Newspaper Article

A revelation in Kew: not just a landscape - but a soundscape, too

McCARTHY, MICHAEL

2013

Overview

It's agreeable, the bird life of Kew, but you wouldn't say it was special; at least, I wouldn't have done, until last Saturday, when I took Mark Cocker there. Mark is a naturalist and writer familiar to many people as the author of Birds Britannica, the riveting encyclopaedia of the cultural aspects of our avifauna; he is also, on a more basic level, one of Britain's leading birders, able to look at a dot two hundred yards away and tell you it's a black redstart. Yet his visual skills are if anything exceeded by his aural skills; Mark has head-turning expertise with birdsong. He began with siskins, those charming glowing-green finches, and then picked up the calls of their cousins, goldfinches, and the much less familiar redpolls; then it was the turn of goldcrests, and coal tits, and long-tailed tits and great spotted woodpeckers, and then redwings and mistle thrushes, and a teal on the nearby Thames, while all the time the parakeets were screaming their heads off all around us. In Queen Charlotte's Cottage Gardens, the wooded area, he suddenly said to me: \"There's a predator about.\" The blue tits had begun giving alarm calls; sure enough, a few seconds later, a sparrowhawk flashed past.

• Publisher: Independent Digital News & Media
• Subject: Cocker, Mark