LIKE A DREAM I CAN’T STOP DREAMING

 by Simon Hampson

This is a piece about watching birds. Years ago I used to write zines about music, about local punk bands. But now I don't want to write about music so much anymore, so I thought instead I'd like to write about something else which can easily take over waking thoughts, and dreams, and be a point of weird obsession if you're inclined that way. But it's also about how being into watching birds is different, special, and in some ways unique.

Lots of people say that watching birds is a hobby, but I don't think that's right. Hobbies are what people do in their spare time, setting aside some hours to take yourself somewhere different from the usual world. Hobbies are five-a-side football after work. But watching birds is much more ever present than that. It's not what happens in spare time, it's what happens pretty much all the time, as long as I am outside, or can see outside. It's always going on - walking down the street, and mentally ticking off the birds that are around, just below the conscious mind. So it's much more a way of being, or (a little) less pretentiously a way of moving around and thinking about the world, than it is a hobby. It's mostly like the backdrop to a life, this constant mental hum. Like a dream I can't stop dreaming.

I think that this is probably really comforting, but I'm not sure because it's been like that for so long I can't remember or imagine life without it. When I've spoken to people who are really into skateboarding they say that it reconfigures how they see the world, like they see it as a set of opportunities for skating, and they notice details that non-skaters would just pass by. I think the same thing is true of bird watching. It's this constant awareness of tiny details, of existing half in this human world and half in another world altogether.

And so I don't remember ever being bored if I'm outside. Even when there isn't anything to notice, there always might be, and watching birds is at least as much about what could possibly happen than what actually does happen. A constant maybe. There's also the good, warm feeling of putting some kind of order onto chaos. The world goes by, and you’re seeing what species there are and what they're doing, and all the while without even thinking you're mentally cataloguing it and categorising it, and creating some kind of sense and rhythm to it. Actually, though, there is lot of chaos and uncertainty to watching birds, and that's a large part of why it's so enjoyable, but I'll talk about that later. 

I guess you could get exactly the same thing if you just watched humans. You could fill your days watching them and neatly parcel up the types and behaviours you see, keeping a list in the back of your mind. But I've never heard of people doing that. If so, it might be some kind of pathology. Or maybe we do it all the time, without even thinking. In any case, watching birds is the socially acceptable form of this particular pathology.

The more you look, a half-secret world is gradually being revealed. Creatures emerge from the undergrowth. Sometimes you can arrive somewhere and there's nothing around, and everything seems dead or gone, and then just by sitting quietly – by doing nothing at all – the world around you starts to increase in volume and activity until its shrieking with life, and it's an honour to witness that. A few years ago I was on holiday in Zambia and I got up at dawn to go down to a little pond next the hotel. At first there was nothing, and then I noticed a few little splashes of colour moving about in the acid green trees that hung heavy over the water. After half an hour or so I realised there was life everywhere, that was always there. I just wasn't ready to notice it before. There were Bee Eaters who after catching an insect would sit on a branch and make this mmmmmm sound as they ate it. Sat in line, muttering mmmmm, mmmm. And I too was completely content. That's pretty common in watching birds, this feeling that everything is right and you wouldn't want anything to change. I don't know how common that is elsewhere in life. I stayed for hours and could have stayed forever. When I left the pond there were some zebras blocking my way, relaxing next to water sprinklers throwing out rainbows, and I had to push past them. I was scared but they were used to it. It was no big deal for them.

