Birds make this big world seem small and intimate. No other living creatures circle the globe so free of physical restraint. And no other creatures – except bacteria and us humans – have made themselves as at home across the planet. Mountain ranges, deserts, the Antarctic winter, your garden; pretty much wherever we are there are birds too. Some 10,000 species of them. As varied as ostriches, emperor penguins, sparrows, sparrowhawks, cormorants, choughs and wrens. And all moving around. Because birds always seem to be going somewhere. Often somewhere really far away. Birds travel the way that perhaps we’d all like to travel ourselves. They have an upbeat way of settling in wherever they are, and getting on with life. So, the swallow spotted happily swooping on mosquitoes in west Africa, might be the same bird seen a year later in a different season diving through the skies above Seville, and the same one that arrives each summer to patch up its mud nest in west Cork.
Wherever I end up in the world, birds feel like companions worth getting to know. This means I’m less scientific than an ornithologist and a lot less fanatical than a twitcher, but just a bit more interested and knowledgeable than a bird lover. That makes me a bird watcher, I suppose. And that’s what I do. Watch them. If I’m feeling just too foreign when travelling I take consolation from spying on the contented avian world. Because seeing a familiar species – rock doves, house sparrows, crows all have world-spanning ranges – in a place that’s not home to me is cheering. Yet a tiny bee-humming bird buzzing between Cuban flowers or Eurasian cranes dancing in a Swedish field is the exoticism that we yearn for when travelling.
It's obviously daft to attribute human emotions and desires to birds, yet their patterns of movement
whether as flocks or as individuals seem uncannily close to our own travel experiences. Like us, birds travel in search of better weather. They flock to beaches. Some build summer houses and return to them each year. Some are economic migrants flying between different work opportunities. Plenty, like the shearwaters and petrels that can soar and glide up to 70,000km a year, are like restless backpackers circling the planet.
Albert, a black-browed albatross was blown from his species’ home in the Southern Hemisphere close to the Antarctic and settled in a gannet colony off Scotland for over 40 years.
It’s that kind of avian ability to be at home wherever one ends up – and with whoever’s around, that I find inspiring. It’s what makes me a bird watcher when travelling. Though once I looked across from a cliff-hugging track in the Andes and into the dark-red eye of a condor hanging immobile on an updraught only a few metres away from me. His gaze met mine. I was the one being watched.