Friday, July the 14th, 2006

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World of Birds

Dear Mr Key, writes one of the cast members of Lost, who does not wish to be identified further, I am a keen listener to your radio show on Resonance FM, and I could not help noticing that for the past two weeks you have been talking about birds, to the exclusion of virtually all other topics. A fortnight ago you regaled listeners with A Catalogue Of Fifty Three Birds, and this week you devoted your entire allotment of half an hour to the recitation of a list of over six hundred birds*. Are you a top ornithologist, or are you trying to pull the wool over our eyes by pretending knowledge where there is only a stagnant pond of ignorance?

It is always nice to receive letters from the cast members of Lost, even when—as here—there seems to be an inference that I don't know what I'm talking about. And I have to say that this is not the first time my ornithological credentials have been called into question. It is an accusation I am getting used to, sadly. Many writers of an avian bent would throw in the towel if they faced this sort of needling, day in, day out, but I am a man of almost saintly forbearance, and I shrug off such pinpricks—especially, it has to be said, when they come from people who spend their time pretending to be members of a frankly unbelievable fictional rock & roll band called something like Crankshaft, and whose guitar strumming is tuneless and vapid.

Perhaps I can end the malicious gossip once and for all by summarising my ornithological experience. My first paid job, after leaving school—it was still called a ‘school’ in those days, rather than a ‘community education hub’—was as a filing clerk for the Pointy Town Seabird Rescue Service. Pointy Town is, of course, a long, long way from the sea, so during my three exciting years there only a handful of seabird rescues took place. I remember—oh, vividly, vividly!—a guillemot that became entangled in many bright crepe paper ribbons and was set free by judicious snipping with a pair of embroidery scissors.

(Incidentally, speaking of guillemots, I certainly know more about them than the Guardian writer who seems unaware that they are a type of bird. Does the paper employ anyone over the age of twelve these days?)

As a filing clerk I became familiar with all sorts of seabirds, not just guillemots. Terns, auks, skuas, kittiwakes and hundreds of different types of gulls came within my purview.

Then, I am ashamed to say, I fell in with a low crowd and rapidly became a denizen of the underworld. Luckily, this did not put a stop to my ornithological education, as I became involved in a numbers racket. Eh?, you ask, isn't that a non sequitur? It would be, of course, except that the numbers in our numbers racket were based on bird populations. Every morning I was bidden to go out and about counting starlings, wrens, linnets, and what have you, thus arriving at that day's numbers for the racket.

After a brush with some very tough coppers, I decided to go straight. I applied for a job as personal chef to Peter Maxwell Davies, the eminent composer, thinking that this would provide me with an opportunity to find out all about swans—including how to cook them—but he turned me down in favour of some uppity kitchen person who is now a famous television personality. I mooched about idly for a while, and then enrolled on a course of Bird Recognition Skills at the Van Dongelbraacke School Of Bird-Related Studies in Tantarabim. To meet the tutorial fees and supplement my income I worked at nights for a company that carried out owl investigations, thus extending my knowledge to birds of prey. It was around this time, too, that I had a number of singular encounters with cassowaries.

I passed the Van Dongelbraacke course with distinction, umpteen gold stars, and a badge with a profile view of a trumpeter swan in silhouette, and thus secured a position as Assistant Bird Counting Person at the newly-established Haemoglobin Towers Bird Counting Institute, generously funded with a grant from Yoko Ono. One Thursday morning we learned that the Senior Bird Counting Person had been pushed by an unknown malefactor into the path of an out-of-control pneumatic railway train. By Thursday afternoon I was installed in his place, and given his talismanic feather-and-bird-bone necklace. Subsequent investigations by the very same tough coppers who had once pummelled me under a spotlight in an underground cellar failed to prove that I was the unknown malefactor, thank heaven.

A couple of weeks later the Gubernatorial Board of the Institute recommended that my job title be changed to Uber-Omniscient Bird Chieftain. The bleached skull of a vulture was added to my talismanic necklace. I was given a personal hen, whose clucks warned me of the approach of unauthorised visitors to my palatial suite of offices at the pinnacle of Haemoglobin Towers.

My binoculars are encrusted with gemstones. Tiny hummingbirds peck grains of wheat from my hand. A booby nests in my tremendous bouffant. Soon I will become indistinguishable from the Ancient Egyptian Bird God Horus, and thou shalt bow down, bow down before me and thou shalt tremble.

*NOTE : To be precise, I read out a list of five film directors, two jazzmen, one astronomer, one newsreader (Brent Sadler), thirty four stars of stage, screen and television, and six hundred and one birds. There ought to have been six hundred and two birds, but one was inadvertently duplicated.