Patrick Galbraith - In Search of One Last Song: Britains Disappearing Birds and the People Trying to Save Them

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2022

Copyright Patrick Galbraith 2022

Illustrations by Robert Vaughan

Cover artwork Robert Gillmor

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Patrick Galbraith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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Source ISBN: 9780008420475

eBook Edition March 2022 ISBN: 9780008420482

Version: 2022-06-10

For Constance, for my uncles too, who I hope would have enjoyed this book very much, and for all those people trying to preserve the beauty of the world.

Up behind the river, at the back of the kirkyard, the rabbits lived among the dead. I wasnt ever sure if I was meant to be shooting in the graveyard itself but I was fourteen and Walter, a sheep farmer who sat on the parish council, rang one evening to say hed lend me his air rifle if I fancied it. The flowers left by grieving relatives were being eaten and it had been decided that something had to be done.

When the sun shone, Id cycle over on my younger brothers bike and leave it leaning on the ivy-covered gable end of the old ruined chapel next to the pink sandstone kirk. All afternoon and often long into the evening, Id crawl among the graves, head up into the fields, and wander in the birch wood beyond, trying to do the best I could to thin out the rabbits. There were hundreds then, but even when I learned how to use the wind and the stone dykes to get right in among them, I only ever went home with two or three. Im sure it meant though that Walter could say yes, absolutely, the flowers being eaten was a problem he was dealing with.

On my way back home, after the humpbacked bridge and past the rowans, where the railway line once ran, Id stop and call in on the old lady who lived down the lane. From her kitchen window, she could see the gravestones in the distance and she once told me the story of how shed met her husband, who lay beneath one of them, just after the war, but mostly she wanted to talk about the hills beyond the kirkyard where shed lived as a little girl. Back then, in spring, she remembered peewits and curlew coming crying across the fields and there were so many black grouse she told me nobody would have believed you if youd said that one day theyd be all but gone. Often, the following morning, Id return with some rabbit casserole Made it myself, cider and honey and mustard. You just have to put it in the microwave then wed sit and talk some more. She had a black cat called Titus that would lie across her lap and Im not sure I ever saw him awake. One morning, she showed me a map of the Shinnel Glen and told me there was a pool there where you could guddle trout. You rub your fingers under their bellies, she said, in a whisper, showing me how with her small white hands, and then when they fall into a daze, you grab them behind the gills and quickly hoick them onto the bank.

That afternoon, I cycled up there with my terrier. The sun shone orange in the quiet sky and beech mast and leaves lay drifted on the lane. For a couple of hours I stalked the water but the burn was on its bones, so I sat in the moss and looked down the glen, wondering if, without all those birds, it was really the same place at all.

Chris Packham and I had been in touch for a while and we thought that maybe we could do something together. I knew plenty of people who seemed to hate him, and as the editor of a prominent fieldsports magazine he knew plenty of people who felt the same way about me. It was a cold Monday afternoon and I dont think it had actually rained all day but the streets were greasy and damp.

I checked the email again as my train pulled in. His assistant had sent it four weeks previously and David whoever David was had apparently put the date in his calendar: There is a restaurant on the concourse at Waterloo Station, the Natural Kitchen, it might work as a place to meet. Chris was sitting with his glasses on the tip of his nose scrolling through his phone as I approached. He looked older than he does on telly and he was pushing the corner of his lip up with his tongue as though something was frustrating him, but when he noticed me lingering he looked round and smiled. Patrick, he said, standing up. Im sorry its not very He gesticulated apologetically and laughed, then said hed eaten, but you have whatever you like. Order whatever.

Chris Packham: Forever Punk had just aired and I told him how much Id enjoyed it and the way the three episodes sort of captured what it was to be a teenager and just that whole moment. You know, he replied, making that was just terrific. As I picked at my fried courgette, we talked of fishing. Wed both done a bit when we were young. He told me he wished he wrote more and I told him I wish I fished more. Too busy, he said with a shrug. Yeah, life does get like that, I replied. When I was finished, he ordered tea, and when it came, the conversation turned to what we could maybe do together to try and stem the decline of some of our disappearing birds. I didnt go for his ideas too much, too antagonistic, too divisive at a time when I felt we needed less division and he didnt go for mine. Too slow, too plodding. Sometimes, Patrick, youve got to make a bit of noise.

Below us, the station was starting to fill up with agitated commuters trying to get back home. Somewhere down the line, thered been an incident, and emergency services were responding. Chriss train wasnt going to be for another half hour so we ordered more tea and talked on. We spoke of some of the birds we loved and how little time some of them have left. In a way I hadnt really anticipated, he listened intently, and I tried to listen just as intently to him. At just after five we wandered over to the escalator and descended into the crowd, a mass of grey faces inches apart and bodies pressed together. That morning, almost 6,000 miles away in Thailand, a sixty-one-year-old traveller in a Bangkok hospital was confirmed to be carrying a virus that hadnt previously been seen outside China.