The dark underbelly of birdwatching

Two birdwatchers have this week attempted to sue the RSPB for defamation. I don’t want to delve too deeply into the details, but the gist of it is this: Gordon and Christine Bowker spent four years monitoring some black grouse in Wales, concluding eventually that the birds were in danger. Some scientists from the RSPB said that actually, it may have been the couple themselves putting the birds in danger. Now they’re all heading for the High Court – except for the black grouse, that is.

For non-birdwatchers, this makes little sense. If the Bowkers cared enough about the birds to spend four years watching them, why would they want to harm them? And why do these people care so much about birds anyway?

My father is a birdwatcher, which may explain why, until January 2005, I was not. It’s an easy hobby to shun, spurn or sneer at, especially when you’re a teenager. But with fatherhood on the horizon, I decided to give it a go. To ensure it was a fair trial, I challenged my dad to a race: who could see the most species in one year? That way, I was committed for at least 12 months.
The first lesson was that the term “birdwatcher” has many shades. My dad, for example, volunteers at his local bird reserve and willingly carries out bird surveys, but that’s apathetic compared to some. The extremists of the birdwatching world are
the “twitchers” – the fanatical collectors, the men and women prepared to pay any price to get a new bird on their list. This week, this particular species was the subject of a BBC4 documentary, Twitchers: A Very British
Obsession, which chronicled the extraordinary journeys made to spot, or miss, a new bird.
Watching twitchers twitching was gripping stuff (and well worth catching on the BBC iPlayer). But the film also highlighted a less obvious side of the pursuit: the crucial role played by reputation. Despite advances in photography, spotting birds is a hobby based on trust. If someone says they’ve seen a particular species, one has to believe them. If evidence is produced to prove the claimant mistaken, innocently or otherwise, their reputation is ruined. A mistrusted birder can find themselves estranged from an already marginalised community.
I was especially intrigued by the documentary because, of all the possible birdwatching styles, twitching was the one to which I gravitated most readily. While my dad loves the birds themselves, and could happily spend an afternoon staring at a pigeon, I liked the competition. On one occasion, I drove for five hours to see a long-billed murrelet, only for the lost Japanese bird to flee minutes before my arrival. I didn’t mind: I enjoyed the chase.
Twitchers are often accused of not caring about the welfare of the birds they pursue, and I accept that I was more interested in the numbers than the individuals. In fact, disappointment was as crucial a part of the process as nil‑nil draws are in football. I’d heard about the bird via a website called Birdline (a vidiprinter for rare sightings), weighed up the cost and decided that the journey was worth it.
A flock of twitchers sprang into similar action this week, when word spread online that an American kestrel was lurking in Suffolk. This time, the bird obligingly hung around, but it wasn’t long before someone noticed a ring round its leg: it had escaped from the Suffolk Owl Sanctuary, so it wouldn’t count on any lists.
Five years on, and I’ve lost the itch to twitch. Instead, I am now a proud casual birdwatcher. I may not wear binoculars at all times, but I automatically tune in to birdsong, and still get excited by the sight of a goldfinch. All hobbies are irrational to some extent. To what extent is up to you.

Italian cinema legend De Laurentiis dies: family

Italy's Oscar-winning film producer Dino De Laurentiis, who brought larger than life characters ranging from King Kong to Hannibal Lecter to the big screen, has died aged 91, his family said on Thursday.
De Laurentiis, who worked with some of Italy's best-known directors such as Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini before breaking into Hollywood, died in Los Angeles after being gravely ill for two weeks.
"Cinema has lost one of its greats," said Walter Veltroni, an Italian lawmaker and former mayor of Rome who founded the Rome Film Festival.
"The name of Dino De Laurentiis is tied to the history of cinema," he said.
His nephew, Aurelio De Laurentiis, also a well-known producer, confirmed his uncle's death as he spoke to reporters in Rome ahead of his departure for the funeral in the United States.
De Laurentiis described his uncle as an "intellectual" who used cinema as "a way of embracing and understanding life."
He said his uncle's passion for film began when Dino was a young boy and flourished in the "magic climate" of the 1950s.
"There wasn't a fascination with television at the time, but a great fascination with cinema," he said.
"When you talked about work with Dino one thing was sure: it was fun, you would toss ideas back and forth," he said.
Dino De Laurentiis produced more than 500 films over his entire career, working with some of the biggest names in European film as well as Hollywood.
Starting out in film aged just 20, he became one of the leading producers of Italy's post-war cinema boom and the neo-realist genre.
One of the first films he produced was "Riso Amaro" ("Bitter Rice") by Giuseppe De Santis, a 1949 classic and one of the best examples of neo-realism.
He won an Oscar in 1956 for Fellini's "La Strada" and was nominated 38 times. In 2001, he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the Oscars for demonstrating "a consistently high quality of motion picture production."
In 2003, he won a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival.
De Laurentiis worked closely with the legendary Italian comic actor Toto and Alberto Sordi, one of Italy's best-loved stars whose portrayals of middle-class Romans struggling to get by became national classics.
In the 1960s, De Laurentiis built a film studio near Rome known as "Dinocitta" -- after the famous "Cinecitta" -- that was inaugurated by US director John Huston.
His work became increasingly in demand in Hollywood, enjoying box office success with "Serpico" starring Al Pacino in 1973, "Three Days of the Condor" with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in 1975, "King Kong" in 1976 and Ridley Scott's "Hannibal" in 2001.
However not all of his movies were hits.
His 1984 science fiction film "Dune," written and directed by David Lynch, was a commercial flop and was slammed by critics.
De Laurentiis was born on August 8, 1919 in Torre Annunziata near Naples and moved to the United States in the early 1970s. His parents were pasta makers.
He married Silvana Mangano, the star of "Riso Amaro" and one of the beauties of her day. They had four children together and later divorced.
In 1981, his son died in an airplane accident in Alaska.
His granddaughter, Giada, is a well-known US chef and hosts a programme on the Food Network.

