{ 1 }My Family and Other Birds

GOLDEN PHEASANT


Native to the dense mountain forests of Western China, the Golden Pheasant has long been prized for its beauty, leading to its transportation around the world. Feral populations of escaped or released birds have established themselves across the globe—in the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, and various other European and South American countries, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. Records from as early as 1740 suggest this bird was the first species of pheasant brought to North America. Some historians have suggested that George Washington may even have kept a few at Mount Vernon.

My parents met in an underground club in Bristol called the Tube, an homage to the psychedelic 1960s. It was March 1995, and condensation dripped off the vaulted cellar walls as they made eye contact through a throng of gyrating bodies. The building vibrated to “Venus” by Shocking Blue, and the light show—a looped reel of original band footage—cast flickering images across their faces. In a secluded corner of the room, the banter began. My dad, Chris, introduced himself to Mum, Helena, as an electrician working in a chicken factory. She assumed he was the rough diamond among his university-educated friends. Only later did she discover he was referencing an obscure lyric from a song by the Specials, something he does to this day. He was twenty-seven years old with a background in hunt saboteuring, animal rights, and environmental activism; he was also, and most significantly, a birder.

When I ask Dad what drew him to Mum, he says, “Have you ever seen a photo of your mum at that age?” I have many pictures of Mum in her youth: dark-eyed and slim with very long, very straight black hair. There are also photos of my dad, often in a black turtleneck sweater and black jacket. His handsome face was framed by long, fair hair. It was not only his “look” that caught Mum’s eye; she also loved his self-confidence and the way he held her eyes as he flirted.

While sparks flew at their first encounter, it hasn’t been an easy road for my parents.

* * *

From her teens, my mother has struggled with mental illness, but she wouldn’t be officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder until she was in her forties. Mum took her first overdose at fifteen, and by the time she went to university, she was acutely unwell. Flipping between manic and depressive episodes, Mum would have weeks when she went out clubbing every night followed by days in bed.

It was during one of Mum’s manic episodes that she met her first husband; in the throes of another, she married him, in secret, in Sheffield.

Born into a fairly strict Muslim family, Mum, at first, had enjoyed her independence at university, but the combination of newfound freedom and mania was toxic. She began to party hard. My grandfather, unlike others in the Bangladeshi community, believed in education and sent all five of his children, including his three daughters, into higher education. He wanted Mum to succeed, but he also wanted her to marry a “suitable” man, and that meant an arranged marriage. Like many Muslim girls, Mum struggled with this clash of cultures. By the end of the first year, her grades were suffering, she was in love with an Englishman, and her mania had subsided into deep depression.

In her second year, she was convinced she would be chucked off her course and married off shortly after. Despairing, she took a handful of pills and fell into a deep sleep from which she could not be woken. Stomach pumped and still alive, Mum recovered enough to marry the Englishman in secret.

Of course, her parents went ballistic when they found out, but it was a done deal. She dropped out of her math and philosophy degree and began to consider the law as a career. When she found out she was pregnant with my sister, Ayesha, Mum enrolled at a local college, took and passed a couple of A levels (law and politics), and armed with good results—and a new baby—hand delivered her CV to fifty solicitors’ firms, eventually landing a job as a paralegal. She then enrolled in a law degree. This snapshot is my mum in a nutshell: when she sets her mind to something, she will barrel on until she gets what she wants. Was she manic during this period? Definitely.

By the time she realized her marriage had been a mistake, she was well into her degree. She moved back to her parents’ home, determined now that as a single mother she would have to support herself and Ayesha.

In 1994, she and my four-year-old sister moved out of my grandparents’ house and across town to Clifton, a trendy part of Bristol. Working full-time, studying most evenings, and taking care of a toddler while still clubbing didn’t faze her; she had manic reserves of energy, and her parents were still local enough to be relied on for childcare.

When she met Dad, she was still struggling, moving regularly from reckless party animal to lone wolf, mired in deep depression.

