UK

Five Hundred

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

When I set out for Peru next week, the number of bird species I will have seen in my lifetime will be a clean five hundred. I’d like to say I’m not usually the record-keeping sort, but that would be pretty unbelievable. The fact that I’ve kept this blog going for the best part of eleven years says otherwise. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with list-keeping, but it does border on the nerdier, birder side of birdwatching, and there is a lingering part of me that still raises a wary eyebrow at the prospect of becoming an anorak. However, since Peru is generally considered one of the world’s finest destinations for birdwatching, I thought I’d cave in for a change, do a little spring cleaning and get my affairs in order before I go. And that means working out just how many birds I have seen over the last thirty-two years or so. It took me a few days to collate the various lists I have held onto over the years, and longer still to whittle down some of the more fanciful additions that may or may not have been added in haste, leaving me with a perfectly square total of five hundred species exactly. It’s a start.

I have been very lucky. I haven’t been as committed to my old hobby as others my age, but even so, my travels have afforded me encounters with a number of species I might otherwise never have seen: pygmy cormorants in the silent marshes around Torcello, Berthelot’s pipits in the Teide caldera and Rwenzori double-collared sunbirds in the clouded hills of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. I thought I’d share a few of my favourite encounters below.

Griffon Vulture

Vultures are far and away my favourite creatures on the planet and I make no secret of that. Cinerous, Egyptian, Palm Nut, White-backed, Hooded or Griffon – I’m not fussy. Something about their enormity, the way their wingtips spread wide like fingers, the silence with which they rule the skies… It’s spellbinding. They’re easily the fondest memory I have of my year in Spain when, aged eleven, I traded herring gulls for griffons for a year. I think I can be excused for being occasionally distracted in class when a tawny giant with a nearly three-metre wingspan happened to be passing by the window. I still get the shivers when I see that silhouette, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for an even greater shadow in the sky when I go in search of an Andean condor in Peru’s Colca Canyon.

Nightjar

Something of a late discovery for me and inseparable from the Camino de Santiago, where it is the nocturnal yin to the diurnal yang of the stonechat – since both species seemed to follow me all the way from the French Pyrenees to Santiago. Nightjars can be found in the UK, but I’ve never seen them, despite searching the forests and heathlands where they are said to breed. On the Camino, however, one is so often up before the break of dawn that it’s virtually impossible not to run into these cryptic creatures at some point. Their endless churring sound must be very strange indeed to those who aren’t aware of its maker, sounding more like a giant cricket or a miniature UFO than a bird. Reports from Manu NP indicate that there may be nightjars to be found along the Madre de Dios river – I shall be keeping my eyes open.

Abyssinian Roller

I could have put any number of the more than two hundred and fifty species of bird I saw in Uganda on this post, but this one takes the top spot because of our story. Having never had any luck with European rollers in Spain, I was amazed to learn on the very first day of my stay in Uganda that there was a particularly handsome Abyssinian roller in the neighbourhood. But I’ll be damned if I thought photographing it might be a cinch – the bird gave me the run-around for most of my three-month stay, fearless and indifferent to my presence when I didn’t have my camera to hand and skittish in the extreme when I came prepared, as though it were camera-shy. In the end an act of God intervened on my behalf: an explosion of winged ants in the neighbour’s garden brought every winged insectivore within a hundred miles to the yard. With more than forty kites to worry about, plus a host of other raptors including shikras, lizard buzzards, grey kestrels and falcons, the roller had his mind on other things and I was able to get in a good shot or two. Sometimes it’s hard-fought encounters like that one that make a photo more compelling than all the editing in the world.

European Bee-Eater

Much like the roller, the bee-eater is an explosion of colour in avian form – at least, to a British birdwatcher’s eye, since most of our native birds are rather drab by comparison. They’re incredibly captivating creatures to watch as they flit through the air like oversized moths, but it’s their call that I love the most: a cheery whirrup that heralds the spring in Spain just like the merry twitter of the swallow in Britain. The sound alone makes me feel warmer – it takes me back to the sands of El Rocio and the dusty scrubland between the Madre de las Marismas and the Palacio del Acebron. One day, it may be warm enough for bee-eaters to colonise the UK. They have bred here with occasional success in the last few years, but it remains to be seen whether they will follow the example of the egrets and move in for good. A part of me hopes they don’t – they are far too tied to my image of Spain as a special paradise. Some things you should have to travel to behold, to see with your own eyes. That’s what I think.

Purple Swamphen

What list would be complete without one of my all-time favourites – the bird that probably kickstarted my obsession with Spanish birds? The purple swamphen is unmistakeable: a moorhen on steroids, with bigger feet, a bigger face-shield and a bigger attitude. I saw them first in El Acebuche, but since then I have found them in several other places: the rice paddies of the Brazo del Este, Uganda’s White Nile river and under the Roman Bridge in Merida. Like griffons, they lose nothing with each successive encounter, and I confess that my eyes are always on swivel-stalks whenever I’m crossing the bridge in Merida in the hope of catching one of them in the reeds below.

Red and Black Kites

WordPress won’t let me upload the images I have of the hoopoe, Iberian magpie and Montagu’s harrier, which would bring the total to ten, so I will have to finish with another old favourite: the kite. Specifically, it’s black kites that have always held sway in my heart, due to their association with the Elysian stone-pine forests of the Raya Real, but since red kites have pretty much exploded in number in the UK in my own lifetime, they’ve earned a spot in this list too. Despite nearly twenty years of active pursuit, I have yet to take a decent photograph of a black kite (in my defence, I have often been without my camera when the right moment presented itself). Had I brought my DSLR with me on the Camino last summer, I would have had the opportunity of a lifetime when I stumbled – quite by chance – upon a feeding frenzy for the local kite population in a rugby field a day’s march from the Spanish frontier. But, I didn’t, so I just took a few photos on my phone and watched the spectacle.

