MIDDLESEX: No sooner had I reached the high, bleak causeway that measures its length straight across the middle of one of the biggest reservoirs near London when a small boy attached himself to me. Tagging along in his short trousers and his wind jacket, with binoculars hanging from his neck and the badge of a school’s natural history society displayed proudly on his sleeve, he seemed quite undaunted by the cutting north-easter that came near to freezing the marrow in my bones. It soon became apparent that he was new to bird watching and before long he revealed that it was, in fact, only his second outing of that kind. When I was able to show him packs of pochard and widgeon and other quite common ducks as well as the less common smew and goosanders, this brought wonder to his eyes.
We had not walked very far before we fell in with another group of watchers, one of whom told me that they had seen a Leach’s forktailed petrel somewhere out in the grey haze. I had not in the whole of my life seen that small, agile, tern-like, dusky bird of the great open waters of the ocean. A rare visitor, indeed, to a London reservoir and what a find for my young companion! After a while we spotted it diving and darting through the air as it was being molested by a party of gulls. The boy checked all the details carefully in his pocket book and then we went on our way. But just before we left the causeway another watcher who had just arrived asked us if there was anything interesting about. “Yes,” said my young friend, “there’s a Leach’s forktailed petrel out there.” He concealed all trace of emotion, simply tossing out the information like an old hand to whom that sort of thing was in no way extraordinary. But I could tell that it was one of the proudest moments of his life.