When Dad entered her life, she had little idea that he would introduce her to a world beyond the murky, sweaty interior of a 1960s nightclub. She was to meet creatures that would transform her relationship with nature.

But that was later; right now, in the underground club, Mum’s friends had heard about this young man’s strange passion for birdwatching. “Careful,” they told her, “Chris is a twitcher.” Of course, Mum had no idea what a twitcher was. (She thought it might have been slang for a drug addict, but in her eyes at least, it turned out to be something far worse.) While it didn’t entirely break the stride of their relationship, from the outset Mum let Dad know he would be birding alone. “I’m Bangla. We don’t do birdwatching!” she told him.

* * *

At first glance, you might imagine my parents’ lives could not have been more different.

My Bangladeshi mother was born and bred in Bristol, and birdwatching, hill walking, hiking, rambling, and all other activities we associate with “the great outdoors” were not part of her childhood.

In 1955, my mother’s father, my nanabhai, a Sylheti Bengali, immigrated to the United Kingdom when he was nineteen years old, without a penny in his pocket. He worked as a waiter at a thriving Indian restaurant in Oxford, the city awash with wealthy students. When he was ready to strike out on his own, he chose Bristol, full of equally well-to-do students and bereft of an Indian restaurant. Three years later, he opened the Taj Mahal, the first Indian eatery in the South West.

In 1961, he returned to East Bengal to marry my grandmother, my nanu. They had not met before the ceremony but came to the UK as husband and wife. Nanu arrived during one of the coldest winters Britain had seen in recent years, with deep snow on the ground, in a thin cotton sari and cardigan.

Theirs was a fairly traditional Muslim home by Western standards, but by South Asian standards it was liberal. My grandparents were passionate about education for their daughters, inspired by Indira Gandhi’s attendance at Bristol’s Badminton School in the 1930s. This hunger for education was unusual in Bengali families even as recently as the 1980s. My grandfather worked long shifts at the restaurant, rising at dawn to buy supplies from the fruit and vegetable markets. He put all five of his children through private school, understanding the value of academic success for the immigrant class. He was only too familiar with the experience of Bengali communities in East London, where sons left school at fifteen to work in the family restaurant and girls were packed off to Bangladesh in their teens to find suitable husbands. It wasn’t an easy life for my grandparents; their ambitions were held in check by the hostile political landscape into which their children were born.

In the 1950s, racial discrimination was not illegal, and signs such as NO BLACKS, NO IRISH, NO DOGS could be seen in the windows of B&Bs, pubs, and flats to let. Nanabhai was no stranger to the taunts of racists who came into his restaurant at the weekend, looking for a fight. But he preferred rallies to protest against racism, rather than fighting with his fists on the streets. I have a photo of him at the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott march. It’s hard to believe that, during my parents’ lifetime, a commercial business—in this instance, the Bristol Bus Company—could refuse to employ Black and Asian workers. The city united to boycott the company’s buses, and the policy was abandoned. It was also widely considered to have influenced the passing of the Race Relations Act in 1965, outlawing racism in public places, and the act was extended a year later to prohibit employment and housing discrimination.

In the late 1970s, members of a far-right fascist party, the National Front, marched past my grandparents’ house, chanting, “If you’re White, you’re all right.” The family was terrified, the children instructed to keep away from the windows. Episodes like this and my nanabhai’s public fight against bigotry were the backdrop for my mother’s and my aunts’ burgeoning political awareness. From their early teens, they became vocal opponents of the oppression of South Africa’s non-Whites by the policies of apartheid.

So, when Mum eventually qualified as a solicitor, she used her experience to highlight racial bias within her industry. She joined her law firm in 1996, one of only two non-White members of the staff. In the following years, she was instrumental in promoting ethnic diversity within the company. In the past, job applications had been discarded if the applicant hadn’t achieved a first-class degree from a Russell Group university, or if they had a “funny name.” The firm was awash with suited White men. Mum hired paralegals from all backgrounds, successfully proving to the partners that color or provenance of degree was no bar to excellence within the industry.

