A bird of wild places

I had passed my driving test in the States in the summer of 1985, but it was nearly another three years before I did so in the UK, at the second attempt. (Amusingly, perhaps, I failed the first time for being too cautious pulling out at a junction – not something I could have been accused of often since, especially on twitches.) So there I was in Birmingham in early May 1988, new licence burning a hole in my pocket – I hired an Escort van for a few days, slung a mattress in the back, and headed off on a road trip.

If I’d been a bit more clued-up, given the time of year I might have headed to the coast – North Norfolk, perhaps, or Spurn – but I decided on a swing round the Peak District. It was great fun – I was young, I had the freedom to visit new places, go where I wanted, park up and sleep where I felt like… And the scenery was fantastic, picturesque villages full of old stone houses, and bleak and wild landscapes.

The best day was Saturday 7 May. I started off by walking along the old railway line at Miller’s Dale, then spent most of the rest of the day in the Goyt Valley. A walk in the woods alongside Fernilee Reservoir was much the same experience as I now get (in normal years) in the wooded combes of Exmoor or the Quantocks – a parachuting Tree Pipit, a dapper male Pied Flycatcher singing its little ditty, a Wood Warbler shivering with the effort of pouring out its melancholic heart (oh, that song!), and a couple of scorching male Redstarts. Absolutely magical for a young birder, and still so even now.

But these were all birds I had seen before, albeit only a few times each by then. There was one bird that I hoped to see for the very first time, and for that I needed to head further up the valley, above the woods and out on to open moorland. Past Errwood Reservoir I stopped again and walked down to the old packhorse bridge (a delight in itself) – there I heard an unfamiliar thrush-like song. Was it? Was it? Yes! In one of the small trees just upstream of the bridge was a fantastically smart male Ring Ouzel singing away. Wow! I found another further up the valley, and a few Red Grouse even further up too, where the bracken turns to heather.

(As an aside, it was also the last day of the football season, and late afternoon I was sat in the van in a car park, a Mistle Thrush showing fabulously in a small tree just in front of me, as I listened to the radio and celebrated my beloved Aston Villa clinching promotion back to the old First Division. But I digress.)

Ring Ouzels have been special birds for me ever since that day, birds that speak to me of wild places. On Exmoor, Blackbirds moved ever further up the open combes in the 1990s, and we lost Ring Ouzel as a breeding species in 2002, so most of my encounters in recent years have been with migrants. Still, some of those have been in their old haunts, the wild and open landscapes where they fit so perfectly. But even if they are just in a horse paddock on Portland, every single one is an experience that is eagerly anticipated, and to be savoured to the full when it happens.