I've been watching birds since I can remember. I learnt to read from the Reader’s Digest Guide to British Birds. As a kid, if I wasn't getting on with my family, which in my mind was pretty often, I'd go up to the woods around my house and sit alone in soft rotting vegetation and watch birds. Even now I like to watch birds on my own, with sense of perfect peace and safety because nothing is expected of you, and nothing is asked. There are no mistakes, and you can't disappoint or fail to meet the mark. You just sit and wonder, let the world happen around you. There were some marshes very near my family house, wasteland which was the result of mud bringing dredged out of the River Mersey to keep the ship canal navigable, and then dumped on a field. It is not at all picturesque – just miles of brown mud cracking into crazy paving, flat yellow grass and some farming machinery crumbling into rust. Back then I didn't realise quite how good it was, and how lucky I was. Given how many rare species live there it should probably be a nature reserve, and a nationally famous one. But I'm glad it isn't – that tends to mean neat paths and fenced off areas, and passive-aggressively helpful signs. Instead it’s been left uncontrolled and ignored, a leftover and wild space where you can pretty much do whatever you want because there's no one around to care. At night from miles away you can see the headlamps of cars meeting up down there to do drug deals.

My dad used to drive me down to marshes when I was very young, like maybe 6 years old. He'd stayed in the car while I wandered round on my own for miles, mostly looking for Owls silhouetted in the fading light, or Marsh Harriers gliding over the reeds which shuffled and whispered in the wind. Looking back I wonder if other people would find it odd that he stayed in the car, that he was happy to just leave me to get on with it, and didn't feel any need to share the experience or make sure I wasn't doing something I shouldn't. But I was happy with it. Who wants their parents getting involved with everything anyway? And perhaps may be he just wanted his own peaceful time of quiet lonesomeness too. 

I spent a long time looking for birds when I was a kid, and they're by far my most vivid memories. Like I used to watch a Spotted Flycatcher in the rhododendrons above our dining room. These are very regular birds.  They sit at the same spot every day, and dart out to pick an insect out of the air and then return to that same spot. A perfect loop of flight, over and over again. I can remember watching it, can remember exactly where it used to sit and what I was eating when I saw it, I can remember how the light was on its feathers, and the pink industrial sunset above, but I can't remember the faces of many relatives, now dead, from that time. 

The most dramatic moment from that time was when Peregrine Falcons moved in above our house. At that time they were still very rare due to pesticide use poisoning them – the chemicals made their shells impossibly brittle and chicks died before they could hatch. But above our house was a small chain of sandstone cliffs which are famously impassable. People used to train for ascents up Everest on these cliffs because they are so difficult to climb. And that, coupled with the ducks living on the marshes below, makes it pretty much the perfect place for Peregrines. If they're going to live anywhere, they'll live here. So when I was about 7 they moved in. At first it took me about a week to work out what they were, as they were so unexpected and alien. But once you do know they are unmistakable. Much of this is due to their behaviour, rather than how they look. Perhaps because they're one of the few animals here that have no natural predators, they have a confidence and dominating vibe that's very distinctive.  They're not afraid of anything. They’d wheel around, screaming, passing dead animals between each other above us. The noise is piercing and violent. A stabbing sound, kek, kek, kek. It's a strange thing, the nearest I can come is to say that when Peregrines move in it's like you're living in their garden, not the other way round. Volunteers kept a constant watch over the nest to protect it from egg collectors – they'd sit out in camping chairs all day and all night, wet to the skin from cold spring rain. It was kind of obvious who was in charge.

So these were the regular birds that I would see every day. One of the things that you learn from watching birds is the more that you look at something the more you want to keep on looking at it. There's no natural end point, no point of where you're finally replete. Recently I've got really into watching Pigeons, I guess I just saw so many that eventually something just snapped and now I find them completely enthralling. You know when you listen to music as a teenager and get into more and more extreme stuff and then you listen to Merzbow or something but you do actually enjoy it, and you realise that there's no more boundaries to go through? It's a final frontier. Well, Pigeons were like my Merzbow. There is no further to go. Just look at them, their feathers like quick, fluid sketches of a rock garden. If you spend almost any time watching Pigeons you'll often see one do a series of pirouettes in front of another. This is a courtship display but the great thing about it is that Pigeons mate for life, so what you're often seeing is not one Pigeon trying to get a mate, but more likely an old couple who know each other better than anything, deciding to take a moment to reinforce their bond, rekindling old magic. And sometimes you see a Pigeon pirouetting when there's no others around, dancing just because it feels good. Or maybe they just find themselves in love with the world, or the pavement, or the sky.

