Samhain and the Vagrant Mind

GB Point: photo Martin Goodey

Each autumn, during my retirement in the late seventies and early eighties of last century, was given-over to worshiping the gods of migration. My personal homage to birds and to the greatest wonder of the known world - evoked by 'vismig' - by visible migration. I was indeed fortunate in being able to decide to enjoy my retirement before taking-on work! Clearly, at least so far as I could see, life on earth was not going to get steadily better and better as the propaganda machinery of the dominant western culture relentlessly sought to proclaim. It seemed to me that anyone with a serious interest in our living planet, in nature and wildness, could not fail to appreciate the consequences of shocking information that was being revealed on an almost daily basis. Anyway, my departure from normal life took place in 1977 and followed a period of great disillusionment which set-in during my self-imposed incarceration at a highly respected medieval university in eastern England.

I vividly recall one dull day at the end of October in 1976. On a grey street in that fine historic city of spires, one formerly surrounded by the richest wetland in all of England, both now far away in space as well as time, a postcard appeared in my hands from a good friend whom I had first met at Easter 1970 (on a Young Ornithologists ten day trip to the Neusiedlersee in Eastern Austria). The card was an aerial photograph, taken from the south, of a tiny island of celtic fields and heathy moor adrift in a soft blue sea. There was Horse Point of Agnes, an isle who had through no fault of her own became known as Saint Agnes, in the Isles of Scilly. Here our family had once spent our proper holiday in the late summer of that same year i.e. 1970. Horse Point happens to be the southernmost land, a lichen-crusted granite tor (an eminence of rounded, weathered boulders), in all of post glacial Britain.

St Agnes: photo Martin Goodey
On the backside of the postcard, written in neat blue biro, was my friend's annotated list of Scilly rarities seen over the past three weeks. My three weeks past had yielded no highlights, avian or otherwise, so I begged two birder friends (not embedded in the ranks of the university) for a lift up to the north Norfolk coast that coming weekend. It turned out to be a really great weekend, providing two lifers, but that is another story.

Then and there, in the street, those bird names on the card, of beings so recently incarnate (some names archaic now - e.g. Indian Tree Pipit), unhinged what was left of my window on success and in an instant freed me from a square life of framed ambitions.

After leaving Uni, the fall of 1977 found me ensconced in California birding daily and studying hard, swotting-up Nearctics usually whilst in the backseat on the freeways with luminaries like Paul Lehman and Louis Bevier, each of us attentive to the optical brilliance of established local bird finders Guy McCaskie and Jon Dunn. I finally left California owing to a certain homesickness - specifically the need to surround myself with old friends - a pining for Old World genera and species.

It was October 28 1978 before I eventually made it back onto St Agnes and the fabled Isles of Scilly. I stayed two windswept weeks in a tiny cottage, which was called The Hump, perhaps Sizewell: The author and friends at the Sizewell White-tailed Eagle twitch (Sufflok) in 1981 (pfoto: Steve Rooke)because it perches on the top of Agnes, with a bearded birder named Paul Dukes, a man who has found, there on Agnes, more new birds for the British List than one might imagine possible. Thereafter my fate was sealed, and each autumn I managed to join with other pilgrims on the pathways to the Isles of Scilly. And undeniably, unfailingly, each autumn the birding experiences garnered on Scilly formed the zenith of my year. More than once over the years, in those autumnal weeks, a solemn vow was taken, (once in a force nine gale, within a swirling mass of curled ruby-red leaves of the now endangered Cornish elm) that one day I would try to write something worthwhile about such brilliant times. Specifically about the revelations, many outside the scope of mundane mainstream birding, which were discerned in those now distant days by many of my age-class. And so, falteringly for All Souls' Day and Halloween 2007, a score of years after the events, I suppose it should be at least begun.

"Scilly", as she became to us birders, is an archipelago in the north-east Atlantic straddling the imaginary fiftieth line of latitude, between 27-35 miles west south west of the British main island. The islands lie on the very edge of Europe, in an equable climate which has benefited from the gulf stream, they face America and, like other preeminent vagrant traps have a full 360 degree catchment area from which they gather migrant birds. Frost is rare and the vegetation, largely devised and nurtured by a century of dedicated human action, is in places quite lush and almost always green. Consequently birds that arrive there find cover and some food and survive long enough that they may be found - especially if there is an army of keen observers searching for them.

