There it is again - twee-er, twee-er, or is it more tee-cher, tee-cher? Chaffinch or great tit though? And is that tek-tek, tek-tekking blackcap or warbler? Suddenly the air is full of mystifying and beguiling sounds. I am in the grip of a new enthusiasm, a revelation of old music that drives me into spring woodlands and makes me pause, head cocked, in municipal parks.
In the unreflective world of Sunday night television, birdwatching, or "birding", might still be the preserve of obsessive, slightly dotty coves in anoraks. The true picture is of an interest grown almost to the point of craze. The membership of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has doubled in recent years to more than 1m, while ex-Goodie and birdman Bill Oddie regularly draws 4m viewers to his various BBC 2 programmes. "When we started Birding with Bill Oddie in the late 90s it had taken us 15 years to get it on TV," says Stephen Moss, the BBC producer of Oddie's shows. "Since then birding has become hugely popular, and we have 20 hours of Bill's wildlife programmes (on BBC2) every year." The latest offering, Springwatch, which begins on May 30 on BBC2, will feature live reports on birds' progress from viewers and professionals across the country. In the same vein the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch asks people to count the birds in their gardens for an hour in a single weekend in the year. This January more than 400,000 participants peered at 240,000 gardens and recorded more than 8m birds. The charity's Richard Bashford says the ubiquity of birds makes watching them an accessible activity: "Birds are very obvious, where other mammals are more complex and less visible. You might not see bitterns or ospreys, but everyone knows robins and blackbirds - the subject matter is perfect for mass appeal."
Bashford says bird-feeding and bird-watching in gardens has "taken off" with the TV-led growth of interest in gardening. Stephen Moss agrees that birding "starts with the garden . . . people settle down and get a house with a garden. With their children they feed the birds, then perhaps go on guided walks and they're hooked. It's good for physical and mental health too."
But the sudden popularity of birding is also a reflection of the surge of interest in the environment and conservation since the 1980s. "It's a zeitgeist thing," says nature writer Richard Mabey, author of Nature Cure. "Birds are the most intimate things in the natural world that we have; people are never going to be as turned on by plants as they are by the whole migrating, breeding business of birds."
So central to the national psyche have birds become, that the government has chosen the presence of wild birds as a "headline indicator" of the quality of life. But not everyone claiming an interest in birds is a birder (an RSPB survey found that 73 per cent of the population said they watched or listened to birds). For the majority, birdwatching will mean putting scraps on the bird table and looking to see who turns up, rather than pulling on the boots and going somewhere specially to watch birds. Richard Bashford concedes that as many people join the RSPB to offer general support or to visit one of their 182 reserves (covering 300,000 acres), as are red-hot birders. Then there is the vexed issue of when does a birdwatcher transmogrify into a "twitcher"? According to Stephen Moss "a birdwatcher has his binoculars, knows his birds and has a local patch he keeps an eye on." He is a social animal it seems, and will take the odd day trip in pursuit of his hobby. A twitcher "belongs to a separate tribe; someone who travels deliberately to the countryside in search of a particular rare bird - usually an individual bird. Twitchers are skilled but tend to be obsessive and can look down on people who just feed birds in their gardens".
I see myself as more of a low-level birder, but how to start? The RSPB offered to show me the basics at their reserve at Garston Wood in Dorset. Warden Jack Edwards tells me the 85-acre coppiced wood is a 5,000-year-old remnant of Cranborne Chase, and host to some of the rarest birds in England. "The assemblage here is the same as 500 years ago", he says. "We have turtle doves, marsh tits and spotted flycatchers on the red list (of endangered birds), treecreepers, warblers and many other woodland birds." Always patient, he encouraged me to stop and listen to the apparent chaos of birdsong, pointing up the subtle differences in trill and syllabication. Tone deafness apart, I couldn't see the birds for the trees; in two hours of squinting, I glimpsed a single dark blur, streaking through the hazel stools like a rubber bullet (a blackcap, apparently).
Edwards says that in managing his wood for birds he preserves the habitat for other wildlife too; an effort requiring 2,500 man-hours a year and the help of volunteer work gangs. The RSPB depends on the work of its 8,000 volunteers - a remarkable number given the demographics of the membership. Sixty per cent is over 55 and very few under 25. "Young people don't get involved with birdwatching," says Stephen Moss. "They're interested in the environment but not in birding." He thinks a lack of freedom to "wander about and collect birds' eggs and frogspawn as in earlier days" may be to blame.
There are now 30 or so specialist bird-tour companies offering everything from a weekend in Suffolk to three weeks in Antarctica. Chris Kightley of Limosa Holidays says the all-inclusive tours are expensive: a week in a European destination will cost about £1,200, and next January's 20-day trip to the Falklands has a price tag of £4,225.
Strolling over the Wiltshire downs, on the other hand, staring at the sky watching out for skylarks doesn't cost anything at all. One problem: was that a tirr-priiut or a tsivitt-tsivitt?
