against the obsessions of a true birder such as Cocker and the men (all men) he celebrates, my maligned dad has the merest, fleeting interest in avians. He has never taken a job cleaning lavatories in the Shetlands in pursuit of Puffins; he is not, like the bird photographer David Hunt, about to end his life by being mauled to death by a tiger because he pursued an owl into an Indian forest thicket.
I read Birders to try to understand what it was about his hobby that has so fascinated him over a lifetime. The greatest tribute I can pay Cocker is that I do now get it, sort of. Compared with train spotting (the comparison, of course, my mother drew), birdwatching requires real powers of observation and deduction. Yet, although wide enough to be challenging, the British field is finite and, therefore, collectable. There are 220-250 different birds that regularly breed in the UK. Our top birder, Ron Johns, has taken 50 years to see 545 species. In Peru you see that many in a week.
Cocker is especially good at critiquing the poetry of his craft. Birds, as in all the worst movies, do represent freedom, but not only because they have the liberty of flight. Cocker explains how twitching, which demands you fly to the other end of the country at a day's notice to log an aberrant migrant, shatters the restraints of society. "It tells you that you can actually go anywhere at any time." And once you have framed your target in your 8x32 lens, a magnified and enhanced field of vision of a mere eight degrees, the other 352 degrees, the ones that contain all your anxieties, are consigned to darkness.
The author is wise enough to know his addiction is not entirely healthy. Many of his descriptions of it use knowingly erotic language. He speaks of how birder and bird become "one", calls his notebook a fetish, and admits to the "orgasmic moment" when he realised what he thought was a common-or-garden Herring Gull was actually an Iceland Gull. It cannot be coincidence that half the male population still calls women "birds" nor that this is a hobby that costs marriages.
But while Cocker is brilliant at analysing the joy of birding and paints vivid scenes and character portraits of ornithological legends, the book's second half demonstrates he has a dead way with anecdotes. The tales of long hitch hikes to the scenes of recondite sightings, of extraordinary coincidences and of ironic triumphs - such as British birders who abandoned a holiday in Atlantic City to see a nighthawk in the Scilly Isles, not realising they had just seen a flock of them in the US - bored me (although they delighted my father, whom I sent a copy).
Nor is this, as has been billed, an ornithological Fever Pitch. The narrative strength of Nick Hornby's hymn to his soccer obsession was seeing how it affected his love life. At the end of Birders you have no idea if Cocker is married or single. Good for him for eschewing the Boy's Own Story genre, but it makes Birders more likely to be enjoyed by those millions already converted than those who remain mystified. Still, it made me smile upon the innocence of birdwatchers and upon birds too, so well does Cocker's prose bring them to flight. At least it did until, while I was finishing the book on a beach, a seagull zoomed over and shat messily on my sun hat. Bloody birds.