* * *

Dad was born in Rainhill, Merseyside, in 1968. His father worked in the laboratories of Imperial Chemical Industries, who were the big employers in the North West at the time. Academic and sporty, his dad was an all-rounder. My grandmother was from a working-class background, less confident in her academic ability but smart enough for grammar school. For a while, she worked for an insurance company, but like her peers, she gave it up to become a homemaker when she became pregnant. Dad’s younger sister, Penny, loved horses and long walks with the family, while Dad was often happier in his own company.

From a young age, he was always more comfortable outside the house than in. They had a large garden with a six-foot fence, which he would scramble over to visit the woods nearby. He had a bird table and bird box in the garden, the latter remaining empty apart from one year when a male wren spent days building his domed nest inside, only for it to be rejected by the female.

On his seventh birthday he was given a book on how to identify European birds, and correctly named his first linnet in the next-door neighbors’ front garden. His passion for birdwatching was born.

Family camping holidays in the Lake District, Wales, and South West England meant that the countryside was as much a part of his childhood and adolescence as going to political rallies was a part of Mum’s.

When Dad was ten years old, the family moved to North Yorkshire, where his love for nature was fully realized. Now the family spent weekends walking the moors, climbing up to the impressive sandstone crags of the Wainstones or the distinctive half-coned peak of Roseberry Topping with its panoramic views across the Cleveland plain. Day trips to the picturesque Yorkshire coast between Runswick Bay and Staithes took in the fishing villages nestled in among the craggy cliffs and the coves and beaches. He hogged the binoculars and trained his eyes on the moors, the woodlands, the fields, fells, rivers, and lakes for birds, the pages of the guidebook burned firmly into his memory.

New birds came thick and fast. Here was the Red Grouse, ubiquitous amid the heather moorland, with its whirring wings and go back, go back, go back call as it burst into flight. It was hard to believe this plump-looking bird could achieve speeds of over a hundred kilometers per hour as it sought to evade an avian predator or, likelier, humans wielding guns. The Red Grouse is classed as a game bird, and around half a million are shot each year in the UK. While the moorland might appear to be natural, in many places it is intensively managed to increase the numbers of grouse. Other animals and birds that might eat the grouse are eradicated, and bird of prey are illegally persecuted in some areas.

Smart, golden-spangled, summer-plumaged Golden Plovers gave their fluting peep calls from hillocks among the heather.

Fulmar is a concatenation of the Old Norse words meaning “foul,” as in foul-smelling, and “gull,” which the Fulmar resembles in appearance. On the coast, they cruised off the cliffs on stiff wings, their innocent, wide-eyed stares disguising their ability to projectile vomit an odious-smelling liquid at anyone or anything coming too close to their nest sites among the noisy Kittiwakes, who sang their name from their coastal colonies perched on the sheer rock face.

Dad handwrote his first birding list at the age of ten, ninety-eight species spotted and noted! But it wasn’t until a family holiday on Corfu that his ambitions ramped up. He was immediately seeing and identifying species he had only ever dreamed of: the red-eyed Sardinian Warbler, the cerulean-hued Blue Rock Thrush, and the Red-rumped Swallow nesting on the hotel balcony, appearing at first glance to be a cross between our house martin and swallow but, on closer inspection, clearly distinctive. It was a thrilling trip, a new and different experience for Dad; he was adding more birds to his repertoire, and his appetite for birdwatching expanded to fill every spare moment.

* * *

Before they met my dad, Mum and my sister had shown no interest in birding or even in the great outdoors. As a second-generation Bangladeshi growing up in Bristol, Mum had always considered herself a city girl. The closest she came to birding as a child was catching sight of the pigeons when she and her family went to the park to play cricket, or chasing away the gulls from her bag of chips on trips to the seaside. (Although now she admits she was rather enchanted by the tiny sparrows that flocked to her garden to be fed grains of leftover rice by my nanu.)

By the time Mum had actually worked out what dating a birdwatcher meant for their relationship, it was too late. She was in love. But she still wouldn’t join him on the predawn expeditions to wherever the birders’ pager alerts came from, where she imagined he would be standing for hours in the rain for the sake of seeing a single bird that had flown off its natural course. She wasn’t wrong.