Oceania's seafaring ancients make journey to Paris

Ancient seafarers who launched one of the world's swiftest migrations, settling the virgin islands of remote Oceania 3,000 years ago, have brought their story to Paris for an unprecedented new exhibit.

The Lapita, as the ancient Oceanic people are known, were all-but-unheard of just a few decades ago.

But since the mid-1990s the discovery of a body of highly-distinctive potteries, spread across some 250 sites, has shed light on how the Lapita set out over uncharted waters, bringing their language and culture with them.

Now, for two months starting on Tuesday, the Quai Branly museum of tribal arts in Paris is hosting what is being billed as the first ever comprehensive exhibition on the people's artefacts and history.

"For indigenous people in the region, this is their heritage," said Stuart Bedford of the Australian National University of Canberra, who has studied the Lapita for the past 15 years and is co-curating the Paris exhibit.

"But it's also a great human migratory story, an extraordinary chapter in the colonisation of the planet -- of this vast area that was uninhabited until just 3,000 years ago.

Many of the pieces on show have never left the region, according to Bedford, who lives and works in Vanuatu, home to many of the richest Lapita sites.

The Lapita's story is part of a wider pattern of migration that saw Southeast Asian peoples head south from Taiwan to Papua New Guinea and as far as the main Solomon islands, where they stopped some 40,000 years ago.

Then, after a break of tens of thousands of years, the Lapita took once again to the open seas around 3,300 years ago, pushing east past the Solomon Islands to the Bismarck archipelago and beyond to Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa.

Wherever they went, they left behind archaeological "markers" in the form of distinctive potteries, decorated with complex, dotted motifs, whose discovery is now enabling researchers to retrace their route over the waters.

"Pacific islanders have an oral tradition of seafaring stories that were dismissed by scientists," said Bedford, who works in partnership with Vanuatu communities that train up local fieldworkers to assist with excavations.

"Missionaries spoke of what came before them as a period of darkness," he said. "After 30 years of independence, Vanuatu is regaining confidence, as people start to appreciate they have a history that is older than the Church".

"They're very excited about the history," said Bedford.

Shell bracelets, disks, pearls and pierced teeth, obsidian shards used as cutting devices and shellfish hooks are shown in Paris alongside dozens of pots -- both in fragments and as whole, reconstituted pieces.

Typical Lapita pots have a large, complex motif running around in a central band, surrounded by a series of smaller friezes, with zig-zags, labyrinths or curls made with the teeth of a tiny comb-like instrument.

Lapita designs are still visible today in some of the region's artefacts -- most strikingly in the Tapas weaves of Fiji and West Polynesia.

But the ceramics -- which have also been recovered from burial sites across the region, used as funerary urns or to mark tombs -- are also believed to have carried deeper meaning.

"Each pot is unique in design. These were not being made for trade," said Bedford. In some cases, intricate dotted motifs are buried under a thick coat of glaze, suggesting a symbolic rather than aesthetic role.

Modern-day Vanuatu is home to a ritual called sand drawing -- or "Sandroing" -- a UNESCO-protected practice which uses graceful, ephemeral patterns to communicate across dozens of language groups.

For Bedford, "just as the sand-drawers pay customary rights to use certain motifs, so the pot designers probably used patterns according to set rules."

Looking beyond the artefacts, Lapita culture is seen as a founding period in the history of Oceanic societies, offering "a chance to understand how people survived in an unpopulated area," said Bedford.

For instance, the discovery of extinct animals -- like a large flightless bird that was hunted to extinction by early Caledonia explorers -- "gives us a picture of the human impact" on the ecosystem.

"We've realised there was a high level of interconnectedness, with people moving around the region for hundreds of years."

Twenty five years ago there were 50 known Lapita sites. Today there are more than 250, from Papua New Guinea to Samoa -- and now that researchers know what they are looking for, new sites are cropping up in Northern Australia as well.