Every year between 1978 and 1991 from late August until mid November, (rarely we arrived a week or so earlier in summer and more frequently we were forced to drag ourselves away, even deeper into the dark time), my close companions and I might have been observed each day somewhere on the isles. Most likely quite exposed on one of the motor launches that connect St Mary's to the four inhabited off-islands of Tresco, Bryher, St. Martins and Agnes, or less easily whilst haunting the rustic waysides and headlands that fringe the busier main island of Saint Mary's. Or perhaps we might have been 'scoped whilst dodging across the Higher or Lower moors (wet areas which occupy the two big valleys on the island); myself diving, secateurs in hand, into some forbidden tangled clump of Goat willow - on a quest for rare Phylloscopus. You had to be furtive even then, for there was no right to roam on Scilly, the islands being part of the Duchy of Cornwall, so that the land remained in thrall to the laws of an alien monarchy, and the obscure needs of one Charles, Prince of Wales.

During the day I was most definitely peripheral to the birder throng; though in the evenings the lure of the pub, and less often the log, could prove compelling. In daylight even when a really good bird was showing-well I was always at the margin of those tangled knots of greenish-brown masculinity that periodically surged along the narrow road, or leaned in lines against old stone walls peering into little fields, clogging the smaller lanes. The woolly hats and sour-smelling wax jacket uniforms of Britain's fast-lane twitcher society, whose ranks multiplied massively during periods of active vagrancy, when suddenly, briefly they would descend on Scilly, choppering-in and choppering-out on board the red white and blue of a British Airways Sikorsky. The chief umbies (upwardly mobile birders) would always appear on the islands, in the wake of a major migrant fall-out. Typically arriving just as things were being found, in the clear nor'westerly sector a day or two after the eastward passage of a major atlantic cyclone into Biscay; or less often, on a warm and grimy south-easterly breeze drifting out of continental Europe, to the south of a Baltic high (blocking anticyclone). In some of the better autumns there would be such an arrival on three or even four occasions.

Umbies, whilst being for the most part excellent observers, were primarily dedicated to enlarging their already large British (and later their World) lists and therefore, as the culture of the increasingly affluent eighties reinforced such drives, more and more of them opted to remain at work throughout October. By remaining at work in cities and towns on the British mainland (rather than wasting valuable holiday-birding time on a duff spell in Scilly) they could more rapidly redeploy themselves (often overnight) to islands and headlands near and far. Places where individuals of a patient and rapidly growing band of dedicated patchworkers would once in a while strike it lucky and discover a major national rarity; one that by definition almost everybody needed - even a first for Britain - and on the mainland even! Known as cripplers or blockers (i.e. on very few lists) in those cruel cold or post-war days; such birds have become known as megas in the cool order, warm world parlance of PC detachment.

The Ovenbird Twitch: Photo Martin Goodey

Yet one suspects that most of the other birders, whenever they were there on Scilly, were benefiting just as I was. Benefiting not only from the blessings of bearing witness to the best annual assortment of "Sibes and Yanks" anywhere outside the Bering Sea, but also from the chance of finding their own rarities at the annual jamboree. I believe that the chase, the sport of chasing rare birds, of searching for, finding, identifying and, most important, of sharing the experience of finding rarities in the field (on Scilly this was undertaken on foot, entirely without private motorised transport) can be a unique and yet daily challenge. And such a great joy, a real privilege, that many of us eagerly anticipated each year as the month of October drew near. For well over a decade Scilly remained the best, the most enjoyable, most sociable place in all the world, in which to play this delightful birding game.

The poor ovenbird: Photo Martin Goodey

Of course we knew that the majority of these rare birds each autumn would be doomed first years, disoriented or mis-directed juveniles of globe spanning migrant species that by ill-fate become one area's super rarities.