Similarly, Tawny Owls – the birds that go t’wit t’woo. But it's actually two birds together, a pair. “I love you”, “I love you too”.

After I moved to London it was very common birds like Pigeons that interested me more and more. Partly because the more exotic birds are far away, but also because there are certain birds that play a big part in making a city more than just a collection of buildings and turn it into a kind of myth of itself. Like how the cheeping of Sparrows is the sound of a sunny afternoon in suburbia, from here to the Mediterranean. Or like how Swifts shooting down a street, tearing the air with their screams, amplifies the closeness and excitement of a city night, and matches the red brake lights of cars glowing through smoggy air. Swifts live in long-established colonies, which can be older than the city they're in. A city within a city. When Swifts scream down streets they're mapping the boundaries of the nest colony. Younger Swifts ask to be accepted into the colony by beating their wings on the nests as they fly past – sometimes they're allowed into the citadel, and often they're not. 

Swifts do almost everything in the air, really just landing to lay and incubate eggs. They're so uncompromising it's absurd, like if Henry Rollins was a bird. At night, they ascend to high altitude and hang in the air. This hallucinatory sight was first reported by fighter pilots in World War Two, who found their planes surrounded by thousands of near stationary birds. I saw hundreds of them descend once, at Peckham in early morning, like a thin mist falling over the town from unseen heights, and settling just over the rooftops. Sometimes, coming back early on a summer morning from a night out, still dark, I think about the Swifts high above me, hanging over the night’s clouds. The whole city feels asleep, but for the Swifts it’s never stopped.

Like the boundary lines of Swifts’ territories, birds allow us to think about cities in new ways, and imagine new possibilities. Blue Tits often go round in a feeding party of a dozen or so birds, working their way through trees and bushes together before moving onto the next patch. They're pretty predictable in this – when I was growing up you'd almost always see a feeding party travel through at about mid-afternoon. When I moved to south London, a feeding party passed through our garden around noon. I like to imagine that if you had the time you could map out the entire course of a feeding party’s regular movements and the time they arrived at each location and it'd form a kind of clock face superimposed on our streets.

More and more now I try and see the birds I saw when I was a kid. A few summers ago I spent a lot of time trying to see Blackcaps, which are little migratory warblers. They're not uncommon but can be difficult to find because they prefer thick undergrowth and have a strange song which seems like they can throw their voice. That summer I fell into a habit of rushing home from work to run to a place where I thought I might have heard or seen them. And I remember wheeling in the middle of the street, frantically scanning the gardens around me as sprinklers hissed. I think I must have looked crazed, like someone who has lost their child. Perhaps because of the fact that my behaviour got close to an obsession, and it looked so ridiculous, it was one of only times when I really questioned why I do this. They're not rare birds, and they're not even particularly interesting to look at – small and olive brown and kind of dumpy. But I did become near obsessed, nevertheless, and the best explanation I can find is that it's something about wanting an unbroken chain from your earliest memories to the present. I used to see Blackcaps everyday walking to school and the memory of that created this need in me to see them again, to see them that week, and then for all the subsequent weeks of that summer.

This particular importance of the past – the need to find resonances and points of contact between now and then – is different from nostalgia, I think. It’s not necessarily a wish to be back in the past, or a yearning for a mythical lost happiness. Rather, it’s a need to situate ourselves in the present. To find the guiding principle, a harmony out of noise, a thin golden thread to guide us through the cacophony. To find an order and pattern within all the chaos of a life. I think this is where birdwatchers’ love of lists comes in, carried with us from the beginning and added to every year. 

