Blackbird male I recorded the blackbird virtually every time I went out bird watching during the 1950s. Along with the starling and house sparrow, it was the most common bird in the York area, and I enjoyed its presence. I often followed it to its …
Growing up in the countryside of Britain during the 1950s, I always was fascinated by the sight and sound of the yellowhammer. It belongs to the bunting family and is sparrow-sized at 6.5 inches (16.5 cm) in length. The males would sing from the tops …
Female and male bullfinch
There was a small apple orchard close to our farm in the early 1950s that was one of my preferred childhood patches for bird watching. I would go there to watch jackdaws, woodpeckers, starlings, blackbirds, and thrushes, but during spring, I would see some rather stocky and colorful songbirds, often pecking away at the fruit blossom. They were called bullfinches, and if I saw a male, I would usually see the female close by. My stepfather used a shotgun to shoot them to protect our apples.
Back then, bullfinches were fairly common. According to a mid-1950s report published by the York Bootham School Natural History Club, bullfinch numbers had risen during the past 80 years in my part of Yorkshire, and remained a potential threat to commercial fruit growers. This threat was hardly new. In the 16th century, Henry VIII passed an Act of Parliament that paid one penny for every bullfinch killed.
Bullfinch in the window
In the 1970s their numbers declined and eventually the species was placed on the UK’s Red List of most threatened birds. Trapping and shooting of bullfinches is still permitted today, but a license to kill is required. Bullfinch numbers have become stable to slightly increasing, with about 190,000 breeding pair in the UK, although this still represents a third reduction since the mid-1960s. Culling is permitted today, but scaring and netting techniques are preferred to prevent the birds from causing damage to fruit trees. Currently the species is on the UK Amber Watch List of birds.
The male bullfinch is a strikingly beautiful and exotic looking bird, with a distinctive large black cap, blue-gray back, rose-red breast, a white rump, and thick bill. It is compact, about six inches (15 cm) in length. Females lack the flashy pink of the males, but are also attractive, with a pale brownish buff-colored breast and cheeks. They are very shy birds, although that has lessened in recent years as they have begun to appear at garden feeders. It is believed that individual bullfinches learn from other bullfinches and therefore it is hoped that this trend will continue.
Bullfinches typically remain in the same area throughout their lives, although may move short distances during harsh winters. They build their nests in thickets of dense scrub and thorn, which is why I rarely found their eggs. They are often difficult to see because of their skulking behavior and preference to stay hidden in vegetation. The origin for their name is believed to be their plump-looking shape, although some speculate it is because they were once referred to as “bud finches”. They breed across Europe and temperate Asia, and are treated a woodland bird.
Bullfinch Range Map: orange – breeding; purple – year round; blue – non-breeding
The bullfinch belongs to the Family of finches, even though it appears plumper and rounder than most other finches. In the UK, the most common finch I observed as an adolescent was the chaffinch. Although colorful, it is not as exotic looking as the bullfinch, although I did include it as the lead bird in chapter 20 of my novel She Wore a Yellow Dress.
Chaffinch – male
Chaffinch – female
Moving to California in 1979, I lost contact with both species of finch and have little opportunity to see them when I am back in England. Neither are present in North America, except for the occasional vagrant. Nonetheless, North America is home to 17 other species of these small to medium-sized birds, and includes the crossbills, grosbeaks, redpolls, and siskins, as well as those with finch in their title. One of the most common is the house finch, which looks similar to the linnet in Europe, and has an estimated North America population of around 31 million.
House finch
How these birds deal with climate change remains to be seen. There is evidence that some species are shifting their range due to rising temperatures and others, like the house finch, are nesting earlier.
Great black-backed gull There were never great black-backed gulls around the farm during my childhood, and only a few wintered close to York. I had to go to the seaside if I wished to see them. Great black-backed gulls are the largest gull in the …
It was 1958, I was 14, and had recently joined the York Bootham School Natural History Club to broaden my knowledge of birds and to learn of the best birding spots near York. 138 species were listed by the School, and I had probably seen …
Growing up with blue tits on the farm is one of my earliest memories. These feisty little birds (4.5 in/12 cm in length) were noisy, sociable, and inquisitive, and the moment we hung up bacon rind after breakfast, they would be there, hanging upside down, pecking away at the food. The word “tit” is derived from the Old Norse word meaning tiny and the family consisted of another members in the UK, called great tit, coal tit, marsh tit, willow tit, and long tailed tit. They were common virtually everywhere, and at school it was normal to see them attacking the tin foil on the tops of school milk bottles to get at the cream below. More about my early life and how I discovered the shocking story about my arrival into this world is described in my novel Unplanned.