Now, on the weekends, Ayesha and Dad would disappear off to Chew Valley Lake or the nearby hills. Their very first trip out was a twitch to Cheddar Reservoir to see a Red Phalarope, a small, storm-blown gray-and-white wader that wears a little black mask. It breeds on the Arctic tundra, then spends the rest of the year out on the high seas, so when they occasionally, inadvertently, arrive on an inland reservoir, they are very tame, often never having encountered a human being before. Ayesha fell in love with this little bird spinning like a top on the surface of the water, sifting up the mud to dislodge the invertebrates below and feast.

Mum was starting to feel a bit left out. Both daughter and new boyfriend having abandoned her, she allowed herself to be drawn into their next adventure. “I’ll go with you. Just once, to see what all the fuss is about.”

The first family twitch was a cold day in March 1997, on a mission to Welney Wetland Centre in Norfolk in search of a Canvasback. This American diving duck had never been seen in the United Kingdom before. The alarm clock bleeped in the dead of night. (Just six months earlier, Mum would have been returning from a nightclub at this hour.) The game was on. Mum slept in the car all the way there and even nodded off in the bird hide. She was hardly slumming it, though—this hide had a carpet and plate glass windows; surely the most luxurious hide in the country, Dad had commented. What better place for her inaugural twitch?

Dad, Ayesha, and the other twitchers, who had by now gathered in this birding temple, trained their binoculars on the surrounding wetlands, a series of flooded fields with open flashes of water and part of the much larger Ouse Washes, a floodplain between the Old and New Bedford Rivers. By now, Mum was growing impatient. This was birdwatching? Where was the bird? There was no sign of the Canvasback. They had all got up in the dark to drive halfway across the country, only to spend hours staring at a boggy swamp, and for nothing. Maybe the bird had decided to do the sensible thing and return to its home in North America, she wondered aloud.

But she was wrong; the Canvasback hove into view across the lake. Its distinctive long black bill and chestnut-brown head sat atop a pale gray body bookended by the black feathers on its breast and stern. A regal duck, escorted by a flock of its serene European cousins, the pochards.

My sister spotted it first and helpfully pointed it out to the assembled twitchers, who were just as desperate to catch a glimpse of this new visitor to our shores. She kept up a running commentary of its movements as it weaved its way through the pochard flock until, finally, everyone had seen it.

Mum was beginning to get it now, inspired by the excitement of the other twitchers, by Ayesha’s exhilaration at being the first to spot the bird, by Dad’s obvious pride.

Hours later, with the sighting of another new bird, Mum became fully initiated into this often misunderstood, often obsessive pastime.

On the way home, Dad decided he wanted to stop off to try to see a bird local to Norfolk: the Golden Pheasant. Although it originated in the mountains of Western China, the Golden Pheasant has an established population in the UK after being released into the wild by shooting estates. The Golden Pheasant is rare and extremely shy, often difficult to glimpse even for an experienced birder like Dad.

The sun was already starting to dip below the horizon when they arrived at Wayland Wood; Ayesha recalls the ground crackling with dry leaves, the air still and cold, a muntjac deer barking in the near distance. This foray wasn’t so much about converting Mum to the art of birdwatching; it was about Dad’s increasing desperation to find the Golden Pheasant. He had made this trip a dozen times in the past with no luck.

Leading the way, he scanned the undergrowth for a flash of gold, but Ayesha had begun to drag her feet, by now thoroughly exhausted by their predawn start. One circuit of the woodland was enough for her. And for Mum. The woods were eerily still. Leaves crunched and Dad was irritated, convinced the noise would scare off every creature in the area, including the reclusive pheasant. Eventually, in frustration, he left them to go and search on his own.

Mum and Ayesha waited for Dad to return. After a few minutes of near-total silence, the ground crackled behind them. Turning slowly, Mum laid eyes on a creature that took her breath away.


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