5 – Fake news

“By watching the master and emulating his efforts… the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself” Polanyi

Catching the bug (2012) was The Sound Approach’s guide to Poole Harbour, and it spawned a new conservation charity that has taken over my life. I blame Paul Morton.

We met in 2011 at the RSPB reserve at Arne where he was working for them as an information officer. He stood on the decking in the car park and I introduced myself. We chatted, at least that’s what he tells me. I can’t remember. We met next at The Baker’s Arms pub when he offered to take over the Poole Harbour BTO WeBS (Wetland bird Survey) counts and started to put some order into what had degenerated into a disaster. At the end of November that year he e-mailed me with a suggestion that we should have a group dedicated to Poole Harbour. Part of the reason that I don’t remember much of this was because I was in a state. I can remember my son saying; “It’s a pretty poor show if you’ve got yourself in this way through writing a bird book”. I wasn’t sure I had. It could have been guiding a load of children’s bird boats or that my business had grown enormously.

Here’s a bit of Paul’s original e-mail to me;

“Which leads me on to the idea I’ve been mulling on for a while. My passion for the harbour has been life long, and it still grips me the same way it did when I first visited Arne at 5 years old. Having worked out of the country as race crew on a racing yacht for the last 5 years, I almost lost touch with birdwatching altogether. I would still count the Honey Buzzards crossing from Africa to Europe as we sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar,” – that got my attention – “and watch the shearwaters, petrels and tropicbirds whilst we were mid-Atlantic, but it was these regular spectacles (and rollickings off my skipper for not watching what I was doing) that made me realise I needed to get back to what I love most… ornithology.”

“Getting my job at Arne re-ignited my drive to study the bird life of Poole Harbour, which is when I came up with the idea of PHORS (read as force) . Poole Harbour Ornithological Research Society….”

So I didn’t reply to Paul although a friend, Phyl England, told me to employ him. “He’s one in a million,” she said.

I was thinking, perhaps I did need some support with all my bird work. I phoned him; “ I’m not sure about a local birders group but I do need something, can you help?” We met again and Paul started the job in the March 2012, first on charity projects working for Lush. Then he suggested that we start this small charity called Birds of Poole Harbour to manage and grow the children’s bird boats, which by then he had taken over. It seemed sensible, and the charity started in 2013.

Shortly after, he asked if he could join The Sound Approach.

I was an apprentice in the sixties, a period where pranking was a national sport, especially if like me you were a bit naive. It was typical for me to be sent to the chemists for a bottle of Blue Steam or to the ironmongers for a long weight. Somehow the folk at the other end would always be in on the joke and leave you waiting there for half an hour or send you back with the message that they had run out of steam at present.

When an experienced bird ringer takes on an apprentice there is a similar tradition of giving them a Eurasian Blue Tit Cyanistes caeruleus as the first bird to practice putting a ring onto. The inexperienced student is lulled into thinking that the lovely little bird will be benign, and gets a shock when it draws blood. Paul is a trained bird ringer. So when he said he wanted to join The Sound Approach, I thought I was being smart when I said, “Yes, when you’ve sound-recorded female Robin and Dunnock songs you can come aboard.”

These two projects seemed to me to be nigh on impossible. I had written about female song of both species in The Sound Approach to Birding (Constantine & The Sound Approach 2006), but knew of no examples and I certainly couldn’t tell songs of the two sexes apart myself. You would need to catch the birds, sex them, then colour-ring them so that you knew which was which, then you’d have to wait (potentially for months) until a female sang.

It wasn’t as if he was short of things to do. Pretty soon the charity was installing a wader scrape and moving hides for Livability Holton Lee a disabled charity nearby, then doing similar work with Natural England at Sunnyside in Wareham. Then the number of schools that were taken out increased, seeing the charity take out c1400 local school kids each winter.

Anyway, ringing studies are administered by the BTO. Paul applied for permission to colour ring Dunnock Prunella modularis and European Robins Erithacus rubecula back at his old haunt Coombe fields at Arne. Using mist nets really didn’t work, so he progressed to spring traps and by May 2017 he had caught a series of nine Robins, all males. He also caught a couple of Mistle Thrushes Turdus viscivorus and nearly caught a Common Cuckoo Cuculus canorus. Over two years he colour-ringed eleven Robins including four females, but by mid-September he couldn’t re-find any of them to sound record.

The Robin project foundered. Still, it did better than the Dunnock project. Despite hiring a team of two full time ringers between 2017 and 2018, the Dunnocks were either uncatchable in spring and summer or impossible to sex in autumn & winter.

Meanwhile Paul had found the first Short-toed Eagle Circaetus gallicus for the British mainland, 2 Black-winged Stilts Himantopus himantopus, a Temminck’s Stint Calidris temminckii… I started to feel the need to find something special myself, dreaming of finding a Pallid Harrier Circus macrourus. For this part of the story you need to know a bit of my history.  My Nan brought me up in her house while my mum went to work. When I was twelve my mum remarried and we left Nan’s and moved to a new home. Four month’s later my Nan died and being twelve I didn’t go to the funeral. My mum decided that it was all too sad and didn’t get a plaque put up in the crematorium where my Nan’s ashes had been spread. Then around the time Paul made his finds, I found I had a little less confidence. I saw a therapist who suggested that I might like to sort out a plaque or memorial for my Nan, but I never got around to it.