Kites are something of a bait-and-switch story for me. Since their whistling call was used in the BBC’s Land of the Tiger whenever vultures were on screen, I came to associate that sound with those kings of the sky. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised that vultures are pretty much silent (when they’re not squabbling over a carcass, that is), but by then the spell had already been cast. I would travel all the way to the Raya Real just to hear that sound. Of course, I’d go for more than that: the music-box melodies of a nightingale, the flute-song of a golden oriole, the oop-oop-oop of a hoopoe, the beak-clacking serenade of a stork and the descending whistle of a woodlark. But even if all those voices should fall silent, leaving nothing but the trill of a kite, I’d still make that journey. That’s how precious a single sound can be.

T minus one week. It’s getting closer! BB x

Bitterns and Boomers

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The Flat, 21.03.

It can be done! After living in Somerset for the best part of two years, I finally made it to the Avalon Marshes. It’s a little out of the way – as fenlands often are – and, being without a car of my own, impossible to reach outside of term-time, but with a little planning I managed to successfully navigate the one bus there and back again after school this morning. Worth it? Absolutely!

The Avalon Marshes are a network of pools, channels and reedbeds that stretch from the west of the festival town of Glastonbury across the Somerset Levels. Being naturally averse to crowds, Glastonbury and its ilk have never even crossed my mind as a way to spend the summer, so I’ve never had any cause to come this way before. Evidently, I was missing out. This mystical corner of the British Isles has a real charm to it. The 376 bus dropped me off outside The Royal Oak in neighbouring Street and I struck out across country for the marshes from there. Along the way, I walked in the sightline of the legendary Glastonbury Tor. It was a balmy spring day – the fourth in a run of consistently sunny days – so the Tor was drawing a growing crowd of sun-seekers, like a sweet on an anthill. If I had a little more time, I might have gone and had a look myself.

The magic started before I even reached the Glastonbury Canal that runs into the fens. I had just come upon the first of the reedbeds that herald the Avalon Marshes when I heard the sound that I had come here for: a low, pipe-like boom. A sound that inspired many a myth and folktale in the British Isles, and that once was surely heard all across this island. The noise belongs to the great bittern, a singularly beautiful and cryptic variety of heron that is surely the prince of the fens. I can’t remember whether or not I have ever conclusively heard a booming bittern before – my memories of a possible encounter with one in Stodmarsh when I was a lad are a bit hazy – so I have hesitated to add them to my life list thus far.

Today, however, I was left in no doubt. I must have heard at least six different individuals booming all across the fens, including one that was so close that I could swear I heard its resonant intake of breath before each boom. The great bittern is a master of camouflage, however, with a plumage so perfectly suited to its life within the reedbeds that it is almost completely invisible when “bitterning”, so despite the fact that they were making enough noise to be heard from Glastonbury, I never saw so much as a feather. But I wasn’t disheartened in the slightest. Just to hear that booming sound was worth the journey out here. I’ll have to do it again sometime.

While I was scanning the reeds for one of the bitterns, a swan came swimming by, giving me something to train the lens on.

The swans weren’t the only great white birds in the marshes. Another species that has drawn me to the Avalon Marshes today is the Great White Egret, a relative newcomer to the British Isles. The largest of the egrets is actually a heron, a fact that is obvious from its size, which is considerable. I’ve seen these beautiful birds before on the continent, but this would be the first time I’ve seen one here in the UK. When I was a kid, this would have been a very rare find, but much has changed since then. The Avalon Marshes have around fifty breeding pairs, which is frankly ridiculous, considering that they only started breeding here a few years ago. Even the other birdwatchers in the Avalon Hide barely batted an eyelid when one flew into view. It’s a sign that, no matter how bad things may seem, life always finds a way.

On that note, I feel I have to talk about one of the things I haven’t missed about birdwatching: the manspreading. The term didn’t exist when I was a kid, but it certainly does fit the bill.

I thought I’d check out the Avalon Hide to see if I could find one of those elusive bitterns, but it had been staked out by a very different group of boomers, who had each selected a window to themselves and laid out their gear all about them: a panoply of scopes, binoculars and cannon-like lenses that made even my monster zoom lens seem like a hand gun. Only one window was available, which looked out back the way I had come. I stuck around for about twenty-five minutes, listening to their familiar birder-talk, but it quickly became apparent that they meant to stick around until sunset to see if either the bitterns or the resident barn owl would make an appearance, and as I had to catch a bus home, I had to cede the hide to them.

I explored the “cattle class” alternative screens below the tower, very much aware of the scopes poking out of the windows above me like artillery. Sometimes a bird-hide can look a lot like a pill-box.

A friendly chap and his wife restored my faith in the hobby when they pointed me in the direction of a water rail they had just seen, but it never did reappear from its hiding place in the reeds, so we went out separate ways with a shrug. Fortunately for me, there was plenty to see: perhaps sixty or seventy shovelers out on the lake, along with attendant flocks of gadwall, mallard, tufted duck, teal and coot, as well as a few noisy great-crested grebes. Most of them were much too far for even my faithful 500mm, but a robin that followed me out of one of the hides was perfectly happy to let me take his photograph, which definitely made up for it.

As this was my first sortie to Avalon, I didn’t want to end up stranded by missing the last bus home, so I left with plenty of time to get back to Glastonbury. It was a quiet walk once I’d put the birders and the bitterns behind me, and I only ran into two other walkers out with their dogs along the trail. There seems to be a small gypsy community on the edge of the marshes – something about the layout of their encampment seemed strangely familiar, not to mention the presence of two old and very battered horse-drawn caravans in the yard. When I reached the edge of the marshes, I stopped to look back in the direction I had come, and when I turned back to Glastonbury I saw something staring back at me from the edge of the reeds. I thought it might have been a muntjac at first, but it was much too big for that. It was, of course, one of our native roe deer. Fearless as ever, it didn’t even flinch when I raised my camera.

One thing’s for sure: I’ll be back. It’s only a £3 bus ride from Taunton and, while the return journey is broken up with a layover in Somerton, it’s perfectly doable in a day. I’ll be back for the bitterns, either later in the spring or next year, depending on how busy my duty weekends are after the holidays.