Blue tits are amongst the most intelligent birds and only the crow and parrot families exceed them. They have the knack for knowing what you are doing, and individual birds develop behaviors from which others learn – an example of social learning. The bird also has a sense of smell. Studies show that blue tits feeding their chicks will not enter the nest if the odor of a weasel has been added. They also have been shown to solve puzzles to enable them to reach a supply of food.
British blue tits are strictly resident, seldom moving away from where they were hatched. Their population has increased since my childhood, and today there are an estimated 4 million breeding pairs in Britain. In winter, they are joined by large numbers of visiting blue tits from the Continent trying to escape from the cold, and the population rises to around 15 million. The species is currently on Britain’s green list of endangered birds, that is “of least concern”.
Blue tit Range Map
They are beautiful birds; each has a cobalt blue crown (edged in white), wings and tail, a greenish back and yellowish underparts. There is a black band running through the eyes of the bird and round its nape. Some of their British cousins are almost as pretty – such as the great tit, coal tit and long-tailed tit.
When I moved to California , this species of bird was no longer available to watch. They are absent from North America. However, what you do find are their close relatives in the form of titmice and chickadees. Fortunately chestnut-backed chickadees, the most colorful of chickadees, and pairs of oak titmice frequently visit my bird feeders.
Chesnut-backed chickadee
Oak titmouse
Both species are common in the Pacific Northwest and rarely migrate. The name titmouse originates from “tit” meaning small, but also from “mouse” that was used to describe a small bird. The chickadee is named after its distinctive call. There have been slight declines in their numbers, possibly because of loss of habitat, but both are classed as Of Least Concern. Watching them brings back memories of the entertaining blue tits I watched as a child in the UK.
Range map for the Chesnut-backed chickadee
Range map for the Oak titmouse
Red-necked phalarope Sexual dimorphism was not something that had significance to me during my juvenile years as a bird watcher. I sometimes wondered why the female blackbirds were brown and why it was more difficult to identify female chaffinches and bullfinches than their more colorful …
For 10 years, starting in the early 1950s, my family spent a summer week’s holiday in a rented bungalow on the coastal hillside at Reighton Gap near Filey, Yorkshire. The bungalow has since been demolished. Nearby, to the south-east, stood the hard chalk outcrops forming …
Long-billed dowitcher
Early during my bird watching career, I recorded mainly everyday species around my home near York, but at the start of the 1960s, at the age of 16, I took my first journey to Spurn Point. Here my ornithological expectations quickly changed. I was on the pathway of hundreds of thousands of migrating birds and was in the company of highly experienced birders who could tell me what I was looking at. I recorded unusual species such as the hawfinch, ring ouzel and black redstart; there were vagrant species such as the ortolan bunting and icterine warbler; and I spotted several very rare birds such as the surf scoter and a black-browed albatross. A very rare bird that avoided me was the long-billed dowitcher. Some of these experiences are detailed in my novel She Wore a Yellow Dress, and chapter nine is dedicated to one of these trips to Spurn Point.
Location of Spurn Point
With the Humber Estuary close by, there was always the possibility of happening upon a rare shorebird such as the long-billed dowitcher. I thought I saw one but my colleagues were skeptical of my accuracy and rejected the sighting. In the UK, this bird is so rare that no more than one or two sightings occur each year. I did not see it mentioned in two of the bird books I used at the time, and the third presented it under the alternative name of red-breasted snipe. The species hails from North America, and even today, it is an extremely rare fall migrant, usually only appearing when blown across the Atlantic.
It is a tubby, medium-size, rugby ball shaped bird, measuring about 11 inches (29 cm) in length and four ounces (113 grams) in weight, and transforms its appearance during the breeding season when its upper body turns rufous-brown and white, and its throat and breast become a bright cinnamon with dark scalloping. By contrast, during the fall and winter, the bird moults into rather dull gray feathers and a pale belly.
My relationship with dowitchers has changed dramatically here in the United States. Now that I have taken up bird watching once more, I find that many pass through the San Francisco Bay Area, and I frequently see them feeding on the local estuary mud flats, probing deeply into the mud, and using their very distinctive sewing machine action to locate their food. The feed on mainly aquatic invertebrates and insects.
