After my praise of his work designing handwriting fonts, I had a pleasant note from Brian Willson. Another of his passions is birding, and he keeps a regular blog of his sightings on the Maine (N.E. USA) coast, listing all the birds he sees every day, a self-appointed task that fills me with awe.

He gets to see many more birds than we do in London or in Harlech. I love birds, though I’m not a twitcher, and Brian’s blog set me to thinking how I first fell for them.

I was six years old. I was looking out of my father’s study window when I saw a strange bird on the lawn. “Daddy, what’s that?” I cried. He glanced up for a moment, then went back to his papers. “It’s a pigeon,” he muttered.

At six you don’t know a lot, but I knew enough to realise that few pigeons were orange, with black and white striped wings, a long curved bill and a spectacular crest. Up till that time my father’s pronouncements made the Pope look fallible, but this planted the first seeds of doubt in my inchoate mind.

Of course, this is what I saw:

It was a Hoopoe, Upupa epops, and I took this photograph many years later (2004, actually) of a hoopoe emerging from her nest in a wonderful Spanish folly belonging to our friends Shaunagh and Crispin Latymer.

That Christmas I was given Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe and I became obnoxious on the subject.

The following year for a test at school Mr Walker asked us, a class of seven year olds, to write down the names of four birds. I carefully wrote

lammergeier
hoopoe
ortolan
chough

and failed the test because Mr Walker thought I’d made up the words.

What a little prick I was.

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