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BIRDERS
Tales of a Tribe
By Mark Cocker
Atlantic Monthly Press
Copyright © 2001 Mark Cocker.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0871138441
Chapter One
1 male Satyr Tragopan, Tragopan satyra
Chandan Bari, Nepal, 20 May 1996
The indefinable fragrance of the Himalayas was in the air — a high sweet blend of wild flowers, dew on conifer forest and woodsmoke rising from numerous cooking hearths. We were on the southern edge of the Langtang mountains in northern Nepal and it was 20 May 1996. There were six of us up at dawn: our two guides, Ramesh and Chabindra, plus four others, including a friend, Alan, and myself.
I'd persuaded a group of seven friends, half of them members of an old birdwatching class that I'd taught for ten years, to come on a trip to look for Himalayan birds and walk through the mountains. About as tiring as a hard day's shopping in Norwich was how I'd tried to convince them they could do it. Unfortunately I'd based that assessment on my own trekking experience thirteen years earlier, when I was twenty-three. Most of my group were in their fifties and sixties. I realised too late that I needed to review my description of trekking. It still felt like shopping in the city. But more like a whole week of it ... continuously.
The day before had been a real grind — about a 3000-foot climb (and about equivalent to ascending Ben Nevis) to a spot called Chandan Bari. Today was going to be worse. After a few hours' birding we were off up the equivalent of Nevis again, but most of it at an altitude three times the height of Britain's tallest mountain. Above 10,000 feet most Europeans find the air desperately thin. Your lungs pump frantically to filter out the necessary amounts of oxygen. Muscles grow weary and tempers fray. By the dawn of the 20th, day eleven of our trip, we were not the happiest of groups.
That morning I was most worried about Alan. Whenever he looked at me I sensed the menace in his eyes — a mixture of plotted revenge and irritation at allowing himself to be so easily fooled. Alan was fifty-eight years old, six: foot four and about seventeen stone. The only small blessing was that he was getting lighter by the hour. At one point on the trail, after a steep climb, he'd arrived with sweat running in rivulets, down his torso and a soaked white hanky knotted on his bald head, like Gumby out of the Monty Python sketch. He arrived with the words, 'Stuff me slowly with a yard broom.' It was his way of telling us he was shagged out and I was surprised to find he was up that dawn for the birding excursion.
But then I'd billed it as the highlight: of the trek. In fact I'd even confessed that the whole thing — the tour for eight people for seventeen days, with a support staff of over twenty Nepalese — had been arranged specifically to get me to this spot, on this morning to look for one bird: Satyr Tragopan. I was only half joking.
Satyr Tragopan is amongst the most beautiful names for any of the world's 10,000 species of bird and a loose translation might be 'horned god of the forest'. But this is a creature even more lovely than its title. It's a type of pheasant:. Those who haven't seen one shouldn't try to conjure the beast by thinking of those beautiful but stupid birds that blunder into our car windscreens. Comparing a tragopan to the hand-reared pheasants we know in Britain is like trying to evoke an Apache warrior by describing a balding overweight London businessman.
Imagine, perhaps, a bird the size of a really large cockerel with an electric blue face, erectile black feather horns that it can raise at will and a body plumage of the deepest blood red. Overlay that magical colour with hundreds of white ocelli so bright they look luminous. Then surround each of the glowing eyes with an intense black margin and you have a sense of this extraordinary creature. And that's only the appearance.
The beauty and power of its habitat undoubtedly feed into its legend as the most sought-after bird in Nepal, a country that boasts one of the highest species totals proportional to its surface area (about 850 different birds) in the world. Tragopans occur only in dense Himalayan forest usually above 8000 feet on the steepest slopes. At Chandan Bari it was as atmospheric a spot as you could imagine — huge, widely spaced stands of hemlock, dripping with hanks of moss and lichen, the morning mist rising upwards and shredded to light ribbons by the trees' dramatic silhouettes.
As we walked through the forest away from the campsite we could actually hear a tragopan calling. That alone was amazing. The first sound was a harsh, repeated ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka, which had a distinctive mocking quality. Much more weird and powerful was an unearthly, un-birdlike, drawn out, rising wail, W-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a. It was the sort of sound you would expect from a horned god of the forest. It was tantalising and magnificent, but it was not enough. And after a long and complicated stalk we all finally got to see the bird itself. For about two or three seconds it was in view as it rushed down a tree stump, from which it had been calling, and ran off over a steep brow — a blur of crimson studded with a hundred silvery eyes. We never saw it again. The homed god was gone. Yet it is still, undoubtedly, the most beautiful, wondrous and thrilling wild bird I've seen in my life.