This time next week, I’ll be in Madrid. From there it’s only a matter of hours until I set out for South America. That has come around shockingly fast. I’m starting to get very excited! I’ve had a full month to put the camera through its paces and I think I’ve got the hang of the lens and its demands now – the way it handles, the settings it requires for optimum output and, of course, its weight. Now all I need is to be out there already. Thank you Avalon for being the last stage of boot camp for my trusty Nikon companion. Here’s to the next grand adventure! BB x

Minor Adjustments

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The Flat, 21.56.

Two weeks from now – right now – I will be sitting somewhere in the transit lounge in Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport, awaiting my connecting flight to Peru. That’s about 5,300 miles (or 8,500 kilometres) from home, which will be the furthest I have ever been from home by a long shot, beating both Kampala and a brief layover in Dallas last year – and, if things go to plan, I may well find myself even further afield before the year is out. I will also be a full five hours out of sync before I even reach my final destination, so I will need to be careful and try to acclimatise with an altered sleep schedule a few days in advance.

We are very much into the preparation phase now. I have arranged the last of my accommodations for the journey in Ollantaytambo, where I hope to end my Peruvian adventure in the peace and quiet of the Sacred Valley. I have ordered a new pair of sturdy Merrell hiking books to see me around the altiplano and beyond. I should do a preparatory pack this weekend to see if I can fit everything into my rucksack. I’m a light traveller, but the zoom lens is likely to be the largest and heaviest of the equipment I will be lugging around. The jury’s still out as to whether I should take a book with me or simply use up the last of my Audible subscription credits and download more audiobooks than I could possibly hope to finish in that time. I’m leaning toward the latter, if only because I’m not particularly good at leaving a good book behind.

I’ve been meaning to get out and about and keep practising with the lens, but my time is very limited. Last week I managed to escape for just over an hour on Friday afternoon while the sun was out, but between report-writing, lesson planning, taking my team to Oxford Schools on Saturday and being on duty almost all of Sunday, I haven’t had much luck. The Netherclay Community Wood isn’t too far from home, but it had rained a lot on Friday so I didn’t explore the woods too much, as the ground beneath my feet had become little better than a squelching quagmire. Little wonder, then, that there were so few walkers out and about.

I went looking for the water rail that I heard last week, but I didn’t see or hear it. I did disturb a kingfisher on the other side of the pond, though, and while the halcyon bird was much too fast for me, I did have more luck with a young cormorant in the momentary interlude when the winter sun deigned to show its face.

Having something incredible to look forward to always makes the Lent term – by far the hardest of all the school terms – a lot easier to bear. Last year, the knowledge that I would be spending all of three weeks in and around Spain was enough. This time, I have pushed the boat out so far that there is a very real danger that the tide will carry it away. And once it does, where will it take me? I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve caught myself exploring other destinations, other wildlife adventures, other places where I can run while I still have the light of life. This year it’s South America’s turn, but in the years to come, I would dearly like to see the rest of the world, now that the wanderlust has returned. I still harbour dreams of seeing the eerie saguaro stands of Sonora, but a number of other old ideas have started to rise to the surface, like bubbles beneath a frozen lake: KwaZulu-Natal, Kanha National Park, Svalbard and Borneo.

It may well be that in abandoning my search for Her, wherever she may be, and indulging in the thing that has always brought me the most joy, I am putting off the thing I want the most in life. It may also be that I find Her along the road. Either way, I am done waiting. The apps are drier than the Atacama these days and the conversations drier still. There is a world of light and life and joy out there and I can no longer ignore it. It is time for a change of scenery. BB x

A Warren Buffet

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The Flat, 21.57.

I’m slowly starting to rebuild the life I left behind me. It’ll take a little while, but it’s starting to feel very familiar: the long walks, the eyes on swivel-stalks, the weight-training involved in swapping the zoom lens from one arm to the other. In a way, it’s like I never stopped – though it has been about fifteen years since I last did this sort of thing on the regular.

One of the first things to establish is a “patch” – that is, somewhere nearby that I can visit easily and regularly for a quick nature fix throughout the year. I’m still in the market, but I think I’ve decided upon the stretch of the River Tone that runs along Longrun Meadow and into the Netherclay Community Wood. It’s within easy walking distance and there’s plenty to see, including otters – though I dare say I’d be exceptionally lucky to find them out on a weekend wander.

The egrets around here are pretty fearless, though. The flooded banks of the Tone must be harbouring a number of small fish, because I was able to watch this one hunting for quite some time, catching a couple of tiddlers and a small eel. I wonder why great egrets are more skittish than the little and cattle egrets that have colonised so many towns and cities? Is it genetic, perhaps – or is it the memory of that obsessive slaughter for their feathers that keeps them at bay?

I added a few new locals to my “patch list” – namely, teal and buzzard – but spent most of the walk learning how best to cradle the heavy lens over a long distance. I think I’ll need a strap for the lens itself, because I don’t want to chance the weight of it putting undue strain on the camera itself.

I was looking at a tied-down weekend this week, but thanks to a couple of necessary swaps and the support of my wonderful Debating team, I worked Friday night instead and got the weekend off. Suddenly, I had a free Sunday. Coupled with the knowledge that my Railcard expired at midnight, putting a definitive end to many years of affordable train fares, I decided to put the lens through its paces in a new environment: Dawlish Warren.

I came out here at the end of October, when the sun was still shining and the beach was still packed with holidaymakers. In my memory it felt like the end of summer, but it must have been autumn, because the brants had already arrived in great numbers. They were very much in evidence today, numbering well over a hundred, and more than likely the same birds I saw back then.

Brant geese are a seafaring species of goose that spend the winter around the coasts of the British Isles, returning to their breeding grounds in the Arctic circle at the beginning of spring. Most of our geese – the dark-bellied kind – come from northern Russia and Siberia, though the odd light-bellied individual is often to be found among them, straggling over from its North American range.