Birds from far distant and, in those days, enduringly mysterious lands, inaccessible, they hailed from human nations not at all like ours. These included nearly all the "Accidentals" species which were given only cursory treatment at the very back of Peterson, Mountfort and Hollom (the first Field Guide of those times).

That we could see vagrants and extreme vagrants that we had first heard of in our sixties childhood, seemed almost unbelievable. A fancied glimpse of any one of which had occasionally graced the dreams of our birding apprenticeship in those earlier years.

The fact that almost all of these individuals, especially the mirror-image vagrants from Russia, searching for Indo-Chinese jungles bursting with invertebrate life, and the often dazed-looking cuckoos and thrushes Masked Shrike: photo Martin Goodeyblown-over from North America, would soon drown in our cold northern ocean or starve to death in some leafless wood added haunting pathos to the experience of finding and watching these most highly desirable avian vagrants.

However one can choose to look at this whole rarity-hunting phenomenon in another way. One that is both less sporting, less fanciful and yet to me even more encouraging. The birds, at least collectively, are not in any real way doomed, and we are celebrating the annual revolution of life itself when we search for them.

Autumn avian vagrants, of any species, appearing in any part of the Holarctic are representatives of a vanguard of pioneers who, whether via genetic idiosyncrasies or by falling victim (occasionally en masse) to the vicissitudes of changing weather patterns and climatic realignment, find themselves one dawn flying over seas and land where very few of their ancestors have traveled before.

Ever changing environments occasionally enable some of the pioneer minority, somewhere way off course, to survive the winter (non-breeding season) and return whence they came or very occasionally to establish a breeding site in a different part of the globe.

They are therefore both a part of the great seasonal sacrifice and also a measure of the success of a species in any one breeding season. They are the harvest and also part of the seed crop.

Searching for and finding these autumnal waifs and strays on remote islands and headlands, oases and deltas around the northern hemisphere each October seems to me a worthy pursuit in itself. It is a great tribute both to the special beauty and vitality of the birds and to the aliveness of our own people, our birders.

A pursuit as alive and meaningful as any human activity can be. In fact I now feel that this pursuit is about as close as we can get, in the British Isles and Atlantic Europe (and doubtless elsewhere) to an unselfconscious participation in the annual celebration of that most important Gaelic festival Samhain.

Samhain marks the end of summer light and of evident plant growth; and the beginning of the dark half of the year.

Evidence of this festival stretches back into the times of our early Brythonic ancestors. And of course at that time doubtless it existed in a similar form among almost all the diverse ethnic groups of the northlands. Undoubtedly in form, if not in name, it was practiced farther back, through the vastness of the Bronze Age and Neolithic times, and farther still, even into the very emergence of our communicated awareness of the seasons and our place within the chase - to the dawn of our humanity.

Thus we - the birders - celebrate All Souls' Eve, the Halloween, our own extended harvest festival, which pays tribute to the decline of summer and marks the onset of winter. It is our version of the gaelic Samhain and of ever more ancient rites hiding in the mists beyond.

In so doing we may receive an in depth education in birds, bird lore and birding (and in much else besides) which as it pours into the gulf stream currents of our collective memory, or tribal consciousness, helps sustains us. Enables our recollection of the thrills of the ancient hunt (a chase now dressed in fairly benign if not in passive garb) and connects us to the essence of being alive on this Earth.

Rarity hunting was, and for many it remains, no matter where we are, an extremely rewarding investment of our free time and of any surplus energy.

Memories of many seasons searching for autumn vagrants on Scilly; in my late youth's retirement, and latterly in Shetland, western Spain and elsewhere; hopefully will remain with me always as dearly cherished memories.

Patch-birding; for in reality everywhere you bird is - in that moment - your patch; and rarity-finding require that certain commitment of energy, discipline and training that many continue to find exciting even in later life. Despite it usually being by then, at best, somewhat erratically pursued. As all too frequently our training, or mine at least, is interrupted by various adult responsibilities. Nevertheless it remains a fiery core inside an aging heart.

And thus my friends, a toast at this Samhain - to the departed, to spring-our-queen and to avian evolution!

Buff-breasted Sandpiper: Photo Martin GoodeyCream-coloured Courser: Photo Martin Goodey