In a sense, the purpose of this book is to explain why that tragopan is so special and to make that moment intelligible to someone who has perhaps never even been birding. It is to let you understand and feel what I felt on that May morning. I'd like you to see, for instance, why it wasn't enough simply to hear the creature. Why it was so important to continue until we were in a position for the light to make its near—instantaneous journey from the tragopan to me and on to the retina of my eyes.
The following 215 pages are no more than a description of that three-way relationship between bird, light and human observer. Because that momentary biochemical process has eventually come to be surrounded by an entire subculture and a type of tribe, with its own rules, structures, history, customs, language, etiquette and values. To help you grasp completely that moment between me and the tragopan I must explain all the elements in that society and introduce at least some of the characters who make up the tribe; the bird tribe. It's a book about the way birders' lives are defined by the experience, what they'll do and what they sacrifice to ensure it. It is, in short, about the way the human heart can be shaped by the image of a bird.
So come on ... let's go birding. Remember — it's no more difficult than a hard day's shopping. W-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a.
Chapter Two
c.5 Feral Pigeons, Columba livia
Chapel-en-le-Frith, 1968(?)
My first concrete memories of an intense interest in birds date from about the age of eight. My father had a shop, originally for general groceries, then women's clothes and finally a launderette, in the north Derbyshire town of Chapel-en-le-Frith. Set amongst the bleak, powerful upland country of the Peak District National Park, Chapel is a quiet rural place, a commuters' retreat from the urban sprawl of Manchester a few miles down the busy A623. But it suffered then from heavy traffic coming to and from Derbyshire's numerous limestone quarries — lorries laden with huge trailers of stone and powdered lime that hurtled down Chapel's main street. Their empty wagons rattled as they pounded the road's frost-cratered surface, and as they passed our shop it shook briefly with the violent impact.
It was bitterly cold. A grey slab of cloud pressed down on Chapel's damp winter streets like a colossal lid. I can't recall why exactly we'd called at the shop or what we were doing, perhaps some kind of repairs. And I was there to help or, like small children with parents at work, allowed to think I was helping. Eventually I drifted away from the task in hand and climbed the stairs to investigate the old storeroom-attic. When I entered the room I noticed a number of slates were missing and the stark daylight was crashing in through the unhealthy cavity, scattering amongst boxes of old stock and the debris abandoned on the floor. It was just the sort of promising, wild, half-shadowed landscape that a child explorer loves. And I burrowed in.
Suddenly, from amongst this rubble of half-lit junk there came a clatter of wings, a dramatic upward surge towards the hole and, briefly, the intense silhouette of an escaping bird. Then another and another. Their departure left a swirl of dust in the shafts of cold light. They were pigeons. The usual inhabitants of parks and town centres everywhere, they had taken advantage of the building's undetected point of access and made the attic a convenient roost spot.
But I also discovered that our attic held a different kind of secret for the birds. I could smell a warm, fusty pigeon-dropping sort of odour and there was a scattering of down wafting across the floor with each blast of air. Finally, in a cavity between some broken floorboards, I unearthed several nests — shallow untidy hollows amongst heaps of crumbled plaster, old twigs, pale feathers and dry white droppings left by the birds themselves. At the centre of these crude scoops were clutches of eggs — as unexpected and exciting a discovery as any archaeologist could hope for. They lay there, pure white in colour, oval in shape, perfect amongst the winter gloom of a neglected attic.
It never occurred to me that the birds might be sitting or the eggs fertile and I rescued them from oblivion, taking them to keep in an old shoebox in a new, more comfortable nest of my own construction. For a few weeks the box and its contents were a childhood treasure, to be opened and examined after school, until they lost their compulsive numinous power and I abandoned them to devote myself to a new hobby — excavating bones from a hollow tree stump and collecting owl pellets.
I have other bird memories from after this event, but they are only a hazy background or random single-image snapshots without context and incapable of awakening any sort of narrative. They remain suspended, jostling with a rabble of other half-remembered events, until I turned twelve, and birds...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BIRDERS by Mark Cocker. Copyright © 2001 by Mark Cocker. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
