This Birding Life by Stephen Moss

birds isn’t always as exciting as it sounds: you spend more time with the camera crew than you do with the wildlife, and there’s an awful lot of what a colleague of mine calls ‘endless, pointless, hanging around for something to happen – God knows what!’
    Nevertheless, during this period, I did manage to visit some of the very best of British wildlife sites: from Speyside to Shetland and Devon to Minsmere. I even managed a trip to the most remote — and surely the most incredible – place in Britain: the fabled islands of St Kilda. Thanks to the decision to broaden our approach to include other wildlife, I also began to take notice of other wild creatures: notably dragonflies and butterflies. Now I know what it’s like to be a beginner again!
    Away from it all
    JULY 1998
    Few people in this overcrowded country have not some favourite heath or common or moor to which they retire when they need solitude, or unpolluted fresh air, the glimpse of wild life, or the sound of water falling over stones.
    These words, by the English landscape expert W.G. Hoskins, are as true today as when he wrote them more than a generation ago. Hoskins understood that human beings will always need special places where they are able to contemplate the natural world.
    One Sunday afternoon in June, I suddenly felt the need to escape from my busy urban surroundings and to get a dose of solitude,wildlife and unpolluted fresh air. So I got into the car and headed down the A3: through the suburban blight of Tolworth, past the horrors of the M25 and into deepest Surrey.
    Despite being so close to London, Surrey is still quite rural, and you can usually get away from the madding crowd. Unfortunately, on this sunny summer’s evening, the madding crowd had brought their dogs, children and loud voices to the car park at Thursley Common. Fortunately, people who come in cars don’t usually go very far, and I only had to walk through the wood and out onto the open common to be alone.
    Well, almost alone. Thursley isn’t always the easiest place to see birds, but in late June it is at its peak. Skylarks sang high in the sky above – do they ever stop for a rest? A Meadow Pipit launched into the air and parachuted down to Earth, singing as it fell. And a family of Stonechats clicked and whistled from the tops of the gorse bushes.
    Thursley has its special birds, too, if you know where to look. I headed along the boardwalk, taking care not to step off into the boggy surroundings. Suddenly there was a sound of terrified quacking, and a dark object shot overhead. The noise came from a panicking pair of Mallards, and the dark shape was a pursuing Hobby.
    Hobbies are far too small to catch a Mallard – but they can still give them a nasty scare. The slender, swift-like falcon whipped across the common, then rose high in the sky, where it attracted the attentions of a passing crow. The two birds made a few casual jabs at one another, before the Hobby disappeared as quickly as it had come.
    Further on, a little copse of pine trees echoed to the sound of birds. Chaffinches sang, doing their usual impression of a fast bowler running up to deliver. Coal Tits and Goldcrests seeped their high-pitched calls, and in the distance, a Green Woodpecker lolloped off, laughing as it went.
    By now it was almost seven o’clock, and the sun was low in the sky, bathing the gorse and heather in a golden light. I had one final quest: to see the elusive Dartford Warbler. Then I heard a short, unassumingsong, like someone scratching the strings of an out-of-tune cello. I raised my binoculars just in time to see a tiny, burgundy-coloured bird dive into the foliage.
    The song began again, and then stopped. The bird leapt out of the bush and bounded across to another, where for just a few seconds, it sat in full view. Unmistakably a Dartford Warbler, once one of Britain’s rarest breeding birds, but thanks to the recent run of mild