In Which We Twitch

It being lovely weather for ducks, I thought we should go and look at some.

Number 2 Son is a bit of a twitcher. So from time to time we go birding at Brandon Marsh. I enjoy the stroll, the cafe, and the virtuous sense of being a good mother and wildlife patron (at £2.50 to get in, patronage comes pleasantly cheap)

Hiding in hides is magical. I love raising the worn wooden flaps, made apparently from old school desks, to open the viewing slits which line the walls. We spy out of these, sitting on hard, high wooden benches, like voyeurs at a peepshow.

Courtesy demands that the flaps are closed once you’ve finished ogling the waterfowl, so you enter in darkness, unless the hide is occupied. If it is, the odds are that your companion is armed with both binoculars and a camera the size and shape of a bazooka. With this terrifying piece of armoury, he takes very, very close-up pictures of small and, to me, deeply undistinguished birds.

We too come badged with binoculars (you can borrow cast-off pairs free from reception; no-one can tell the difference and they generally work if you close one eye and concentrate).

I can’t really tell one bird from another. A duck is a duck in my book. We see Pochards, and Teal, and search vainly for Goldeneye, but only because Number 2 Son points them out to me. I squint through my dodgy binoculars in the wrong direction, and pretend I can see them too. What I really see is out-of-focus ducks.

The bazooka wielders assume that, as an adult, I am the twitcher. They point out to me a Dunlin that’s just gone behind that patch of scrub.

‘Actually, it’s a Redshank’ murmers Number 2 Son, and they realise they’ve addressed the monkey, not the organ grinder.

We want to see a kingfisher. Even I quite want to see a kingfisher. Whenever we arrive at the Carlton Hide, where they hang out, some kind soul tells us we’ve just missed one. Today, before we get even that far, a passing fisherman tells us how he sees them constantly, they even perch on the end of his rod; in fact (guess what) there was one right here only half an hour ago.

We hang around the East Marsh Hide for a while with a bazooka wielder and a nice elderly couple eating sandwiches, and watch cormorants. I can recognise cormorants, being much bigger than ducks. Huffed up in the sleeting rain, they remind me of Japanese woodcuts, fishermen and sanpans, and I fantasise that I’m somewhere else, drier and warmer. I bet they do, too.

Number 2 Son sets off for the Carlton and the wretched kingfisher (which we both know has just this minute left) while I wait back at the East Marsh, contemplating a damp shag (or possibly cormorant), when something terrible happens. Bazooka says casually ‘Ah, there’s a Water Rail. See, by those rushes’

Just as I’m obligingly swivelling my binoculars in the wrong direction, a small brown wader breaks cover and sprints right across the front of the hide. The Water Rail. Even I can’t miss it.

But Number 2 Son has. And, for him, it would have been the best thing that’s happened to him, ever.

He returns from not seeing the kingfisher, and of course Bazooka immediately tells him all about it. My son’s small face stiffens with suppressed anguish and disappointment. I pray for the rail to make return dash, right now. It doesn’t, of course.

We trudge back to the café for hot chocolate and toasted tea-cakes, both lost in contemplation. Eventually, he lets out a sigh.

‘I’ve thought about it’ he says ‘And, after all, I did see a Red Kite, once’

His bravery overwhelms me with love.