I don't know when one stops being a "newbie" birdwatcher and graduates into a proper birder, but I can tell you a lot of my education has come from the pages of Birdwatching Magazine. I have gotten to know Matt Merritt, the editor of the magazine, a little bit better though the medium of twitter, and I learnt he had a lot of Welsh connections, so I asked him if he would write a guest blog for me on his love Wales and his passion for poetry. I was delighted when he said yes, and what a wonderful blog he sent me.
Anthony.
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Yesterday, a Red Kite drifted over my garden, unperturbed by the close attention it was getting from a couple of the local Carrion Crows.
There’s a a quiet thrill in seeing such a glorious bird over the former mining village where I live (it was a garden first), but kites are no longer news in the East Midlands, thanks to the Rockingham Forest reintroduction programme.
For me, though, each one feels slightly unreal. When, at the age of seven or eight, I first got the birding bug, birds of prey were my thing. At that time, though, Kestrels were all we saw locally, so our annual summer trip to see my grandparents in Bridgend took on great significance.
There were the Buzzards that started to appear as soon as you turned on to the M50, and I was convinced, thanks to a novel called The Shadow of the Falcon that I’d read in the library, that the cliffs of South Wales were the place to find Peregrines, too (they weren’t, as it turned out).
Most of all, I lived in hope of seeing Red Kites. My Readers’ Digest field guide was irritatingly vague about where the handful of surviving pairs were. ‘Mid Wales’ – how close did that get to Ross on Wye.
Once in South Wales, though, I discovered a new birding passion. Splashing about at Rest Bay one overcast day, a strikingly black and white bird flew over, seemingly carrying a carrot in its bill while piping loudly. Waders!
Our other favorite spot, Ogmore-by-Sea, proved even better, with more of these enigmatic creatures stalking the shifting sands and pools of the little estuary.
Time passed. The usual teenage obsessions pushed birdwatching on to the back burner, until aged 26 I found myself working in Cardiff. I was walking a lot, in an attempt to alleviate a chronic back condition, and taking a pair of bins along to alleviate boredom. Long treks through Pontcanna and Llandaff Fields whetted the appetite, gull-watching (yes, really), in Cardiff Bay took things a stage further, and inevitably I ended up back at Ogmore-by-Sea and Porthcawl again. Even better, I discovered Kenfig NNR. Weekends, I’d drive up beyond Brecon and Rhayader to finally clap eyes on those wonderful kites.
About the same time, I was also taking my first steps in a pastime every bit as much mocked by comedians as birdwatching. Poetry. Reading it, mainly, lots of it, but writing it too, albeit badly.
I’ve no idea whether the natural glories of Wales were what finally tipped me over the edge – sent me from bad to verse, if you like – but there was one very direct link. Fired up with enthusiasm by one particular trip into Powys, I read about the success of the Red Kite conservation effort, and the role in it of the poet RS Thomas (though he ended up resigning from the RSPB in protest at the introduction of non-native kites into Wales).
I’m something of an agnostic, and Welsh only on my mother’s side, so it came as something of a surprise to me that the poetry of this Plaid Cymru-supporting clergyman struck such a chord, but it did. He remains the poet that I go back to more often than any other, and birds are a constant background presence in his work. They’re all over my own poems, too, even when I try to keep them out.
Oddly, I’ve yet to write a poem directly about Ogmore, or Rest Bay. But that’s the thing with poems. Like Oystercatchers flashing over slate-grey seas, or Red Kites soaring above rows of Victorian terraces, they have a habit of turning up when you least expect them. That’s what we love about them.
Matt Merritt is the editor of Bird Watching Magazine (www.birdwatching.co.uk) and the author of three poetry collections – you can read some of his work here. He tweets as @polyolbion
(c) Images - Anthony Walton