Photo Len Helen Hörlin
Minziro
A Twitcher's Trilogy (2) - Skulking at a Forest Pool
Firecrest: by Peter Latham
It's so deeply ingrained it seems impossible to recall how birds became my raison d'etre. Yet perhaps it is possible to suggest how it was James fell in love with "the skulkers". Certainly it became confirmed one soft and sultry evening in June 1965. That evening a boy not yet ten was on hands and knees crawling through the tangled leafy gloom of a sallow grove, on so-called waste land, in Solihull on the outskirts of Birmingham (which is the centre of the English midlands). There he disturbed a pair of pale yellow and delicate olive trochilus Willow Warblers, as they were anxiously feeding flimsy green caterpillars to their unseen young, hidden within a tussock in a tiny thatched roof nest. The adults eyed the quietly crouching child with well-deserved suspicion (for in those days I was still a bit of an egger), yet soon, calling with the softest of bisyllabic "hooo-eets" they accepted my presence and resumed that most essential duty. Early next spring, on the drizzly Saturday morning of Easter (Easter day that year was April 10), he went with a school friend to search for dun-coloured Water Voles which, in those distant days could be found without fail, along the secluded river Blythe where it meandered around the far corner of Bruton Park.
