Listening

You hear them before you see them, which is true of most interesting things but especially true of nightjars. The sound is a churring — a low, continuous, mechanical trill that could be an engine or a cicada or the earth humming to itself. It goes on for minutes without a breath. How the bird does this is a matter of anatomy. Why I stand in a field at ten PM listening to it is a matter of something else. I started birdwatching at fifty-three. This is late. Most birders will tell you they started young — a parent with binoculars, a field guide received at Christmas, a childhood revelation involving a heron or an owl. I had none of this. My parents watched television. My childhood revelation involved the discovery that Cadbury Creme Eggs were available before Easter if you knew the right shop. What happened at fifty-three was that I retired, my wife didn't, and the house was quiet in a way that needed filling. The garden had birds in it. I had time. The binoculars were a gift from my daughter who had run out of gift ideas and consulted the internet, which told her that retired men like binoculars. The internet was, in this case, correct. The first bird I identified on purpose was a goldfinch. This is a common bird. Any child could identify it. But I was not any child, I was a fifty-three-year-old man standing at his kitchen window with binoculars he didn't know how to focus, and when I finally got the image clear and saw the red face and the gold wing bar and matched it to the picture in the book my daughter had also bought me, I felt something I had not expected to feel, which was delight. Delight is an underused word. It's not happiness, which is a state. It's not excitement, which fades. It's a particular jolt of recognition — the world showing you something and you being ready to see it. I had not been ready for fifty-three years. The goldfinch didn't care. It was there anyway. Three years on, I have a list of a hundred and forty-two species. I've driven to Norfolk at four AM. I've stood in Scottish rain for three hours to see a capercaillie that never appeared. I've spent money on a spotting scope that my wife regards with the same suspicion she reserves for my other midlife purchases, though she concedes it's better than a sports car. The nightjar is number eighty-seven on the list. I heard it first on a heath in Devon, in July, when the air was warm and the light was going and the gorse smelled like coconut, which it does, look it up. The churring came from somewhere low in the heather and I stood absolutely still and the bird flew past my head close enough that I felt the air from its wings. I did not see it clearly. They're designed not to be seen — brown, mottled, flat against the ground. But I heard it and I felt it and I stood in that field grinning like an idiot in the dark and thought: this is what I was missing. Not the bird. The listening.