But the great thing about this, and maybe the unique thing about watching birds, is that finding this resolution is essentially chaotic and unpredictable. You can spend hours and days looking for a bird, and nothing. Or you can glance up and see something totally unexpected right in front of you. Things happen when they happen. This means that bird watching isn't really about what you see, it's about what might happen. It's about submitting to possibilities that are totally out of your control. You might get a Proustian rush or you might not, and there's not much you can do either way. So you've just got to stay alert and focused and keep hoping you don't miss it when it comes. And because of this, even nothingness – as in, seeing nothing, those days when everything seems dead or asleep – is not a failed trip. That's still all part of the pleasure of throwing yourself into this uncertainty.

The best for this are Sparrowhawks. I've seen them in particular spots one time and one time only, rising like small ghosts over roofs. Every time I see one in a particular spot, when I'm next there my eyes automatically go to that spot to see them there again. But it's almost always in vain. You rarely see them, but you always might. And in that sense, they are present for you all the time. The streets you walk are imbued with them, seen and not seen.

As I got to know London more I started to realise that you could, with some luck and some lurking on internet forums, see very rare birds here. And so on a few occasions I've seen birds here that that I waited my whole life for. The first was when lots of birds called Waxwings came over from Scandinavia. An influx of Waxwings occurs on very cold winters and is called an eruption. For this eruption, I think in 2010, they had made their home in a housing estate in Balham. There were stories on the internet about them getting pissed on rotten apples in the park, and having to be helped back to trees by concerned passersby. After such a long journey they deserved it. It was around Christmas time and I was too excited to sleep properly. I headed out at I think 6 am, and walked along dark streets to the housing estate – it was important to go early as there were reports that they were already starting to move on. And then I turned into the estate, and there was nothing, just an empty tree where before there had been 100s of them. We were ready to leave until we just spotted one bird still left behind, sat on top of a parking meter. A lady walked right past it, maybe a metre away and it didn't flinch. They are famously tame but I didn't expect this. We walked up to it and it's still the most beautiful animal I've seen. Its name comes from the red tips on its wings like little blobs of molten wax. I heard they have one for every year of their life. It looked amused and rakish. Birds don't have eye brows but I still think it was raising its at me. I thought about this tiny bird flying across the North Sea through arctic weather. Then it flew off and it looked just like a Starling, that exact same triangular silhouette. For the rest of the day when I saw Starlings fly past I wondered if they could be Waxwings and the world felt charged with new possibilities. Nothing was ordinary anymore.

The other time was when I saw a Hobby. I've desperately wanted to see these birds since I was 3 or 4. They are the fastest and most elegant of all birds of prey, the only bird to be able to catch Swifts and dragonflies, which they eat while still flying, holding them like ice-cream cones. For years and years I'd tried to see them, hanging round heathland and gravel pits on summer days so hot that the air was coiling itself into silvery mirages, but no success. I started to tell myself that it would be fitting and poetic if I never saw this bird, that it was too fast and wild to ever be caught up with and ticked off on a list. But I didn't really believe that and kept looking. So on the hottest day of the summer I went to Richmond Park – it was all burnt yellow and joggers had these death masks of pain, streaming with sweat. After hours of searching, and just as I turned to head home suddenly there was a Hobby circling above me, so quick and fluid that it looked more like a crease, a ripple in the air than a solid object. There's this amazing moment when you see a bird like this and you just know that it's what you've been looking for. There's suddenly no doubt, after years of doubt, of seeing smudges of birds in the far distance and wondering if maybe, just perhaps, they could be it. But when you do see it, all those previous hopes are shown to be just desperately wishful thinking. In an instant everything clicks into place and the search is over. I must have watched the Hobby above me for half an hour, gazing upwards as the park went on around me – children learning how to ride bikes, people shouting after their dogs. And I was transfixed on this bird that I'd waited 30 years to see, silently having this moment that I'll remember for the rest of my life. I thought about that bit at the end of Brief Encounter, when there's the private epochal moment in the midst of everyday life going on regardless, and neither makes sense to the other. In the people around us, the strangers we see everyday, these moments may be happening all the time, but we're oblivious. How could we know? How to communicate what this means to someone else? Where can you even begin?