Range Map long-billed dowitcher: red summer; yellow migrant; blue wintering
There are an estimated 500,000 long-billed dowitchers in North America that mainly breed on the desolate, insect-infested tundra along the high Arctic in Canada and Alaska. They travel south for the winter, mainly down the west coast, and settle as far away as Central America. Flocks can be seen feeding and twittering at each other at the same time. It is the occasional bird that is traveling south that gets caught up in storms that is blown the 2,600 miles (4,200km) across the Atlantic to Europe.
The name of the bird possibly comes from the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect for German that is “Duitscher” is their word for German. Back in 1950, American ornithologists identified a separate species for this family of birds that they call the short-billed dowitcher. There are an estimated global breeding population of 150,000 of this species. The two are difficult to distinguish although of course the short-billed has a shorter bill and prefers saltwater habitat whereas the long-billed is typically found on freshwater. There are also subtle differences in plumage and the shape of the bill.
Range map for short-billed dowitcher
And so by settling in California, I am now able to see a species that evaded me in the UK, including its close relative, the short-billed variety. Both the long-billed and short-billed are present here during winter, feeding on the mudflats and wetlands, and only a few minutes drive away from home.
Hopefully, rising sea levels do not restrict their wintering habitat and force them to shift to more suitable areas. Likewise, global warming is a threaten to some of their breeding territory and may push some of them north. For the time being, however, both are listed as of “Least Concern” from a conservation perspective
Back in Britain, spotting rare birds, like the dowitcher, attracts the presence of twitchers. These are birders who immediately travel long distances without hesitation whenever a rare bird is sighted, so that they can add the species to their Life List of birds. This is something I have yet to do but is a practice here in California. Recently, when a yellow-crowned night heron was spotted on the shoreline at Sausalito, CA., it quickly attracted a following and the sighting was reported in the local press.
Bird twitchers
Male whitethroat The whitethroat is a bird I became acquainted without knowing its name. I must have been eight years old, and riding a two-wheeler bicycle when I fell into a bed of stinging …
Falcons have long, pointed wings and fly with strong, rapid wing-strokes. Hawks have rounded wings and in flight alternate between several rapid wing-beats and a short glide. As a result, even before I left primary school in the UK, I could recognize a kestrel from …
My Bird Blog is a series of “then and now” stories that combine my experiences as a juvenile birdwatcher in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s with my knowledge of the same species in California today. Each month I publish the details of a bird that I encountered historically, along with an update on the same species in its present day environment. As a result of climate change, the use of pesticides, urbanization, the affect of invasive species, new farming methods, competition with humans for the same food, regulations controlling wildlife, and the waste that humans produce, there are winners and losers among my community of birds. Please select the bird species that interest you.
I began my bird watching and egg collecting at the start of the 1950s when I was seven years old, and remember egg collecting coming to an abrupt halt in 1954 when the British government made the practice illegal. I adjusted my birding, although I must confess to taking lapwing and moorhen eggs after the law was passed to eat for breakfast. I joined the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and other ornithological organizations to gain more knowledge of birding, and kept notes that I still have today.
A regular haunt in my early years was Spurn Point on the east coast of Yorkshire, where I was taught by the warden and helped by more experienced birdwatchers. My novel, She Wore a Yellow Dress, captures some of the details of my activities back then, and describes how birding influenced my life before becoming entangled in my career and family life. Each chapter of She Wore a Yellow Dress ends with a bird that influenced me at the time.
The novel Unplanned goes “behind the scenes” of my birding background and deals with my upbringing and how I came into this world. It sheds light on why bird watching became so important to me as a child. Abandoned in Berlin has nothing to do with birding, and everything to do with the Second World War
During the 1970s, as my career interfered with my passion for birding, and after I moved to California in 1979, the hobby was sacrificed. The birds in North America were frequently different from the species I was used to seeing in Britain, and I often found that there were different names for the same bird, or the same name for different birds! It was thanks to writing She Wore a Yellow Dress, my retirement from the University of California, and the arrival of COVID, that being a birdwatcher has returned to be my primary hobby.
Hopefully you will find my Blogs educational and entertaining, and that they provide insights on how situations have changed in the avian world during recent history. There have been winners and losers, and some species are classed as “endangered” in one country and of “least concern” in another. Thanks to the many organizations that now provide advocacy and protection for our avian friends, we surely will enjoy their feathered presence for millenniums to come.