In ancient times, before their migration routes were known, the people of the British Isles had no answer to explain what happened to the thousands of “burnt geese” that flocked to the coasts, saltmarshes and estuaries, only to disappear without a trace with the spring. Together with the closely-related barnacle geese – who once pulled a similar disappearing trick – they were believed to hatch from goose barnacles, which shared their colour palette. As such, being “not of flesh”, they were permitted on Christian fast-days – a practical solution in desperate times, it must be said.

It’s hard to see how anyone could have believed that old yarn about birds born from barnacles, but then again, the same people believed that swallows slept at the bottom of ponds during the winter. Sometimes we make up the most fanciful nonsense to avoid having to face the obvious reality, even when it is staring us in the face.

Out in the bay, I saw a silhouette I recognised immediately, diving and resurfacing in a small channel between the shore and a shrinking sandbank. The most common diving seabird around here is the cormorant, but in winter, there are quite a few birds that might dive beneath the surface: shags, sawbill ducks, scoters, grebes and divers. Only one of those comes close in size to the cormorant, and that particular bird holds its head level, unlike the cormorant, who swims with his bill upturned.

I didn’t need binoculars to know I had found a great northern diver – the first I’ve seen since my schooldays – and I went tearing across the beach to get a closer look.

The last time I saw one of these impressive creatures, it was far out to sea and flying east along the British Channel. I haven’t had the luxury of seeing one so close before – close enough to appreciate its terrifying red eyes, an evolutionary trait shared with grebes that filters light and helps them to see underwater.

I watched it hunting in the bay for a few minutes, before it decided to run the gauntlet of the shrinking sandbar and scour the southern shore. I counted the seconds between each dive. This one averaged out at 40 seconds, but the diver has been known to stay submerged for up to five minutes. Pretty impressive for such a small and fast-moving creature.

I made it back to Dawlish Warren’s station in plenty of time for the hourly train, but the sun was still shining and I hadn’t yet had enough, so I set out along the Warren Road to the north. The railway hugs the coastline, so the roads meanders a bit on its way north from the Warren. Eventually, after about an hour’s jaunt through the countryside, I came to the ferry town of Starcross. I decided against pushing on to the Exminster Marshes and set up shop at the station, which looks out over the estuary. I was rewarded for my patience with a family of punk-rock red-breasted mergansers, as well as a number of familiar waders probing the mudflats below: turnstones, redshanks, greenshanks and a couple of curlews.

There will always be a special place in my heart for curlews. Their mournful bubbling call was the backdrop to many a childhood adventure around Romney Marsh and the mudflats of Sandwich Bay, and followed me up into the highlands of Scotland on a couple of hiking adventures in my twenties.

Apart from that, they’re remarkably beautiful creatures, with their cryptic feathering and dark, thoughtful eyes. I’ve been very lucky with the egrets around Taunton, but I hope I can continue to observe these magnificent creatures and do justice to them with my new gizmo.

I might not get so flexible a weekend for a while now, so I’ve cashed in my chips early. But I’ll be back with more nature news in the near future, so stay tuned! BB x

Egret

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment
Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) – River Tone. 22/2/26

On my afternoon wander along the Tone yesterday I came across an egret fishing on the concrete steps of a flow measuring station. I’m so used to the snowy white shapes of these beautiful birds in and around the rivers and fields of the English countryside that it’s sometimes hard to remember a time when these were a very rare sight indeed.

When I was not yet ten, the presence of an egret in the area was something my family or friends found newsworthy. That’s not exactly surprising. Compared to our native (and undeniably stately) grey herons, they do have an exotic look about them. Maybe it’s the silky plumes (or aigrettes) of their breeding plumage, or maybe it’s the smart yellow galoshes they seem to wear on their feet. The speed of their colonisation of the British Isles gave the Roman Empire a run for its money: by the time I was fifteen, they were already such a feature of the Kentish wetlands and saltmarshes that they had somewhat lost their star appeal, if not their lustre. They no longer triggered a rare bird alert on twitchers’ pagers up and down the country, and their names no longer appeared in bold capital letters on the “Recent Sightings” blackboards at nature reserves.

But first, some myth-busting. It’s not as though the egret is an exotic immigrant to our shores. Far from it. Various species of egrets could be found in the British Isles throughout history, before a combination of over-hunting and the insatiable demand for egret feathers wiped them out. Such was the obsession for aigrettes – which once bedecked the headwear of noble lords and ladies alike – that the little egret and its cousin, the great white egret, were driven out of much of Western Europe as well, seeking sanctuary along the sheltered shores of the Mediterranean. It wasn’t until a pioneering group of Englishwomen came together in 1889 to form the Society for the Protection of Birds (the forerunner to the cherished RSPB) that the egret’s fortunes began to change, first by petitioning powerful high-society types to eschew feathers from their wardrobe, then lobbying the government to ban them outright. It clearly caught on, because the Americans set up a similar initiative of their own over in Oregon, where the native great and snowy egrets were suffering a similar fate. Gradually, with aigrette feathers off the market, the birds began to reappear in the fields and fenlands they had once called home. It would be another hundred years before they attempted to recolonise the British Isles, but once they did, they came back in droves.

I bought a magazine once in the late 2000s that predicted the arrival of the rest of Europe’s heron and egret species in the UK as global warming made these cold islands more favourable to birds more at home in southern Europe. It wasn’t wrong. Since then, both the cattle and great white egret have secured a foothold in Britain, with all three species present in the Avalon Marshes over in the Somerset Levels. If it weren’t for the fact that I work six days out of seven – and Sunday trains and buses are awful in this part of the world – I’d be over there like a shot. Somehow, I fear the open wilds of the Avalon Marshes will have to wait until I have wheels, because after a few sums, it would actually work out cheaper for me to fly to Europe and back than to spend a night or two in Glastonbury in order to visit the Levels. Mad how that works.

Not that I’d say not to being back in Europe, of course – though I am still waiting for my temporary ban to lift, as I hit the ninety day limit last year and would very much like to go back to my grandfather’s country without having to pay a fine. I always try to keep an open mind, but sometimes, Brexit, I really do wish you hadn’t screwed up my life quite so much.

