Nature, Animals and Conservation

Story · all 20 words

The Man Who Counted Birds

The nature reserve nearest my house is a flooded gravel pit behind an industrial estate, and it is one of the least beautiful places I have ever loved.

There is a motorway on the eastern side. You can hear it from every hide. The water is there because somebody dug sand out of the ground until 1974 and then stopped, and the whole thing filled up on its own, and now it is legally protected land.

I started going because a man called Ken asked me to, in a car park, in the rain, having decided on no evidence that I looked like somebody with a free Saturday.

Ken counted birds. That is not a hobby he had; it is closer to a job he was not paid for. Every fortnight for thirty-one years he walked the same route in the same order and wrote down every species he saw and how many, in pencil, in identical notebooks.

I thought at first this was a slightly eccentric way of enjoying himself. It is not. It is the reason anybody knows anything.

You cannot argue that a habitat is in trouble without numbers, and numbers only exist because somebody stood in a field for three decades writing them down. When the county council proposed a road through the eastern edge in 2011, the thing that stopped it was Ken’s notebooks – specifically, eleven years of counts showing that a particular warbler came back to that exact hedge every spring to breed.

Nobody at the inquiry cared how much Ken loved the place. They cared that he had written it down.

What I learned from him about conservation is that it is almost entirely unglamorous. It is drainage, and fencing, and cutting willow so the reed bed does not turn into a wood, and arguing about a footpath for two years. You cannot preserve a wetland by admiring it. If we stopped managing that reserve tomorrow it would be dry scrub in fifteen years and the birds would simply go.

The wildlife there is not rare. That surprised me. Almost nothing on that water is endangered, nothing is close to extinct, and the reserve exists to protect ordinary things – lapwings, sedge warblers, a lot of frogs.

Ken used to say that by the time a species is famous it is usually too late, and that most things do not die out dramatically. They thin out, quietly, over forty years, while everybody assumes somebody else is watching.

The one bad year was 2018, when something got into the tern raft in June – probably mink, possibly a fox that could swim better than we thought – and we lost the entire colony in a night. One predator can wipe out a season’s work while you are asleep. Ken wrote the count as zero and drew a small line under it and did not say anything for the rest of the morning.

They came back in 2020. Fewer, but they came back.

I have never been involved in the parts of this that make the news. I have never seen poaching, I have nothing to say about deforestation in places I have not been, and the only animals I have helped to rescue were a swan with fishing line round its leg and, once, memorably, a hedgehog in a cattle grid. We do not raise anything in captivity and we do not release anything – the birds arrive on their own or they do not.

Half of them migrate. That is the part I still find genuinely difficult to believe, standing on a motorway embankment in Bedfordshire, that some of these birds were in Senegal in February.

A wetland is a machine with a great many moving parts. The reeds need water, the fish need the reeds, the birds need the fish, and the whole ecosystem holds together only if there is enough prey at the bottom of it. Remove one thing and you do not get the same place minus one thing. You get a different place.

Ken died in 2022. The notebooks are with the county recorder, and somebody else walks the route now, and I go on the first Saturday of the month and count what I can identify, which is perhaps a third of what he could.