Download as PDF A Word from Hilda The last two years have been quite an adventure. I never knew how fortunate I was to be alive. All my thanks go to my parents, but especially to my mother, who through her warmth, gave me a …
Download as PDF 5. Early Revelations Several weeks later, back in Novato, California, Hilda was increasingly apprehensive about whether or not the woman in the Land Register would fulfill her commitment. Six weeks had passed, and the lady promised a reply within four. An irritated …
4. The Vienna Connection
The trip to Dresden took over three hours on another bright and warm day, and the tour participants arrived at their destination during early afternoon. On the way, the tour guide lectured them on the present-day economy, culture, education, and politics of a unified Germany. After checking in at the Hotel Martha, the tourists walked over the river bridge to observe the reconstruction of a city that was in rubble after the Second World War. They visited such places as the Church of our Lord, the Zinger Palace, Opera House, and the Furstenzug Mural, before everyone was released to spend time on their own.
The following morning, the group departed for Prague, stopping on the way at the fortified town of Terezin that had been converted into a concentration camp during 1941. It seemed to Hilda that wherever she went, she could not avoid the history her parents lived through and survived.
During dinner in Prague, Hilda captivated fellow travelers with her stories from Berlin. They wanted to know more about the family connections with Vienna. She told them her father was born and grew up in the Austrian capital, was imprisoned for about eighteen months during the late 1930s, and after his release from prison, organized an escape to Shanghai for himself and Hilda’s mother at the beginning of 1941. It had been a harrowing time for her parents. They were required to visit the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, organized by Adolf Eichmann, to secure exit permits, and received them only weeks before the Nazi government banned all Jewish emigration. Her mother talked about being chased around a table by an expatriation official, but never knew what he wanted.
Hilda told her audience how her grandmother chose Vienna as the place to move to during late 1937, believing it was safer than Berlin and that it would allow her son-in-law to open a bookstore. Although he had a young wife and two infant daughters, there were other members of his family living in Vienna, and they would help take care of the four-year-old and the baby who had just turned one. At first, the family lived comfortably, pawning valuables they brought from their home in Berlin, but after Hitler invaded on March 12, 1938, these resources were quickly exhausted, and the son-in-law was detained in prison for selling illegal books. Anti-Semitism flourished in Vienna once Hitler arrived, as its citizens sought to destroy Jewish prosperity and force Jews to leave the country. The son-in-law’s family returned to Berlin with some of its relatives about a year later, leaving him in prison. Hilda’s grandmother and mother stayed in Austria.
During October 1938, Hilda’s father, Walter, was required to replace his Austrian passport with a German one, printed with a red “J” for Jew on the cover, alongside a swastika and a German eagle. According to Walter’s wife, he always refused to wear the yellow Star of David, and escaped to Shanghai before wearing it in public became compulsory.
About the same time in Vienna, Ellen received an invitation from her cousin, Gertrud, who she had played with as a child, offering to sponsor a visa for Ellen to move abroad to Britain. She declined, preferring to wait for her fiancé to be released from prison. As funds ran out, she moved to a Jewish orphanage where she lived and worked. At the same time, her mother was lodged in a care home and forced to scrub the streets of the city. She died penniless, grief-stricken, and broken-hearted on May 1, 1940, the same day that Ellen’s husband was released from jail.
Thereafter, Ellen lost contact with her cousin until after the war, when she learned Gertrud was living in London. Gertrud told Ellen that her own mother and an aunt and uncle had been deported during the war from Berlin to the Riga ghetto in Latvia, where they perished.
Hilda’s father was imprisoned for eighteen months but always said he was well looked after. The family speculated he received special attention from the guards because his deceased father was a well-known doctor who treated patients who could not afford to pay. During November 1939, prison officials accompanied Walter to City Hall where he married Hilda’s mother. Afterwards, Ellen returned to the orphanage and he went back to jail.
The reason why Hilda’s father was imprisoned was never announced. Allegedly he tried to smuggle valuables out of the country to help his mother relocate to New York after she remarried. Her new husband had relatives living in America who sponsored their visas. But charges were never filed. Hilda’s father was also a Jew and a journalist, both individually good reasons for imprisonment.
“He must have hated his home country?” someone asked.
“No, he didn’t,” answered Hilda. “In fact, he disappointed my mother by always loving his Austrian heritage. She hated Vienna and never forgave the people there for their treatment of Jews. She said it was a very sad time in her life and she cried a lot.”
