The declining art of the long search

I spent 5 hours trying to find Willow Tit on Monday.  My mate Andy found a Hooded Merganser on his Bristol patch.  I was delighted for him, jealous of him, and not a bit surprised.  He puts the time in, and his fieldcraft and knowledge are excellent.   Myself, I found a Mistle Thrush this week.  Draw your own conclusion.  

My focus has been a bit different recently: I've been thinking of Goshawks.  I've never taken a photo of a Goshawk.  I've seen many, usually a distant displaying shape over a valley, and though the views have been good they have not been conducive to photography.  I'd like a photo of a Goshawk, and I know the increasing population particularly in the south means I could travel and seek some information from birders to help me find a location to get some photos.  But I've decided not to.

I've decided, on hearing a rumour that there are Goshawks moving into the wider local area, that I will search for them myself.  No eBird.  No WhatsApp hints.  No pins in maps.  No GPS coordinates.  Just a lot of time poring over maps and my own memories of suitable habitat and narrowing it down to a 4 mile long stretch of valley, forest and moorland with a dozen plantations as my focus.

Partly this has been a purposeful antidote to my tendency to depend on apps and bird news to inform my birding.  I recently wrote a bit of a critique of people needing a pin to guide them directly to a bird and then struggling when that pin wasn't literally accurate down to the 10 metre square and that made me realise a little hypocrisy in my own birding.  I check BirdGuides probably fifty times a day.  It's a reflex action.  Like lifting your phone screen to see if anyone has messaged or liked content on social media, and it can be addictive.  Making plans for the weekend is often "news dependent" and this implies that travel will be happening away from where we might find our own birds and to where someone else has already found birds for us.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and by this point it should probably be clear that I'm not exactly wading knee deep through self-found rare birds - real respect to those who put the effort in to find birds.  Using other people's hard won knowledge or a GPS pin to see birds more quickly won't make me think worse of you or treat you in any way differently at all.  I love finding rare or unusual birds - it feels good and it allows me to share them with others.  But.  It doesn't make me any better or any worse than any other person. It's satisfying, and it's useful, but a recent conversation with some Manchester birders while watching White-fronted Geese at Lightshaw Flashes, who always talk sense and have helped me get on plenty birds in the last year or so, put that into perspective: the more you get out birding the more likely you are to find birds.  So people with more free time, less responsibility, more disposable income, more mobility and who live in areas more conducive to vagrancy will find more birds than those who are restricted in any of those areas.  Sure, good fieldcraft, good local knowledge, experience of the weather and the seasons and the habits of birds themselves is all going to help, but if you're stuck at a 60 hour per week job and have to care for young or old relatives then you're unlikely to be wandering areas looking for possible vagrants.  You'll maximise your time, go where the birds are, see something rather than waste time looking in an area where you might see nothing at all.  The finders are the people who spend their time outside with their eyes open and their senses tuned in as much as they can.

And that's just it.  Once we structure our lives around the idea that all time should be productive, all time should be a way of measuring our worth to society in terms of money made, children raised, tasks completed, busy-ness achieved then the thought of spending our remaining leisure time not seeing the target bird is anathema.  The dip is painful.  We get depressed when we miss out.  We talk about time like we talk about currency: spend, waste, invest, use.  But I feel that sometimes what we should do with our time investment is explore.  I've written before about how I used almost every minute of birding time in 2020 and 2021 to explore my 10km circle, and how that built on research and other people's knowledge.  That foundation is the foundation of my approach to birding no matter where I am, but it's rooted in the miles and miles I've walked here in Manchester, learning craft, gaining experience.  I have had days and days, and days and days where I've seen nothing special, nothing noteworthy, nothing to write home about.  I've had weeks, months, seasons where I was uninspired by local birding.  Yet I don't regret any of that time at all because when I do find something, when I do see something it is a sweet reward for the exploration.  I can see why people with little time don't want to use it to explore, but I really feel they're missing out.

Today I walked nine miles up hill and down valley.  I climbed steep slopes, waded in deep mud, fell over in pine forest.  I searched in dark stands of conifers and found Siskins and Redpolls, Crossbills and Treecreepers.  I listened to Mistle Thrushes sing and Buzzards call.  I heard returning Curlews and a hundred Skylarks.  I emphatically did not find any Goshawks.  Nor did I the last time I searched, in a different quarter of the valley.  I stood still at a viewpoint and watched the entire landscape every time the clouds cleared and the sun shone.  I scanned through thermals full of Buzzards and Ravens and never once did I have a hint of my target bird.  But this didn't deter me, or put me off.  I don't regard it as a failure.  Instead I found a branching network of paths I've never walked before, and there are few temptations as alluring as an unwalked path.  I walked twice as far as I'd planned and all I found was more and more paths, interlacing plantations where I'm convinced there are Goshawks to be found.

I might never find them.  They might not be there to be found.  But it's the dying art of the search that is important here.  What happens when we lose that generation of birder who don't rely on apps but instead just walk a long way with their eyes and ears open?  Half the people I see in the countryside have headphones in.  A significant proportion of the rest are looking at a phone or into a camera (making video content I assume).  Most of the birders I know are either dyed in the wool patchers who walk a regular beat or twitchers who jump to see the unusual whether locally or further afield.  Why would anyone do this the hard way, when they can just get a pin and go and see a bird?  

The tragedy of this is possibly just a romantic notion: where is the explorer?  Who will explore our landscape?  Who can defer the instant gratification of seeing the bird long enough to explore?  Who can endure the disappointment and failure?  Who can learn to spend the time appreciating learning from what they don't see?  I hope those people are still out there.  I hope there are still explorers of the interstitial places, people who wander the boundaries of their own maps, until the dragons in the corners are well-known to them.  I hope they're there, and I hope they remain in our landscapes for many generations to come.  I hope there are people who know because they went and they saw for themselves, who learned by finding.

I hope that if I walk far enough maybe I can be one of them.