We have a nightly reading time in our household: Mr O reads aloud as I listen with eyes closed since my dry-eye problem limits how much text reading I can do at one time (most of my reading I do with audiobooks). We look for books we both like for our after-dinner reading sessions. After discovering Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” series here at a Dawn Chorus a year or so ago (thanks to matching mole and KenBee!) we’ve been intermittently reading our way through the 12-book series. It is an utterly charming children’s series written in the 1930s, with adventures and explorations outdoors, mostly in England. Characters and settings and activities are so well drawn you tend to forget these are “kids' books”.
Since most of the action is outdoors in nature — sailing, hiking, climbing — the children encounter wildlife, including birds. We’re up to book 5 right now, Coot Club, which is particularly rich in birds as several of the main characters are keen birders. I’ve been inspired to dedicate this edition of the Dawn Chorus to a few of the birds encountered in this book and previous books in the series. Looking up photos and descriptions of them helps me visualize the story as we read, and I hope you may be inspired to dip into this series yourself if you haven’t encountered it before.
The series is known as “Swallows and Amazons” after the first book (the Wikipedia article has a good overview including characters and timeline, and All Things Ransome has pages with extensive background information).
Coot Club takes place in the Norfolk Broads, a flat marshy region in the east of England, where folks get around as often by boat on the winding rivers as by road (or did, in the 1930s). So it’s wetland birds that the kids see flying, stalking, and nesting. The coot of the club and book title is a particular one with a white feather who has an important role in the story.
Coots in England are the Eurasian coot (Fulica atra), but they are just like our American coots in appearance and behavior. The plot of Coot Club follows what happens after rude tourists parked their boat next to the special coot’s nest, preventing the parents from incubating. Tom sets the tourist boat loose to drift down river, and while the nest is saved, Tom is in trouble. Tourists! grrr.
Closely related to coots are Waterhens. I had to look that one up. It’s a local name for the Common Moorhen or Gallinule (Gallinula chloropus) which seem to be very common in the marshes. This bird is the very same species we have in North America. Here’s a photo I took of a couple on Little Cayman Island. Their face plate is red rather than the coot’s white.
Some of the grebes are different over there in England. The Great Crested grebe has a more spectacular crest than any of those I see here on the heads of Pieds, Westerns, Red-neckeds or Horneds.
Bitterns are secretive everywhere. The European Bitterns in the marsh were rarely seen by the Coot club but often heard since the book takes place in nesting season. Dorothea mistook the booming call of territorial males as a foghorn before she learned what they were. Listen:
A raptor they saw that would look familiar to us was the Western Marsh Harrier (Circus aeruginosus), but while our Northern Harriers are fairly abundant, in England these larger Marsh Harriers are much less so. And in the 1930s they were even more rare than today. Centuries of draining the wetlands and shooting almost wiped them out in England. As the children practiced sailing they witnessed a pair of harriers doing a food pass: a male hands something off to his mate, who catches it in mid air. No picture of that, but here’s video of a Marsh Harrier soaring low over a wetland at Minsmere Nature Reserve in Suffolk, England.
A brief history of Marsh Harriers in England, up to today:
Marsh Harriers have always been part of the avifauna of the UK, but numbers dropped dramatically as the fens and wetlands in the east were drained for agriculture. The population took a further hit in Victorian times as birds were targeted as predators by hunters, farmers and landowners and, at the same time, eggs were being collected or destroyed and habitat continued to be lost. By the late 1800s the species had become extinct in England and the last pair bred in Ireland in 1917.
Occasional birds, almost certainly originating from the continent, bred in Suffolk and Norfolk, with the core being at Minsmere reserve, but numbers increased in fits and starts up to the 1950s. A resurgence was expected but numbers crashed once again and, by 1961, no Marsh Harriers bred in the UK. This time it is believed that the population crash was caused by the use of organochlorine pesticides, especially in their Scandinavian heartland. They did maintain a toe-hold, with one nest annually at Minsmere until the use of pesticides was banned. Numbers once again began to climb and now, thankfully, these magnificent birds are an integral part of the fens, marshes and reedbeds of eastern England.
hawkandowltrust.org/…
The earlier Ransome books were less focused on birds but a few stood out to me. In the first book of the series, the family of children known as the Swallows (following the nautical tradition of naming a crew after their ship, in this case the sailing dinghy Swallow) discover a secret harbor on the island they explore. Able-seaman Titty, the most imaginative and adventurous of the Swallows, spends an afternoon flat on her stomach communing with a Dipper, watching it bobbing at her and flying underwater. We have our own Dippers here in North America and the English one behaves the same but I’ve discovered it has a handsome white breast.
Titty is also the one who’s been left on the island to raise the signal lantern one night for the Swallows returning from a foray up the lake, an assault on the Amazons’ homebase (before they all became friends). Titty had instructions to listen for Captain John’s owl call and light the lantern so he’d know where to land in the dark. But Titty, who was 8, fell asleep. She was awakened by an owl call and rushed up to the signal tree, worried she’d awakened too late. As it turned out, her siblings Captain John, First-mate Susan and Ship’s Boy Roger were delayed by circumstances beyond the scope of this brief summary, and were nowhere near. Who made the owl call? In fact, it was by a real bird, a Tawny owl (Strix aluco).
In case you were wondering what the Tawny Owl sounds like, listen here:
In a winter adventure (part of the book Winter Holiday) the Swallows and the D’s are trekking across snowy “Greenland” scoping out an expedition to “the North Pole” when a few of them are sidetracked by the pitiful wailing of a cragfast sheep. The ewe had gotten trapped on a narrow ledge of a cliff, unable to turn around, and was near death in that cold exposed spot. Dick volunteers to inch his way along the ledge while the others go up above where they can hold one end of a rope. The plan is to tie off the sheep and lower it down the cliff, belayed from the top of the cliff. All goes pretty well until Dick is left alone on the ledge with no rope to hold onto in case he slips on the icy snow. To distract his mind from how cold and scary his situation is on the precipice, Dick watches a buzzard soaring above. He is intensely interested in whether it has a nest on the cliff.
In North America buzzards are vultures. In England, buzzards are hawks. According to Wikipedia, “DNA testing shows that the common buzzard is fairly closely related to the Red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) of North America, which occupies a similar ecological niche to the buzzard in that continent.“
The Common Buzzard (Buteo buteo) in flight:
Did Dick survive his hazardous perch? Does he see a buzzard nest? Do the children make it to the North Pole? Does Tom escape the rude tourists chasing him down the River Bure? For answers to these and many other adventures you’ll have to read the books!
Birders will also be intrigued by the Redshanks, Greenshanks, Bearded Tits, Red Grouse, Grey Herons, Shags, Spotted flycatchers, and many more English birds.
Dawn Chorus is now open for your birdy observations of the week.