In the silence after I stopped paddling the canoe, a sudden shout from the banks of a river in the Broads. Cetti’s warbler. Unmistakable. Loud, strident, shouty, sweary. And for a moment I wished that Donald Trump were in the boat with me. Well, in a way.
Because the Cetti has a message for him, one that, were he to listen and understand it, would surely turn him into a Humble Tigger, a melancholy Tigger, a Small and Sorry Tigger, an “Oh-Simon-I-am-glad-to-see-you Tigger.” I can almost hear his apologies now: “Oh Simon, you were right all along!”
Cetti’s warblers are named after Francesco Cetti (1726-1778), the Italian Jesuit scholar and author of Storia Naturale di Sardegna (The Natural History of Sardinia). In Padre Cetti’s day, the eponymous warbler was restricted to continental Europe, never venturing north on to the islands of Europa Minor. Unlike most warblers found in Europe they don’t migrate, and they can’t cope with hard winters. So they keep south. Or they used to.
A Cetti’s warbler was first recorded in Britain in 1961, and it must have been a very determined birder who identified it, without all the birdsong apps, high-grade field guides and top-spec optics that we have today. They first bred in Britain in the 1970s.
By the 1990s they were pilgrimage birds: you could pay them a visit on Marazion Marsh in the balmy mild-wintered south-west of Cornwall. I was by this time pretty familiar with them. I even came up with a mnemonic for that blaring song: “Me? Cetti? If-you-don’t-like-it-fuck-off”. I flatter myself that it captures the timbre as well as the rhythm.
These days I often hear Cettis in my garden in Norfolk. They bred north of the Humber for the first time in 2006. A total of 3,450 singing males have been recorded in a single British spring. The population rose by 187% between 2012 and 2020.
Now you might ask, “why is this of passionate interest to Donald Trump, not known for his love of birdwatching?” It’s not just the birds that are fascinating: it’s also what they tell us about the world now and the world that is to come.
Is the Cetti an auspicious bird? Well, the word “auspicious” is Latin for “birdwatching”, but what they are telling us is not encouraging. Cettis came to Britain because the place now suits them. It didn’t before, but now it’s great and it’s getting greater every year.
The difference between Trump and a Cetti’s warbler – and for that matter a birdwatcher – is that neither Cettis nor birders are climate-change deniers. “Ice storms from Texas to Tennessee. I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and expensive hoax!” That’s one of a million or so tweets on the subject from the great non-ornithologist, crassly confusing weather (short-term) with climate (long-term). But unlike Trump, birds are adept at reading trends in climate and reacting to them.
For as you may have noticed, most birds can fly. That makes them nature’s rapid response unit. When there is an opportunity, they come zooming in to take advantage in a way that a snake can’t, for example, or for that matter any non-human mammal that’s not a bat. It follows that if you look at what birds are doing you can reach valid conclusions about what’s happening in the world.
Here’s a record from the Norfolk Bird and Mammal Report, 1972: “Little egret: a remarkable spring influx of at least six.” Little egrets are white herons, lanky, long-necked and wonderfully elegant. In 1991 I found one at Minsmere nature reserve in Suffolk. It was so unusual that I told the warden and he went hurrying off to see for himself.
Little egrets bred in Britain for the first time in 1996; by 2015 there were more than 1,000 breeding pairs. In 25 years they went from nothing to abundance. And yes, I’ve seen them in my garden. Here are birds that clearly don’t accept the notion that global warming is fake news. If it wasn’t real, they wouldn’t be here.
It’s easy to make fun of birdwatchers because they get all passionate about stuff that nobody has ever heard of: I mean, who cares if it’s a Bonaparte’s gull or an Audouin’s gull? But don’t laugh: birds are revealing the truth about the changing world, and they are doing so with immense vividness.
New British breeding species of recent years include great white egret, cattle egret, spoonbill, black-winged stilt, purple heron, little bittern and black-crowned night heron. In 2022 a colony of eight bee-eaters in Trimingham, Norfolk successfully fledged four chicks.
Who’s next? The smart money is on glossy ibis. No, they don’t sound a lot like British birds. They sound like wacky foreign exoticisms, the sort only to be found in that there Europe. But Britain is, day by day, becoming more wacky and more exotic – even more European.
Since Trump doesn’t seem too interested in birdwatching, perhaps I could get him excited about wildflowers. Can’t you just see him dropping to his knees to enjoy a colony of early purple orchids? The earliness is the significant point here.
Gilbert White is the type-specimen of the English parson-naturalist, and his book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, first published in 1789, has never been out of print, which gives every writer something to aim at. And he was a brilliant noticer. One of the many things he noticed was first flowerings.
An article in the excellent British Wildlife magazine compares his records with those of the 21st century. Some examples:
White’s first lesser celandine March 18.
Modern first lesser celandine March 1.
White’s first wood anemone April 4.
Modern first wood anemone March 26.
White’s first blackthorn blossom April 23.
Modern first blackthorn blossom March 17.
White’s first hawthorn blossom May 16.
Modern first hawthorn blossom April 26.
The pattern is not hard to read. Plants are responding to changing conditions and changing their timing.
And wouldn’t it be lovely if that’s all there was to it: more spring, ever-earlier spring, pretty flowers far sooner than we deserve, the marshes echoing with the song of Cettis, and soon a glossy ibis in my garden.
But of course it’s slightly more complicated than that. The changing timing of spring is affecting the emergence of invertebrates, first flowerings, early growth, arrival of migrants, nesting and rearing of young birds. All these things have got out of sync, creating a series of phenological mismatches.
Yes, but we’ve always had hot spells, haven’t we? What about the summer of 1976, when West Indies gave their opponents a hammering over the parched brown cricket fields of England? Peak temperature that year was 35.9. In 2022 the peak temperature was 40.3, the first time Britain had topped 40. The summer of 1976 was an outlier; 2022 was not. We’re also getting more violent weather events because if you put more energy into a system – say in the form of heat – it tends to get more energetic.
Birders and botanists are well aware of all this: how could we not be? So are lepidopterists, apiologists, chiropterologists, coleopterists, herpetologists and all those who find their joys in less obvious taxa: students of bryozoans, bryophytes and priapulida.
Non-human life in every form is trumpeting a message to anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear: the world is getting hotter and more turbulent. We humans have been filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide ever since we seized control of fire a million years ago. In the last couple of centuries the pace has hotted up and with it, the planet. We’ve reached the stage when every day brings another disaster: floods, fires, droughts, storms, crop failures and desertification.
Never mind. The earth will recover. After all, it recovered from the Permian extinction event, which destroyed 81% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial species. That, too, involved massive increases of carbon dioxide levels and soaring temperatures. The earth’s recovery only took 20 million years.
Those who look at wildlife have a front-row seat at the drama of climate change, and at times it’s like a horror show.
It’s obvious to us naturalists that the world is changing. How can anybody not be aware? There’s no room even for doubt, still less denial.
What will it take for Trump to understand, if I can’t convince him with a Cetti’s warbler or a lesser celandine? I used to think he might change his mind if, say, Los Angeles was on fire, but it seems I was wrong.
Listen, Donald. Listen to what the Cetti is telling you.
