This article first appeared in the September 2026 edition of Birdwatching magazine
There is no doubt about it. As you age, not only does your behaviour change, but your world becomes increasingly microcosmic. Most of us are likely to develop infirmities, find walking harder or distances more challenging. Most of us tend to have weaker sight and fading hearing.
If you’ve ever held a conversation with anyone under 30, you will also realise that you take in things a lot slower than you used to. Words flow over you as if fired from a machine gun by a stooping falcon on speed.
Birds at sea seem to have picked up on this trend and enter and leave my scope view quicker than I can blink. My attempts to follow stutter and fail.
My ageing bones were indolent in youth, but even my lazy targets have had to come a few yards closer. I gave up twitching years ago, but now if a lifer lands more than a couple of hundred yards from where I can park, it’s going to stay a mystery to me.
But there are most definitely compensations for this and some of you will have picked up on them during lockdown a few years back when you were confined to your backyards even on the finest and best migration days. My focus was not so much micro as macro as I wandered about my yard, taking close-up pictures of hoverflies and anything else that wandered in. And that focus has stuck even although we’re now allowed out and about into the wild world. My limitations notwithstanding, I anyway prefer to be slow and steady or positively stationary.
I can happily sit in a hide or on a ramp and let the birds come to me. I’ve found that this has also opened up a world of new behaviour to me. Perhaps because I’m focusing down and still delighting in the commonplace, I’ve seen things this year and last that I’ve never seen in the 70-odd years before those.
At a recent visit to a favourite spot where I can park the car and just step out to view across a flood, I lucked upon a Bittern, not a bird I’ve often seen and one more often heard, so always an excitement to me. But this fine fellow did something I know they can, but have never seen before. It crept along a bank between reed beds, stretched out like a snake, as close to the ground as it could get. And the year before was the first time I’d had a Bittern fly over my head, calling, not with its mating boom, but a surprising guttural croak.
Moreover, it’s not only these exciting rarities whose behaviour I now enjoy all the more. We were parked at our local observatory watching a blue tit bringing nesting material into a nest box. Every time it left, a sparrow shot into the nest and pulled out the same material, flying with it to its own nest box just yards away. When the tit returned, it found long strands of grass hanging from its entry, and went in and slowly jerked the grass into its nest an inch at a time, only to leave and be robbed again by the same house-breaking sparrow.
Back at home I found another robber; one of our local magpies was landing on our compost bin, pulling back the lid and taking out long strands of kitchen paper that we had left to rot with the peelings and pulled weeds.
No need to chase about, as E M Forster wrote: ‘only connect’.