Fast forward a couple of years to an afternoon on a perfect day in October and Mo and I are going birding, I’ve decided that the mythical Pallid Harrier should be in the harbour and I’m going to find it. I call Paul at his desk at work to tell him that I’m off to look for a ‘Pallid’, and that I’ve worked out where one may turn up off Soldiers Road.  Mo and I have a cup of tea, then toodle along there. I’m shocked when we get there, and I realise Paul isn’t at his desk at all, but here up on the ridge looking for ‘my’ Pallid. He hasn’t seen me so I give him a call. “Hi Paul, it’s Mark, are you at your desk? I’m just going to pop round”. “Yeah, I’ll be there in a minute.” I could see him desperately fiddling with his tripod when we broke the ridge and he saw us…

Paul was bashful while I added more and more colour to the tale with each telling. The next day I called at his office and said that I’d forgive him if he wouldn’t mind sorting out a plaque for my Nan. Paul is very generous with his organisational skills, and on a bright sunny Sunday a month later I went to the cremarorium, and there it is. Thanks Paul.

Last month Simon King and Dick Filby had an exchange about female Robin song on Twitter in which they both looked quite knowledgeable. However, I know that neither of them has a clue what they sound like because … We contacted the original researcher Joseph Tobias hoping for enlightenment, and he confessed that he had temporarily mislaid his old DAT tapes. Slightly worse we wrote to Naomi Langmore, the researcher who had originally produced the paper on female song in Alpine Accentor P collaris (a close relation of the Dunnock) and when we asked her what female Dunnocks sounded like the first thing she told was, “Well, they seldom sing”. Ah, so who told me they did? Gerald Oreel 20 years ago. Hmmm, fake news.

By now we had agreed to double the number of children’s bird boats and open an interpretation centre on Poole Quay, as well as funding a new website and an app that enabled you to find out which birds were where. Mo and I also provided funding to put webcams on the Brownsea Lagoon and supported the charity with introducing Western Ospreys Pandion haliaetus into Poole Harbour!

Then on the 26^th September 2018 Paul was sitting in the garden chatting to his wife Philippa when a pair of Robins he had ringed earlier that year popped up, and he noticed that the female, which he had ringed on the left leg for future observations, was singing. He nipped indoors for his equipment and then finally recorded the female Robin. Here it is.

I spent seven years competing in the New Jersey birdathon in the early nineties, and I can remember when Bill Evans produced a cassette called Nocturnal flight-calls of migrating thrushes (Evans 1990). Imagine being able to identify Wood Thrush Hylocichla mustelina, Hermit Thrush Catharus guttatus, Veery C fuscescens, Swainson’s Thrush C ustulatus or Grey-cheeked Thrush C minimus flying over at night. Copies of the tape were like gold dust. Not only would that be perfect for race day, as spring thrushes were very rare on the east coast of the US, but imagine picking one up on the Scillies. That tape has now led to a new hobby in Europe with folk all over listening and analysing recordings made overnight, although not as Bill did with a huge dish and a VCR. Nick Hopper who co-wrote Catching the bug and Paul are very keen noc-mig specialists, learning from Magnus who has taken the whole thing to a fully-fledged study. Why do I mention it here? Well, Paul set up a dish and recorder on my office roof in Poole and discovered that Ortolan Buntings Emberiza hortulana were migrating overhead at two in the morning! I still don’t have Ortolan on my harbour list four years later.

Did I mention that when it was agreed that the Osprey project needed to be re-located, Mo and I bought 150 acres as a private release site for the young fledglings? Paul loved that, and he night-recorded there whenever he had the opportunity. He recorded Common Nightingales Luscinia megarhynchos, which we thought had died out in the harbour, as well as night-flying Eurasian Coot Fulica atra and Little Grebe Tachybaptus ruficollis, and even a Common Quail Coturnix coturnix, another bird that I haven’t experienced in the harbour. I was quite envious this year when he managed to record Redwings Turdus iliacus departing in the spring. I can remember a similar experience with departing Veeries in New Jersey.

I have always thought that I wasn’t zen enough in life, striving and overachieving all the time. I shouldn’t worry really, but this year I was down to run 40 boats with Paul, and he hadn’t asked me whether any of the dates were convenient. I wrote to him about it, explaining that I am a busy man and might not be free. He explained that he never asked me about the dates as it would be too complicated and anyway, I always turned up.

Hmmm, I’m a bit more zen after all…. Then it dawned on me like a lightening strike… the apprentice had become the master.

Literature:

Longmore, N,  Davies, N B, Hatchwell, B J & Hartley, I R 1996. Female song attracts males in the alpine accentor Prunella collaris. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 263: 141-146.