Black-necked Grebes: spring is here

I harken back to younger days much more often than I used to.  Perhaps it's an age thing, or maybe a side effect of recovering from a period of poor mental health.  Either way, I often find my recent birding thoughts stretching back through my mind to the nostalgia that dwells in the formative memories of my teenage birding experiences.

As a child my family lived well below the poverty line.  We had nothing really, and while my childhood wasn't sad it was sometimes difficult and I was very aware of what we didn't have.  My way of coping with that was to read when it was raining or dark, and go birding when it was light and dry.  I was always so grateful to be invited birding with people, and their generosity with time has had such an impact on my life.  I've written before about the incredible volunteers who gave their time and skill to teach a whole group of us how to appreciate nature, but the best thing that came out of that was the informal trips that I was invited to.  I learned so much from birding with experienced and passionate birders, soaking up lessons in fieldcraft and keen to see as much as possible.  I recently found a brief account I wrote as an almost 15 year old in 1995 of being taken to Wheldrake Ings to see my first Black-necked Grebe and while it's a sweetly naive little piece of writing, it did help me to locate my initial love of one of my favourite birds.

Black-necked Grebe was very uncommon in the UK in my youth.  Today it's regarded as a rare breeding bird, but if you head to the right locations in spring across water bodies along the Mersey you're likely to see them.  After a period of absence, the grebes had returned to breeding in the LDV in 1993 following some abortive attempts in the late 1980s and one of the leaders of the Bolton YOC knew someone who knew where to look for one of the nine nests that successfully fledged a double figure total of chicks that year.  It was May 1995, and one of the hottest years I'd ever experienced.  We arrived at Wheldrake about 9.30am and headed straight to the hide where we sweltered in the humidity.  In those days we shared duties with a single, very heavy telescope, which meant that each of us spent 10 or so minutes scanning for the grebes in dense grass and reed habitat.  In my memory it looks more meadow-like than the habitats I associate with Black-necked Grebe today, but it's likely that my memory is skewed here - it's more than 30 years since!  I was never very good with telescopes in my youth - not many manufacturers built in adjustments for glasses wearers and I often struggled to aim a telescope in a way that I never did with binoculars.  This meant that I was really depending on others to find the Grebes while I scanned hopefully for other water birds.  From the basic list of species I'd written up in my terrible hand-writing it seems to have been a quietish day on site, and I can remember the boredom that had crept in at the edges of my attention span.  

It was a shock then to hear the cry from one of the other young guys in the group who had (as he often did) found the main event.  I'd just given up my duty on the scope,   meaning that I was furthest from it and one by one the other four people had a turn looking through the optics at the glory of a summer plumaged Black-necked Grebe.  I was growing more and more desperate for my turn on hearing their gasps of delight at the dark plumage of the neck and face contrasting with those golden fans of crests behind the eyes, eyes that fairly glowed red in the May morning sunshine.  And then I got my turn.  The Grebe had vanished.

I was gutted.  

One of the older birders with us asked me if I'd got it, and I told her that I'd missed it with a voice full of unspoken resentment that others had taken too long with the scope, preventing me from seeing the grebes.  We stayed there another hour, but they didn't reappear, and reluctantly I came away from the hide knowing I alone of the group wasn't going to see Black-necked Grebe.  We walked around the rest of the Ings, finding Snipe and the commoner wildfowl, but my heart wasn't really in it.  I nagged until the driver agreed to go back to the original hide with the scope for one last check, and I set up the tripod with absolutely no hope in me at all.  The very first thing I saw through the scope was a pair of Black-necked Grebes in perfect light.  I recall shouting out loud, and while there was some elation at having seen what everyone else was seeing, I think this bird was the first one I really understood was genuinely beautiful to me.  The aesthetic of such a gorgeous combination of colour and shape really opened up an awareness of nature's beauty in me that I truly don't think I'd understood before.  It might be the first time I articulated a grasp of or appreciation of nature's depth.  The memory of seeing that vivid red eye is so strong in my mind.  I was almost 15 years old and this was perhaps analogous to a spiritual experience for me; a day of waking up to the world around me in more than a theoretical sense.  The first understanding that the impact the natural world had on me could include vast ideas of connection with the beauty of something completely wild.  No wonder I'd always found wild spaces calming.  

Now, 30 plus years on, Black-necked Grebes have established something of a stronghold at Woolston Eyes, only 9 or 10 miles from home.  I make a March pilgrimage each year to see the BNGs in their summer finery, though I rarely get any pictures worth seeing.  My photos are almost always of juvenile birds between July and September as they disperse from their breeding grounds.  These birds are much more trusting and will feed more openly than birds starting their breeding season.  I've seen dispersing BNG in every quarter of my 10km circle, from Amberswood in Wigan, to Pennington Flash, to the big reservoirs near Bury, to the tiny Swan Lake at Cutacre, but one of my favourite places for them is at High Rid, a small, square reservoir near Horwich on the outskirts of Bolton.  Most years in autumn finds a small number of juvenile birds feeding for a few days and these birds are the ones that come close to the edge to allow a patient photographer a decent view.

I love the first day I see them back here in the northwest.  It's encouraging to see these birds increasing locally, and I'm very grateful for the work of the volunteers and staff across the LDV and at Woolston (and other breeding grounds) in protecting the habitat that Black-necked Grebes need.  Every time I see that flash of gold on black or those crimson eyes I am taken back to the moment I first understood anything about why engaging in the natural world is good for me.  It's an elation I've never really moved on from, a foundation stone in my thinking.  It's good to find this beauty, and to let it live in your mind, so I'll keep on my March pilgrimage; I'll never grow bored of this bird.