Anyway. These papers won’t mark themselves. Just thought I’d muse a little on something uplifting before getting back to the grind. BB x

Cattle Egret (Ardea ibis) – Dehesa de Abajo, Spain. 26/4/10

Back in Time

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The Flat. 20.34.

I’ve just come back from a wonderful five days in Scotland with some very dear friends. Apart from being a much-needed social fix, it was as good an excuse as any for a change of scenery. Unlike the rest of the UK, where it has so far managed to rain every single day since the new year began, Scotland and its particular brand of Celtic magic has contrived to turn some of that endless precipitation into flurries of snow, which still frosted the distant highlands beyond the Firth of Forth as my southbound train whisked me around the coast at Berwick. I ended up going north one day sooner than planned to tag along to a family hike in the Lomond Hills around Falkland, for which I was woefully overdressed. We popped in to Andy and Babette’s church first, so I had my Sunday best on, which wasn’t exactly the right fare for carrying a pushchair through ankle-deep mud and melted snow. Still – there’s got to be a first time for everything, right?

God – but Edinburgh is such a beautiful city. I don’t say that all that often about cities, but Edinburgh is special. If Spain doesn’t work out – and I am still holding out that it will – Edinburgh wouldn’t be a bad fallback. What a place to raise a child!

With my Peruvian adventure now just over a month away, I have started to get serious in my preparations. I have booked my first accommodation option in Cuzco, using the only dates of which I can be sure, and started to map out the various bus routes I will be taking. I have nineteen days, which isn’t nearly enough to see all that Peru has to offer, but I’ll give it a damned good try.

As I can’t be sure if I’ll return to Peru anytime soon, it occurred to me a few weeks ago that now might be the right time to invest in an upgrade to my trusty 75-300mm telephoto lens. The reliable little Nikkor lens has done a fine job for the last ten years – almost to the day – but in a country teeming with sights I have never seen before, a little more reach would be a very handy thing to have.

When I was starting out as a wildlife photographer, I used a second-hand Nikon D70 and 75-300mm lens and so I grew very accustomed to shooting with that focal length, but when I was around fourteen, my mother bought me a Sigma 150-500mm. I don’t want to think about how much it must have cost her back then (when we weren’t exactly in clover after our ruinous attempt to move to Spain), but it was one hell of an investment. Once I got the hang of the behemoth and its various quirks (notably its optimal range of 400mm, as it tended to blur beyond that range), it became nothing short of my right arm.

Goodness knows I had enough practice. Weekly sorties became routine. My homework diaries from Year 10 and 11 have a clearer record of my weekend plans than they do of any homework I might have been set. My usual haunts were scattered across East Kent: Stodmarsh, Sandwich Bay, Margate and my local patch at the Undercliff where the White Cliffs of Dover began; and sometimes further afield, to the lonely wetlands of Dungeness and the Elmley Marshes. I still find it ironic that I didn’t really get bit by the birdwatching bug until my last week living in Spain, by which point it was almost too late to appreciate what I had out there. Still, Kent was a wonderful place to learn that trade, and I even made something of a name for myself as the Young Kent Birder for the Kent Ornithological Society. That was also my first foray into blogging, as it happens – this particular endeavour is merely the successor to a record-keeping exercise that I have been working on since I was fourteen years old.

The Sigma lens came with me on many adventures, but it was absolutely invaluable when I went to work in Uganda during the first three months of my gap year. I honestly don’t know what I’d have done without it. I certainly wouldn’t have had nearly as much luck with the fish eagles, crowned cranes, tree-climbing lions and mountain gorillas as I did with the Sigma lens at my side.

Sadly, we leave some of our most cherished things behind when we grow up. When I became a man, I put away childish things, and for some reason, the Sigma lens – and the birdwatching world it had opened to me – was one of those “childish things” I put away when I left for university. Maybe I was only trying to fit in. Maybe all the time I would have spent out and about in nature was reassigned to making time for friends and rehearsals. One way or another, I sort of let go of something that had been a fundamental part of my childhood – and, if I’m being honest, my soul. I regret that, I guess.

The naturalist in me never went away. I distinctly recall keeping a quiet list of the birds I saw in a notebook while traveling around Morocco with some friends from my Arabic course. I remember also taking an unfettered delight in the sight of a sparrowhawk when it struck down a pigeon in my garden and proceeded to disembowel it in front of the kitchen window. And there was always an enormous grin on my face if and when I encountered the pair of goosanders that lived on the River Wear en route to a seminar in the morning. I think I even altered my route most days to try to see them.

After a few months in Spain during my year abroad, I used some of my Erasmus grant to buy myself a new camera. The new model – the D3200 that I have used ever since – was a budget model and thus did not come with an in-built focus motor. When I remembered the faithful Sigma and tried it out with my new kit, I realised that its days as a wildlife zoom lens were over. Let’s just say that tracking a 15cm kingfisher flying at 40kmph across the surface of a rushing river is hard enough with an autofocus-ready lens, and damned near impossible when you’re trying to catch it manually. Several years of neglect had also left it in a rusty state. While still perfectly functional, web-like fungus had grown across its inner rings, doubtless the result of its final foray in the cloud forests of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.

Since then, I have done a decent job with my 75-300mm, but the glory days of wielding a mighty telephoto like a flanged mace felt like a distant memory. Until yesterday, when I bit the bullet and ordered a proper upgrade: introducing the Nikon 200-500mm AF-S. It’s not exactly the latest model – the lens went on the market in 2015, shortly before I bought the D3200 – but it is a huge step forward in terms of what I can do with my wildlife photography. I’m not really at the stage in my career where I feel I can justify splashing out on one of those titanic cannon-esque superzooms that the other Kentish birdwatchers used to lug around, but I am at the stage in my life when I want something to live for. Lady Luck is proving hard to find, so until she turns up, I’ve decided to step back in time and blow the dust off a hobby that used to have me grinning from ear to ear from week to week.