The conversation by now had turned somber, and the tour guide intervened to redirect the discussion to the topic he had assigned the group during the bus journey from Berlin to Dresden. He paired each person with a “buddy” and asked everyone to discover three things of interest about their partner. Two would be true and one false. Each person was asked to present, and members of the group would try to identify the story that was false. Hilda volunteered herself as a dancer, dog lover, and cosmetics salesperson; the last activity was not true. John put forward bird watching, architect and author, with the middle one made up. It was late in the evening before the quiz was over.
As Hilda returned to her bedroom, a travel colleague asked what had happened to her grandmother’s other siblings. “I’m not sure,” she replied. “I believe a brother died due to medical conditions, a sister disappeared and turned up in the United States after the war, and the youngest child, a brother, escaped to Shanghai.”
A few days later, after an overnight stay in the Czech town of Cesky Krumlov, the tour group arrived in Vienna. As with Berlin, it was Hilda’s second visit to the city, the first being with her mother during the early 1990s. She was shown the city but could not remember much about it. She knew from her parents’ passports that they left Austria during early February 1941, with travel visas allowing them to pass through Germany, Poland, Lithuania, the Soviet Union, Mongolia, Manchuria, Japan, and curiously, into Santa Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. There was a currency stamp in her father’s document permitting him to carry a small amount of German Reichsmark.
Her parents never told Hilda why they ended their journey in Shanghai. Travel papers suggested their ultimate destination was the Dominican Republic. The Asian route was far safer than sailing across the Atlantic with its U-boat risks. Maybe they met people in Shanghai they knew. Whatever their reason, their departure from Austria was just in time. Hilda read about the mass railway deportations from Vienna that began a few days after her parents left the country. Within eighteen months, forty-five thousand Jewish men and women were deported to ghettos, extermination camps, and killing sites. Hilda’s mother heard after she left Austria that the children in her orphanage were killed.
Hilda recalled that the most memorable event from her first visit to Vienna was while traveling with her mother on a trolley bus. Several elderly passengers started to scold a group of misbehaving children. Her mother scowled and whispered to Hilda that it was the adults who should be scolded and be ashamed of their treatment of Jews many years earlier.
Hilda enjoyed the sightseeing during the two days in Vienna. With her travel colleagues, she visited the Vienna State Opera House, the Museumsquartier, Belvedere Palace, St. Stephens Cathedral, and Schoenbrunn Palace. At the end of the two days, it was time to say farewell. Her friends wished her success with the investigations, and a Canadian collected everyone’s email with the promise to circulate the list after he returned home. Unfortunately, the list never arrived. Hilda booked an extra three nights in the hotel and resumed her family inquiries.
Her first goal was to locate the apartments her father and mother had lived in before they were married. Addresses were on their marriage certificate and she was surprised how easy it was to find them. They were drab buildings with unremarkable architecture. There seemed no point in trying to enter.
The following day, she visited several research organizations to see if she could discover records about her father’s family. She had no success. No one seemed interested. It was as if the people she spoke to had forgotten what happened during the Second World War in Vienna, and were not eager to be reminded.
On the final day of the vacation, Hilda and John took the train to Salzburg to hear about another Jewish family who had been displaced just before the war, the von Trapp family. The difference was these people had reached the United States, not Shanghai, and were given care and protection. It was the best day of Hilda’s stay. The scenery was fabulous, the town of Salzburg charming, and the local Sound of Music landmarks exhilarating. She even enjoyed the sing-along on the tour bus with the escort dressed in his lederhosen.
But now it was time to return to San Francisco. The sightseeing had been enjoyable, celebrating her birthday at the Vienna Opera was memorable, and discovering the winery on the outskirts of Vienna that she thought her mother took her to visit many years earlier was unforgettable. She was disappointed the Austrian people generally acted aloof, and appeared uncaring and unwilling to admit their country’s involvement in National Socialism. To them, it apparently never happened. They were “occupied” by the Germans, and like many other parts of Europe, claimed they were not guilty of anti-Semitism.
By contrast, the Berliners acknowledged the actions of their ancestors and consistently tried to be helpful. Her confidence speaking German had improved, she had learned how to prepare the wiener schnitzel that her mother cooked for her, and she created several new friendships among the tour group. Most importantly, she was confident that the lady at the Charlottenburg Land Register would deliver on her promise. She would be patient; it was only two weeks since the visit to the District Court, and soon she would learn about the years her family owned the property that she had gazed at in Berlin.
