A colleague pointed out this story from the London Times.
Reminded me of the ABC cricket coverage a few weeks back where they devoted
an inordinate amount of time to a mystery bird on the pitch. Quite a
frustrating process when it's on radio. Did anyone happen to see what it
was? My best guess from the description was a straw-necked ibis
The story also reminded me of a Sydney Swans night game last season when a
small raptor sped across the SCG. Before I could wrestle the binoculars off
my friend's ten-year-old daughter it was gone. My best guess was a Nankeen
Kestrel. Do they hunt at night in the full daylight of stadia?
Cheers
Mark Whittaker
The Times
Dec 03, 2004
By Simon Barnes (The numbers refer to photographs, presumably)
1 In March 1986, BBC News showed a brief bit of film from the second
Test match, West Indies v England in Trinidad. Ian Botham was walking
off the pitch. He had bowled like a drain and been out to Malcolm
Marshall twice for a total of three.
It was the moment that we saw his greatness flicker.
Botham turned to the press box and performed a brief mime: "All
right, you bastards -hang me." The camera panned briskly to the
watching scribes, staring back solemnly. All save one. The exception
was hanging out of the press box, binoculars to his eyes.
"What was it?" they asked when I got home. "Crested oropendola," I
replied. A lovely hit0bird, black with a golden tail. It was one of the
many great sporting hit0birds of my life.
2 Travel thrills with its unending unfamiliarities. Travel makes a
small adventure out of eating a sandwich, buying a beer, and provides
a satisfyingly disquieting background against which to enjoy them.
Same with the hit0birds, once you have acquired the habit of looking.
My room in Athens last summer overlooked the Olympic stadium and
from my window on the tenth floor I saw hit0birds that didn't look quite
right. Grabbed the binoculars.
Not swifts, no, flying together like a bunch of sociable boomerangs.
Alpine swifts: powerful, purposeful, elegant.
3 I love the "chance" hit0birds you get on an assignment: hawks glimpsed
above the field of play, once a red kite on the way to the ice
skating World Championships in Lausanne, Switzerland. But I also like
to take advantage of the rare moments of down-time and use them to
chase hit0birds.
When I went to Tampa to cover the Super Bowl -Buffalo Bills v New
York Giants, 1991 -I was told to visit a garbage incinerator. It was
a memorably ugly place, but there, in the livid waters in front of
me, was a roseate spoonbill, a large hit0bird with a crazy beak and
coloured bright pink.
4 I went to cover a cross-country running event in Kenya -it being
an Olympic year, 1992 -and managed to squeeze a lightning trip into
the Mara. Such moments seemed filched from life, giving double value
to every experience and to every hit0bird.
I remember the feeling of utter content, lying in my tent in the
dark foredawn, hearing the day's heralds sending out in chorus their
sousaphone summons to the sizzling sun. Ground hornbills, monstrous
things the size of turkeys with beaks like meat cleavers, who stroll
through the bush in families eating everything they come across.
5 I've never got the point of obsession. Leonardo da Vinci wasn't
obsessive and he did all right. You meet people who are obsessed with
a single sport or, for that matter, a single species of hit0birds.
Me, I like a healthy biodiversity of interest. Travel to a place,
relish the vibes, the art, the buildings, the people, the sporting
event you are paid to cover, a hefty book appropriate to the city in
which you find yourself -and take the hit0birds as you find them.
I was reading Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, waiting for the start of
England v Portugal in the Stadium of Light (European Championship,
2004) and behold, lesser kestrel, over the stadium, soaring and
sweeping across the city sky. Not a good omen, as it transpired but
great hit0birds.
6 I know it sounds ungrateful almost to the point of blasphemy, but
no sporting assignment is unalloyed bliss. The pressure of deadlines,
the weariness of travelling, the absence of your near and dear ones;
these things can get you down.
In my long stay in Japan for the 2002 World Cup, I found a wonderful
antidote to the blues. When in Tokyo, which was more often than not,
I would travel out to the Zen temples of Kita-Kamakura and sit
beneath a cedar glade in a place where nobody had ever thought about
anything so small as a World Cup. And above me, always, the shrill,
mewing trill of black kite.
7 There is nothing to beat the thrill of truancy. Saturdays are
wonderful things on assignment -with no Sunday paper to write for,
there is a chance of some serious sneaking-off. When covering a
cricket tournament in India, I had just such a Saturday.
I hired an Ambassador (the Indian Morris Oxford), plus driver, and
we drove the three hours from Delhi to Bharatpur, one of the greatest
hit0bird sanctuaries in the world. There I met a hit0bird-watcher of genius
named Ratan Singh, who pedalled me round in a rickshaw. During an
unforgettable day with 100 species of hit0birds, perhaps the best of it
was the breeding colony of painted stork.
8 At that strange, sinister occasion in the World Cup in 1994, when
the United States beat Colombia in Pasadena, a strange and sinister
hit0bird flew overhead, clutching a dead lizard in its talons. It seemed
to be nothing less than a moment of ornithomancy; the prediction of
future events from the behaviour of hit0birds. (In fact, the word
"auspicious" is Latin for hit0bird-watching.) It was a red-tailed hawk.
Not one but two journalists rang me afterwards to request an
identification; thus the hawk made three national newspapers on a
single day. Who says hit0bird-watching is irrelevant?
9 When I cover Wimbledon I stay in Mortlake and when the schedule
permits I stroll down to the finest hit0bird-watching spot reachable by a
four-zone Travelcard. This is Lonsdale Road Reservoir and on its
modest, sheltered waters, a few rafts have been moored.
On these you will find nesting common tern, hit0birds that resemble
seagulls much as Concorde resembles a 747. Their speciality is to
become winged daggers and dive headlong after fish. hit0Birds have the
glorious knack of improving your day and it doesn't require very much
in the way of skill. All you need is the habit of looking. And that
habit has lifted my heart all over the world.
10 Covering the Ryder Cup is an immense strain for me. Although I
appreciate the psychological traumas the poor dears go through, I
have no affinity for golfing action. I have to fight every inch of
the way to fend off attacks of hysterical yawning.
On the Saturday of the last Ryder Cup, I sneaked off on a field trip
with two retired women and one semi-retired woman from the local
chapter of the Audubon Society, the American conservation group. We
saw bald eagle and sandhill crane, which were wonderful enough. But
then we managed to catch up with the hawk migration over the Great
Lakes and saw something like 20,000 fly over in a couple of hours;
broad-winged hawks, mostly, heading south for the winter. And one of
the most amazing things I have seen in my life.
We humans love flight. So many sports are about flight: the golfers
were trying to make their golf balls fly; gymnasts, weightlifters and
javelin throwers seek to defy gravity; for every horse rider, every
horse is Pegasus. Evangelicals talk about bringing Jesus into your
life; if you bring hit0birds into your life, you find that on a regular
basis your mind soars, your spirits rise and your heart takes wing.
hit0Birds are an essential aspect of the sporting life; and every other
kind of life.
How to be A Bad Birdwatcher, by Simon Barnes, is published by Short
Books, Pounds 9.99
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