I envy birds their wings to fly away... (From Gazette & Herald)

I envy birds their wings to fly away...

WHEN I was a girl, an uncle used to take me for Sunday afternoon walks. He was quite good on flowers, but if I asked him what a small bird was, he would usually say "Oh, some sort of a finch, I think".

I have since, over many years, managed to teach myself to recognise most common species. But five or so years ago, when the U3A started a bird-watching group, I was delighted to have the chance to go out with an expert able to show me a lot more.

Jim Pewtress, of Kirkbymoorside, was an excellent leader, very knowledgeable, but also very laidback. He never made you feel stupid for asking some elementary question. The habit birds have of disappearing just as you focus your binoculars never irritated him.

For three years, from about February to October, we went out with him, roughly once a month on a Monday. I owe to him many delightful experiences. I can't claim to be anything of an expert. You need a lifetime for that, and better ears and eyes, and more patience than mine. But I did learn to recognise certain birds whose names I had heard, but which I had never seen before.

Our first outing made a round in familiar country, calling first at a spot in the Forge Valley where you can drive in and either sit in the car, or stand behind it, to look at birds. Some organisation puts there a whole lot of feeders to which every sort of tit, nuthatches, chaffinches, robins, and so on, come in flocks. Most can be seen in your garden, I know. But nuthatches are to me less familiar, delightful in their slate blue back, and their quaint habit of feeding and walking upside down. I had thought they could only be seen in the south, but, according to Jim, there have always been nuthatches in North Yorkshire. Most exciting of all was a visitation from a Greater Spotted Woodpecker, striking in its red top-knot and trousers.

We went next to Seamer Mere. I thought I knew it well. But never have I seen it so beautiful as that day... It was a crisp, sunny October day, an autumn softness on the willows along the shores, a winter glitter on the water - not too good for binoculars, actually. But, perhaps from some magicianly power in Jim, never before or since have I seen so many birds.

There were plenty of geese of course: Canada Geese, less common than they have been and Grey Lag Geese, the most common wild goose of all, Jim said, but for me, a first. The coots were familiar to me, but Jim pointed out to me something I had never noticed - their feet, not webbed like other water birds, but each toe separately frilled with grey skin. They might look like comical toys, he added, but they were savage little creatures, especially when protecting their young.

There was a heron, hunched on a tree like a little Napoleon in exile, a yellow wagtail, and a Great Crested Grebe, which Jim, with infinite patience, enabled me to focus on for several moments. There was a Kingfisher that I missed, and two birds that were mysteries to Jim himself, one some sort of hybrid goose, he believed, the other a half-mallard.

Returning by Marine Drive and Dalby Forest, we stopped at Stainton Lake, at another bird-feeder-hung place, to look at Nuthatches again. But there were no Canada Geese on the lake as I had seen previously. People had fed them too well, Jim said, and they had become aggressive, and had to be banished.

Our next trip was to Derwent Ings, the remnant of once-extensive water meadows, renowned for wild-fowling and still famous for its water birds. I had long wanted to go there, hoping to see Whooper Swans.

We did see Whooper Swans but we were in a hide on one side of a lake, and they were on the far side. To me, they looked, disappointingly, like ordinary swans. I said so. Jim then admitted that at this distance he couldn't see a difference. But he knew they were there that day.

They never whooped for us!

There were flocks of geese. Again, they were too far away for even Jim to identify. But they honked. And skeins of them rose and settled and rose again and again. I was content - but not so content when the Shoveller Ducks (new to me) invariably dived just as I focused on them.

We sat in four different hides that day. It was a shivery day in November. I was glad of a shelter for lunch, though I found the forms rather hard, and the windows you lift to spy on the birds just too high for a woman. (Man-made, like many a stile!)

Still, I had seen the Whooper Swans!

It was February the next year when we next got out. Snow still lingered on Sutton Bank as we passed on our way to Thirsk and beyond. At an old gravel pit, at a place called, I think, Nosterfield, there were as yet no sheltering trees and no hides. A blustery and cold wind made binoculars useless, and soon drove us back to the cars.

Beyond Masham, we found another, older gravel pit with a hide, but rather unproductive for birds. We did see a flock of Peewits, rare enough these days, unfortunately. And I was proud to have seen for myself, actually pointing it out to Jim, a pair of Shelducks, striking with their chestnut 'cummerbunds', nodding to each other, face to face. This, Jim said, was their courtship display.

One visit stands out in my memory, as the most unlikely place you would go expecting to see 'nature'.

In the very heart of industry, at the mouth of the Tees, reached through a wasteland of factories and slim blue chimneys licking orange tongues of flame, with a view of the unmistakable Transporter Bridge, lies Seal Sands Nature Reserve.

Nature did not disdain it. Even on the way, over a little leftover patch of rough grass, we saw a lark rising. Above a chimney, probably providing a warm current of air, a kestrel hovered.

At Seal Sands itself was indeed a line of seals, flopped out for a snooze.

We saw a Grey Plover, Shelducks and Redshanks. I failed to see the red of their legs, but hoped I was learning their silhouette, against the shining water as they walked about, dibbling their long, slender beaks.

The star of the day, however, was a pair of Merganzers, black and white and grey, the male with a black pom pom on his head, preening and diving for fish.

A gull coolly perched on the notice-board that said 'Nature Reserve'. Birds, it seems, demand no beauty in their surroundings, only food and space. Though there was beauty of a strange kind on this spot.

Updated: 14:13 Wednesday, June 29, 2005