Some people find their joy in the gym or in park run. But for me, the answer is and has always been nature. Now that I am fully-armed once again – for the first time in nearly fourteen years – it’s time to get back out there and enjoy a hobby again.

Long-tailed Tit (Aegithalos caudatus), River Tone.

I still don’t have wheels of my own, so my forays will be limited until such a time as I get my hands on a driver’s license, but for now, I intend to explore my immediate area. There’s plenty to see in the corner of Somerset where I live, and the local bus and train network is pretty handy. With the forecast looking none too promising (the rain continues), I thought I’d start with a wander up and down the River Tone, so that I could dash home in case the heavens opened. Fortunately, the worst I got was a gentle mist for the first five minutes, after which I had a very dry (if muddy) two hours’ walk.

The Nikon 200-500mm is about the same length as the old Sigma, but it is both chunkier and heavier, so I found myself using the tripod grip as a handle. It also requires two spins of the barrel to extend to its full focal length (back in the day, I could wind out the Sigma to its precise maximum of 400mm in a single move), but in a major improvement on the Sigma, it loses none of its visual acuity at its full extension, so in a very real sense, I am working with a longer telephoto than I have ever operated before. I had plenty of opportunities to put it through its paces this morning with the roving flocks of passerines that were feeding along the river, and it did not disappoint, tracking the nimble movements of treecreepers, siskins, goldcrests and long-tailed tits as they hopped about between the leafless branches.

I’m a firm believer that it takes more than just an expensive camera or lens to make a decent wildlife photographer. What it really requires is a solid understanding of your subject and their fickle nature. Fortunately, I have spent most of my thirty-two years on this planet observing the world around me, so while I still can’t keep pace with the rest of my generation in many respects, I do know what I’m doing in the field of wildlife photography. I’m no professional, nor would I ever consider making this hobby into a side-hustle, but it does bring me immense joy.

Eurasian Siskin (Spinus spinus), River Tone.

It’s so good to be back. My arm is complete again. Let’s make this a year to remember! BB x

The Jolly Company

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Gate 23, Bristol Airport. 16.20.

I can’t remember the last time I flew Ryanair. It’s definitely pre-Covid, but it might be even as far back as 2017, which isn’t that far off a decade ago. If memory serves, that last flight under the sign of Brian Boru’s harp was so dreadfully delayed out of Toulouse that my flatmate had to pick me up well after midnight from Sevilla Santa Justa airport – back when Sevilla was a conduit rather than a destination, nearly a lifetime ago.

But, at £15 for a flight to Madrid, I could hardly say no. It isn’t often that I can escape to Spain for less than it costs me to get to the airport. My grandfather’s country has become something of an elixir of late, and one upon which I have become heavily reliant… So here I am, once again, hightailing it out of the country less than twenty-four hours after the end of term, in search of peace, joy and healing – and three blissfully Teams-free weeks.

The train up from Taunton was absolutely packed with revellers, cackling and guffawing and generally reeking of booze, weed or the cheap, sickly stink of vape smoke. A new party seemed to jump on board at every station en route to Bristol, before the 13.18 stopped in its tracks at Weston-super-Mare and, at a signal from the station manager, disgorged the contents of its swollen stomach onto a smaller Great Western train on the opposite platform.

I tried to zone out with a copy of Samantha Harvey’s The Western Wind which I had swiped off my bookshelf before I left – a hasty decision, admittedly, as I don’t tend to return the books I take on holiday, so it needed to be fiction. I got about a hundred pages in before losing interest in the plot when I realised it was marching backwards in time. I’m not the easiest to please when it comes to fiction, but I do tend to blanch pretty quickly at any kind of narrative structure that deviates from a logical chronology.

Here’s hoping my fallback, S.J. Deas’ The Royalist, is a little easier to read. Failing that, I’ve downloaded the audiobook for Dune – and there’s always Madrid’s Casa del Libro.

It’s going to be a rather full flight. There’s a large and boisterous throng now gathered here at Gate 23, most of them under the age of twenty. Either Bristol’s entire population of Spaniards are riding this flight home, or several school trips are coming back for Christmas (though I can’t see any teachers). Either way, it’s a good thing I’ve packed light, as I don’t imagine there’s going to be much room on the plane.

They may be noisy, but their language is a lot sweeter on the ear than the F-bomb-littered slurring speech of the revellers on the train. The older I get, the more I feel the sands of time slipping through my fingers. Destiny is calling me back to Spain – I must not turn my head from her. I cannot. BB x

Come and See

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The theme of the Commemoration Service and Prize-giving Ceremony today was Come and see. To that end, the school Chaplain chose John 1:35-51 – the one where Jesus calls together his first disciples. I think the message was intended to convey the importance of getting involved, because that’s something that our kids here really do more than anywhere else I’ve ever worked. But for me, it had a second layer. My disciples, as it were, had assembled for the first time, and delivered one of the best performances I’ve seen in thirteen years.

I have a funk band again. And I couldn’t be prouder of them.

There’s a very real danger of this entry sounding selfish. I admit it freely – it would be foolish of me to claim that my efforts with the school funk band have been entirely selfless. After all, I have wanted a funk band for thirteen years.

Ever since I left my funk band behind at the end of my schooldays, I have had a band-shaped void in my heart. Durham’s Northern Lights, African Singing and Drumming Society and the Gospel Choir were decent placeholders, as were the various choirs and house music ensembles that I’ve cobbled together over the years, but they’ve only ever been pale imitations of what I once had. The fear of cultural appropriation that came in the wake of the BLM movement put all my attempts on ice after 2020, and with the way the workload was piling up as I took on more responsibilities at work, I’d pretty much given up hope of ever giving back the magic… until a year ago, when I sent off a few job applications in a bid for some interview experience.

As soon as I heard that one of the schools I’d applied to had a functioning funk band, the die was cast. I had found what I was looking for. I would consider nowhere else.

