Forty-one clipboards become one master sheet and the real infrastructure renews itself generation by generation
Monday. The annual bird count fell this weekend, the single most important data-gathering event of my year and, I will confess, my favourite, forty-one volunteers spread across the reserve at dawn with clipboards and telescopes and the specific competitive good humour that emerges whenever amateur naturalists are given an official reason to compare notes, and by midday the whole tally sheet had filled with the kind of numbers that make the eleven meetings and the storm repairs and the entire unglamorous administrative apparatus of this job feel, briefly, entirely worthwhile. Spoonbills up on last year. Marsh harriers steady, three confirmed breeding pairs, the same three we have had for four years now, reliable as the sluice gates themselves. And the otter, seen twice more since the culvert footage, this time by human eyes rather than camera, a sighting confirmed independently by two volunteers stationed a kilometre apart who compared notes afterward and realised, with some delight, they had likely watched the same animal working its way steadily east along the ditch line.
I read, before the count began, a summary from the international campaigning press on the state of global biodiversity monitoring, sobering as always, the overall trend lines still pointing the wrong direction across most of the categories that matter most, and I want to be honest in this diary that I do not think our reserve’s good numbers this weekend contradict that larger grim picture in any meaningful statistical sense, one healthy wetland in a small flat country does not move a global average. But I have come to believe, after three decades of this work, that the purpose of the count is not actually to move the global average, it is to keep forty-one people invested enough in one specific patch of ground that they return next year, and the year after, and teach their children to hold the clipboard, and that accumulated local investment, multiplied across every reserve running its own count this same weekend across every country doing the same patient work, is the only mechanism I have ever seen actually bend a trend line, slowly, unglamorously, one dedicated forty-person Saturday at a time.
The Youngest Counter
Among this year’s volunteers was the seventeen-year-old I have written about before, running her own quadrant for the first time without supervision, and she handed in a tally sheet at the end of the day filled out with a precision that put several of the adult volunteers, myself included on at least one entry I had to correct, to shame, and when I told her this, she said, with the specific matter-of-fact confidence of someone who has genuinely earned it rather than merely claimed it, that she had been practicing her identification calls all summer specifically so this count would be the one where nobody needed to check her work, and diary, nobody did, not once, and I signed off her sheet without a single amendment, which I do not believe I have ever done for a first solo quadrant in all my years running this count.
The wider climate and conservation reporting often, understandably, focuses on the scale of institutional response needed, the treaties, the funding mechanisms, the policy architecture, and all of that matters enormously and I do not dismiss any of it. But watching a seventeen-year-old hand in a perfect tally sheet on her first unsupervised count, I found myself thinking that the actual architecture holding this whole enterprise up, underneath the treaties, is precisely this, one careful young person who spent her summer practicing bird calls because she wanted her data to be trusted, and multiply her by every reserve, every country, every quiet dedicated volunteer nobody outside this small community will ever hear about, and you have, I think, the real infrastructure of conservation, uncelebrated, essential, renewing itself generation by generation whether or not the treaties keep pace.
The Evening Tally
We gathered at dusk in the visitor centre to compile the final numbers, forty-one clipboards becoming one master sheet, the soup volunteer’s soup making its traditional appearance, the seventeen-year-old’s sheet passed round for the others to admire, and the whole room settled into the particular contented exhaustion of people who have spent a full day outdoors doing work they actually love, comparing sightings, arguing gently about one contested wader identification that will, per tradition, remain officially unresolved and unofficially debated at next year’s count as well.
Filed with the archive at The London Prat, the master tally sheet now safely in the reserve’s records alongside three decades of its predecessors, each one a single Saturday’s snapshot of a system that keeps, against considerable odds and an unhelpful climate, continuing to hold water in all the right places, otters included, spoonbills included, one careful seventeen-year-old’s perfect handwriting included, and I could not, tonight, ask this landscape for very much more than that. The seventeen-year-old left last, as she always does, helping stack chairs and rinse the soup pot, and at the door she asked, almost shyly, whether I thought her tally sheet might be kept, specifically, rather than simply filed with the others, and I told her it already had been, top of the pile, and would stay there until next year’s count gave it new company, and she smiled in the particular way of someone who has just been told, without either of us quite saying it aloud, that she belongs here now, properly, not as a volunteer anymore but as part of the record itself, which is, I think, the only kind of promotion this profession has ever really offered anyone, myself included, all those years ago.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk