David Lindo - Tales from concrete jungles : urban birding around the world

TALES FROM CONCRETE JUNGLES

I dedicate this book to Donia and
Nicole Lindo. I will always love you both.

TALES FROM CONCRETE JUNGLES

Urban birding around the world

David Lindo

Contents

In August 2006 my life changed in a way I could never have imagined. I had just made my debut as the Urban Birder, having appeared on BBCs Springwatch , and was feeling totally on top of the world. I was strolling around the British Birdwatching Fair, the biggest and best birding convention of its kind in the world. Cock-of-the-rock. Visiting the bird fair was already etched into my psyche; it was the point of the year that everything and everybody remotely birdy planned for. But this year was different. I had just been on telly. Would anybody recognise me? I was especially hoping to be spotted by a scouting BBC executive browsing in the art marquee or forcing down a hot dog at the food tent as he cast a roving eye, ever on the lookout for a rough diamond. The sad answer was a resounding no to every hope I harboured. No one really recognised me apart from someone who had lent me a tenner the previous bird fair. He was clearly missing its weight in his wallet. And there certainly werent any telly executives lurking. No matter, I still felt cocky. So when I decided to walk onto the Bird Watching magazine stand to cheekily advise Kevin Wilmott, the then editor, to write a piece about me, my bravado dial was set to maximum. That sudden surge of courage during my triumphant entrance immediately evaporated the moment the last of those words left my mouth. Kevin looked at me without saying a word. His face said it all: Who is this nutter? Then he uttered: Who are you?

Why should he have written about me? OK, I had been on Springwatch for five minutes but that hardly meant that I was the next Bill Oddie. He broke the quizzical stare that seemed to last for an eon, by laughing. To his everlasting credit not only did he feature me in a Q&A, but he eventually handed me my first regular writing opportunity an urban birding column in the magazine. A brave move considering that I hadnt written so much as a sentence for public consumption before. The column initially featured my musings on the general act of urban birding but I soon thought it would be interesting to visit cities worldwide in pursuit of fresh material. Thinking that this would be a subject that perhaps would last for a year at a push before running dry, I was surprised by the striking variations between the cities I visited. Little did I know that this would be the start of a road trip like no other. Each urban centre seemed to have its own personality that was further heightened by the people I met and the luck that I had (and often didnt have) with the birds during the period of my visit. This book is a collection of many of those adventures spawned from that fateful meeting on the Bird Watching magazine stand. It spans from my early days with the magazine back in 2006 through to 2013 , the time of writing.

Dont expect to find a compendium of birding sites within an everlasting list of the worlds cities. Thats not going to happen. Instead, I would like to invite you on a journey that first examines some of the principles of everyday urban birding before launching into a meander through a few of the worlds cities, starting with some British ones. Not all the places I visit are even cities. Some are islands, others are specific sites that I thought rude not to pop into for a quick gander. I am not confined to cities as I feel that the city perspective on birding can also be brought out into the hinterlands. These stories are largely extended versions of the ones that originally appeared in my regular column in Bird Watching magazine. That said, there are also a few that have not been published before.

As I said before, this has been a journey that got started quite by accident and it is one that has brought me in touch not only with some wondrous wildlife but with some amazing conservationists. Many of these people truly impressed me with their commitment to urban wildlife conservation no matter how small their projects were. It is their work and successes that I wish to celebrate in the pages of this book. I hope that they inspire you to look at cities with different eyes and realise that the conservation message is perhaps more important to spread here than anywhere else in the world.

When was the last time that you stood in the middle of a busy street in a busy urban centre with your eyes closed listening out for the songs and calls of hitherto invisible birds? Let me rephrase the question: when was the first time you ever seriously indulged in urban birding?

If the answer is never then thats fine because urban birding is a bit of a mindset thing. Let me explain. I was born in London and spent my formative years watching birds in urban environments. Although I grew up to eventually call myself the Urban Birder, in reality it took me years to truly believe that I could find birds in cities. That was borne from the fact that I had no mentors and very little reference points as to where I could find birds in the metropolis. While wandering around in my daily city life I noticed birds. I had unconsciously discovered that birds were indeed everywhere.

The day I woke up to the idea of birds in the city was the day I fell in love with Wormwood Scrubs, my local patch. This area of land completely surrounded by housing, industry, roads, a hospital and a forbidding prison of the same name still managed to attract birdlife that even my friends in Norfolk were jealous of. When you start to see the urban world as a habitat with cliffs, woodland, marshes, lakes, rivers and scrubland, that is when you start to see birds.

Ive been a birder since the devil was a boy, which comes as a surprise to those who only know me from behind the wheels of steel when Im spinning tunes in a nightclub or diving around between the sticks on a football pitch on a cold, wet Saturday morning.

If only they knew that early every morning I am to be found roaming my beloved local patch, Wormwood Scrubs in west London; home to the notorious prison of the same name, mentioned in The Jams Down in the Tube Station at Midnight and featured in the original The Italian Job starring the King of the Cockneys, Michael Caine.

Sometimes after visiting the Scrubs, having seen next to nothing, I ask myself: Why am I here birding in the middle of London when I could be watching real and more exotic birds somewhere decent out in the countryside?

To answer that question, I have to go back to when I was a little five year old staring out of my bedroom window over my back garden in suburban Wembley, north London. At first I was spotting mummy birds and daddy birds (Starlings and Blackbirds respectively), baby birds and uncle birds (House Sparrows and Carrion Crows). I watched Woodpigeons performing their display flights and christened them jack-in-the-boxes, and the rounded wings of the passage Lapwings that I occasionally saw reminded me of spoons, so they were quickly renamed spoon wings. A whole new world was opening up before me.

Eventually, when I got hold of an old field guide there was no stopping me. By the age of eight I had begun keeping a list of the birds I recognised in my garden including a few really dodgy sightings.