I have always loved music. Perhaps the Spanish blood in my heart beats with its own tempo, or maybe it’s because I had two music teachers for parents. Either way, I’ve been making music since the moment I could bash a keyboard with my infant fists. School was a gauntlet of choirs, orchestras and musicals, but it wasn’t until I got involved with the Soul and Funk Band at the school over the road that I ever truly loved performing. My bandleader, a living legend by the name of Mr D, was in a very similar fix to the one I’m in now: he’d been in a band himself, found himself in teaching, and channeled his love for the music right at us, giving us one of the best experiences of my entire school career – and my life, come to think of it. If I have become a carbon copy of that man, it is not at all unintentional. When I was wrangling with teenage relationship troubles and other trivial affairs, he directed me to the microphone and gave me something to take my mind off all of the noise. I got my chance when one of the girls didn’t show up for her solo, and I took over one of the James Brown numbers. James was right: it felt good – so good. It turned me from a shy and reclusive wallflower into a confident vocalist, and eventually, the band’s frontman.

My first teaching post in Uganda set me on the path to being a teacher, heading up Public Speaking and Debating here has turned me into an orator, and Spain made me whole like nothing else could, but it was Mr D and the Soul & Funk Band that really made me the man I am today.

So yes – I have recklessly pursued my lost band for thirteen years, and now that I’ve found one, I have done everything I can to turn an already gifted bunch of musicians into a powerhouse – like we were, when we were young, but even better. But it is not just a selfish nostalgic streak on my part. It is my way of giving back what I was given, all those years ago. And maybe, just maybe, along the way, I can do for some of these kids what Mr D did for me, and set them on the path to the happiest days of their lives. BB x

Set List:

+ Play that Funky Music (Wild Cherry)

+ September (Earth, Wind & Fire)

+ Doo Wop (That Thing) (Lauryn Hill)

Shuffling Along

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I’m sitting in the rest area at Bristol Parkway Station, watching the blinking lights of cars cruise around below me in circles like so many coloured beetles in the darkness. If I’d made my original train, I’d be at my mum’s place by now. But there was an incident on the 20.35 from Bristol that the authorities had to deal with, so a twenty minute delay has turned into an hour’s setback as I missed my changeover. I’d chalk it up to some Friday night jollities from some of my ruddy-faced countrymen in the next carriage. The only highlight was the very comical collective groan from the other passengers when the announcement came through. Can I still use the term passengers? It’s been recently outlawed by National Rail, who apparently fear it sounds “too formal” – what has the world come to?

So, I’m stuck here for another half hour. I’ve wolfed down a meal deal and am now watching the world go by with my Spotify on shuffle. The holidays are here at last, so I guess it’s time to blow the dust off the blog and flex my rusty writing arm with a little exercise. I’ll use the first five songs on shuffle as a jump-off point and see where we go from there.

Stronger – Kanye West

Ah, the latter days of 2007. After largely eschewing popular music, my brother and I were simultaneously introduced to modernity with Now That’s What I Call Music! 65 around Christmas 2006, our first away from home during our short-lived attempt to up sticks and move to Spain. Maybe it was because it was a link back to the world we’d left behind, but I leapt upon the novelty, and it’s fairly safe to say that my awakening as an explorer started with that CD. I used to get almost all of my music from those Now! compilations. Thank goodness Spotify came along and broadened my horizons!

It was a good time for music, anyway. Rihanna was still pumping out hit after hit (Don’t Stop the Music had just hit the scene), Ed Sheeran was unheard of, and Kanye was famous for his beats and his bars, and not his antisemitism or his (now ex) wife’s rather large bottom. Those were happier times.

Bailando – Enrique Iglesias

Wind the clock forward around ten years. Durham’s Music Society released the theme for the summer concert (Around the World) and the Northern Lights – then in the early days of our ascendancy – hit the books to find a suitable number to fit the bill. I wasn’t anywhere near as talented as some of my peers (at least four of whom have gone on to moonlight as professional musicians since) so this was my one chance to take the reins with a song where I might be able to do something the others couldn’t – that is, singing in another language.

By that point, aged 22 and fresh from the year abroad, I was spoilt for choice. But let’s face it, it would have been a tall order to get an English a cappella group to sing the Arabic smash hit M3allem, and all the sevillanas I had committed to memory were much too demanding, even for those who could speak a little Spanish. Luckily, Enrique Iglesias was famous enough to provide a bridge between the two languages, and after some negotiation with my musical director, I managed to get Bailando onto the set. I put my heart and soul into my Grapevine arrangement, but I honestly had a lot more fun performing Bailando with the gang, not least of all on account of the choreography.

Mammati – Willie Mohlala

Somewhere at my dad’s place is a little red memory stick containing a number of MP3 files: mostly obscure Ugandan pop and folk music, with a few Dolly Parton numbers sprinkled in for a little variety. That playlist was the soundtrack to the various marathon road trips of my time in Uganda, since the full playlist was never enough to span the enormous distances we used to travel. Shazam still struggles to identify the greater part of that playlist, and since Willie Mohlala was one of the only artists labelled on the tracklist, he was one of the few to travel with me out of Africa. Him and Dolly, of course, though quite how she wound up in central Africa beats me.

AM to PM – Christina Milian

Given my guilty pleasure for early noughties R&B, I’m surprised it took me until the summer of 2024 to discover this banger. I have vivid memories of boogying to this one in a club in town with a girl I’d met on Hinge, the first of several attempts to move on from my American heartbreak. It didn’t come to anything. None of my dates have since. But I did pick up this little number, so I did manage to take something away from the experience. I’ve been using the same excuse to justify traveling more than four thousand miles to discover AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, but since that electric anthem has catapulted itself into my top ten, I’ll allow the hyperbole.

Get Me Home – Foxy Brown ft. Blackstreet

I did a Spotify audit the other day and found I’d amassed about 97 playlists. More than half of them (52, to be precise) are ones I made myself. One of them is definitely a ‘mood’ collection, staffed by Missy Elliott, Blue Six and the legendary Foxy Brown. It’s not one that gets an awful lot of airtime, but it is seriously groovy.

