James Lowen

Hummingbird in my garden

Narrow-billed Woodcreeper

Red-rumped Warbling Finch

Rufous-sided Crake

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I may yearn, one day, to live in the countryside, but for the entirety of the 30 years since I first kept a bird notebook, I’ve lived in cities – and been an ‘urban birder’.

My city birding kicked off in Leeds. It started with the park outside my parents’ house, which I wandered around most afternoons, trying (often in vain) to see something more exciting than a Collared Dove. But the deeper into the park I explored, the more I found. Breeding Siskins one year, a revelation. A massive flock of Bramblings the following spring, the gaudy males wheezing away. A Hobby zipping over one summer and regular Waxwings in winter, much to the annoyance of my jealous birding mates living farther south than the hallowed county of Yorkshire.

As I progressed through my teenage years, I explored farther afield within Leeds, and ended up scribing a monthly report on the city’s birds for the magazine Bird Watching. Eccup Reservoir became my local patch, a fairly unprepossessing artificial waterbody marking the border between the northern suburbs and cityside farmland. Once or twice a weekend I’d take two buses up there, scour the gull roost for two hours in the hope of picking up a ‘Med’ or a ‘Glauc’, then cross fingers that my Dad would remember to pick me up once it got dark. Within months of my first visit, my ‘Eccup list’ developed unseemly importance. How I was jealous at Dickie Hart’s Pomarine and Arctic skuas, seen within minutes of each other the autumn before I first went to the reservoir! But how I rejoiced when I found the first Garganey and Quail for many years!

I then moved to Cambridge where I spent several years, first as a student (with nothing better to do than go birding), then working for BirdLife International (erm, ditto). My Fenland urban birding was marked by constant dilemmas. Was the female Pochard on a college pond tickable for the first-ever ‘national student bird race’? (Answer: it didn’t have much in the way of functional primaries, but that didn’t stop us counting it.) Would I prioritise seeing a vagrant Shag on the River Cam over a shag in the college precincts? (Answer: I was young so there was time enough for both.) And would Paul Salaman’s ancient Morris Minor van actually make it through rush hour traffic down the end of Mill Road before it got too dark to see the Smew that had turned up on an old gravel pit? (Answer: it didn’t, but we saw the pretty duck anyway thanks to the glare from streetlights.)

Eventually, I started working in London and moved to the big smoke. London can be a lonely place and, I knew no local birders, I presumed that my birding days were over. But no. When living in Clapham, I looked upwards, to the skies, in order to bird. From my neighbour’s roof terrace one sunny May Day, I gasped in amazement at a soaring White Stork. Three years of skywatching in Peckham were somewhat less successful; but a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker in my tiny garden one August was an unexpected treat. Mind you, if I’d searched harder, perhaps I would have been the one to find the infamous American Robin that spent several weeks within a few hundred metres of my flat: I never did see it.

My London urban birding picked up when I moved to Blackheath, in south-east London. Greenwich Park and the adjacent River Thames became my patch. I was hooked from day one, when, enticed into the park by easterly winds, I came across a scintillating Firecrest. Down on the river, it became a weekly quest to locate the semi-resident Ring-billed Gull but doing so meant that I also picked up other interesting birds: Common Scoter, Little, Caspian and Yellow-legged Gulls, a flyover Richard’s Pipit and regular Black Redstarts. Even from home, I could urban bird: Ring-necked Parakeets were everywhere, and Green and Great Spotted Woodpeckers frequent visitors. Dave Gandy stayed a night and gripped me off with a singing Lesser Whitethroat after I’d gone to work the next morning. But I gripped back with a Peregrine mobbing two Hobbys right over our garden. Top stuff.

And then came the big move. My wonderful wife Sharon wangled a job in Buenos Aires, Argentina, so I put my ‘career’ on hold and headed over with her to the home of steak and tango. Working from home proved a boon for urban birding. Several species of parrot are regular along our street and two species of hummingbirds come to our garden to sup nectar from the Salvia that Mark Pearman encouraged us to plant. I have also heard White-faced Whistling-ducks fly over by night, watched a lost Masked Yellowthroat fail to find any waterside scrub in our little plot and even photographed a Narrow-billed Woodcreeper from my study window.

But the urban birding doesn’t stop there. Within ten minutes walk of home, there’s a fab little reserve by the river at Vicente Lopez. I regularly head down there to photograph Rufous-sided Crakes and Plumbeous Rails. Every visit I seem to get a site tick. Fifteen minutes farther on is another reserve, at Ribera Norte. The fantastic marshy vegetation and riverside woodland here is an oasis amidst the materialism of suburbia. Curve-billed Reedhaunters, an ovenbird with a very small distribution, scold from the rushes. White-throated Hummingbirds zip between the blooms. And Southern Red-rumped Warbling-finches—a recent split and thus top of most visiting birder’s ‘want lists’—sing in the low trees. If I catch a train into the city centre, then cycle a few minutes, I can be at the Costanera Sur Ecological Reserve, a phenomenal site with nearly 300 species to its name.

So it was in the land of gauchos that I truly came to appreciate how fantastic urban birding can be. It inspired me, in my capacity as editor of Neotropical Birding (the birding magazine of the Neotropical Bird Club (http://www.neotropicalbirdclub.org/) to commission a series of articles about urban birding in Latin America. I asked German Pugnali, one of Argentina’s top birders, to kick off with an avifaunal eulogy to his home town, and my new abode, of Buenos Aires. Read my Buenos Aires report.

And so to the present. Perhaps I still yearn for the countryside, but as an affirmed urban resident, I take what I can get within the various cities in which I’ve lived. That seems to make me an ‘urban birder’. And that’s just fine by me.

James Lowen is currently a wildlife writer, editor, photographer, consultant and guide. This plethora of careers is not because he can’t make his mind up; it’s just that he loves wildlife. He lives in suburban Buenos Aires, Argentina, where many of the bird photographs on his website (www.pbase.com/james_lowen) were taken.