I Go to the Rock – Whitney Houston (with the Georgia Mass Choir)

The London Community Gospel Choir did a school visit to the girls’ school over the road when I was around fifteen. This was back before they were a big deal – and back when there was such a thing as the subject specialist initiative in schools that provided money for that sort of thing. I Go to the Rock was the song they taught us that day.

Like so many of the greats in the music industry of old, gospel was where I truly learned to love singing. It was a true release from years of staid hymnals – which I look back on fondly, but not with the same awesome power that gospel provided. It felt like singing from the deepest reaches of my soul. It’s probably no great leap to say that I wouldn’t have launched myself at the funk band if I hadn’t had that crucial awakening through gospel.

It’s a shame that global politics prevented me from sharing that pivotal joy for so many years. I will always carry that scar, I suppose. At least these days I am in a more tolerant establishment that understands the importance of offering diversity through music. I dread to think where the other road leads. I don’t doubt the talents of Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, but if that’s what people like me will be limited to in years to come, my music tastes will be so much the poorer for it.

For the Love of Money – The O’Jays

Well, would you look at that. When I started writing this post, I was shivering in the upstairs waiting area at Bristol Parkway. I’m now inching closer to the rammed check-in desk at Gatwick Airport. Turns out most everyone on this flight has the same problem: directed to the check-in desk to collect their boarding pass, due to the sheer number of people on board. I could have dodged this by buying priority, maybe. But with prices up everywhere (the Alhambra visit is costing me nearly £100!) I decided to dodge the £8 priority add-on this time. That’s on me!

Money is the root of all evil – do funny things to some people. Spain is in the throes of an anti-tourist rebellion, centred on Barcelona, Mallorca and the Canary Islands. And not without reason: the tourist trade has been allowed to run rampant in some parts of the country, to the point where it has utterly destabilised life for the locals, forcing a dependence upon tourist money that only comes but a few times a year. Unlike Santa Claus, however, it doesn’t seem to be spreading much joy. Some protesters vented their frustration last year by hosing down tourists at cafés along Las Ramblas with water pistols.

I’m hoping to investigate this blight a little during my adventures over the next three weeks. I appreciate the irony of doing so as a tourist, but I’d like to think that by avoiding resorts and foreign hotels, I’m doing my part to contribute to the local economy in parts of the country that aren’t necessarily overrun. Speaking Spanish helps.

Well, ten minutes until take-off. My arm feels exercised. See you on the other side! BB x

Saying Yes, Saying No

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I had my probation meeting today. No, don’t worry, it’s nothing to worry about – just the first part of the “settling in” process of the new job. It’s always good to get constructive feedback on your teaching, and even better to get positive feedback from kids, colleagues and parents alike. Emails remain the bane of my existence, my beast to be slain, and I dare to say that, had I gone into the teaching profession a hundred years ago, before the days of instant communication, I might even have been an exemplary teacher.

Most of all, however, I can’t help but find it delightfully ironic that my main piece of constructive criticism was that I still have a tendency to “say yes to everything”. Saying yes was something of a New Year’s resolution, and it’s been a bloody good one, to be honest. So far “saying yes” has given me: a new job, a short-lived but precious romance with an American beauty, a string of adventures from Paris and Prague to Poland, the chance to teach French again after several years’ oblivion, the title of Head of Debating & Public Speaking and, finally, a well-intentioned caution.

In fact, probably the only thing I’ve said no to this term was tonight’s post-carols drinks with the staff, and that was only because I’d have missed my train if I’d delayed even a minute longer.

I guess that’s just as well. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more exhausted after a Christmas term. It’s been pretty full-on, even by my standards.

I’m off to Poland tomorrow. Polish is absolutely not one of the languages I claim as part of my arsenal, so communication is going to be a bit ropey – but, hey, that’s nothing new to me. It has nothing in common at all with any of the languages I speak, so learning has been slow… on top of everything else I’ve had on this term. Sometimes I have to take a step back and think about all the plates I’m spinning at work:

  • Teaching French and Spanish to Years 7-13 (spanning two different exam boards for GCSE as well as A Level and the IB)
  • Heading up the Debating & Public Speaking events and competitions
  • Living on-site as a boarding house deputy and working two overnight shifts a week
  • Volunteering with a local school
  • Tenoring in the Chapel Choir and staffing any and all music trips
  • Attending as many home fixtures as I can to support the boys

No small wonder I’ve had no time for a relationship or driving lessons this term…! The stress of the latter might just have broken me, if I’d managed to fit my lessons in anywhere at all into my crammed schedule – which is highly unlikely. I think the only reason I managed last year was because I was six years into the job and had taught most of the kids for years, so I could walk straight from my driving lesson into teaching Year 10 GCSE Spanish without batting an eyelid.

Most rational teachers would be practically collapsing into bed tonight after a term like this one. Instead, I’m lugging two rucksacks across the country to catch an early morning flight to Warsaw, so that I can spend the first four days of the Christmas holidays in some bleak corner of Eastern Europe searching for wolves (or traces of wolves). I blame all that time spent reading The Tiger this summer. I’d be tracking Siberian tigers if I could, but I’ve traveled across the world once already this year in search of a dream, so I’m settling for an adventure a little closer to home this time.

At least it’s meant I have something to say in return when my students tell me about their Christmas plans in India, Florida and/or the Maldives. “Wolf tracking” seems to fall under the banner of decidedly unusual responses to the question “any plans for the holidays?”.

Thunderstruck is playing in the one functioning ear of my earphones. The train is fifteen minutes late but racing to make up for lost time. I’ve fired off the usual end-of-term fusillade of messages to friends and family, bursting upon the surface of my WhatsApp in two-minute intervals like an underwater volcanic vent. Old habits die hard. Thunderstruck was the great gift of my American adventure, and it’s been a real mood-lifter ever since. Unsurprisingly, it’s my most played song on Spotify this year.

I think I’ll listen to it a couple times more as the train nears its destination. I could use a boost. BB x