I’m often asked, “What got you into birding?”. I have a stock answer of a kind that goes along the lines of “I grew up by the seaside in Lancashire, and my grandmother swears that she used to throw bread to the seagulls when she took me in my pram along the promenade and - she says - that’s when I first started looking at birds…”

I was thinking about that yesterday when I was taking to an elderly aunt I’d not seen for about twenty years. She asked me if I was still watching birds, and when I said most definitely, she smiled and - quite proudly I thought - said that she’d started me “on the wildlife thing” by taking me out looking at foxes, owls and bats when I was very small. She recalled a few stories - all of which seemed to concern taking the five year old me out to wander around a woodland in the middle of the night - and I smiled and nodded. To be honest though I could no more remember tramping the woods in the darkness than I can remember a cloud of ravenous gulls spiraling out of the sky to pick crumbs off my baby clothes - which is probably just as well in both cases. What I do remember though is my first ever twitch - a Collared Pratincole at Martin Mere Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Reserve. And I know for fact that it was my gran, “Nan”, who took me to see it, because ever since she’s tried to tell anyone who’d listen about seeing the “Partgull”, the “Partcoal”, the “Pinking Duck”, the “What was it called? Say it again my darling…again…Pratnicull…” one bright day back in the 1970s.

Collared Pratincoles (the name comes from Latin pratum ‘meadow, prairie’ + incola ‘inhabitant’) are Old World shorebirds that feed like terns or swallows, hawking rapidly and gracefully over grasslands, croplands and wetlands. The one my gran took me and my brother Nial to see all those years ago was appearing occasionally in front of one of the reserve’s furthest-flung hides and was one of the first to ever be twitchable in the UK. I’m not sure why Nial and I wanted to see it so badly - I’m fairly sure we had little idea what it looked like and didn’t really understand how unusual it was - but we did so Nan decided that was all the reason she needed. She’d drive us out to Martin Mere to go and look for it.

That doesn’t sound like much of a big deal, but it was. Nan was already in her sixties and her car in those days was a white automatic Rover 2000, a brute of a vehicle without power-steering (or, as I remember it, suspension or the power to go up hills). I eventually learnt to drive in that car, and getting anywhere in it was like trying to guide a rowing boat through treacle, a cardio-vascular work-out that left you aching all over, and one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. Nan, bless her, was only 5′ 0″ tall when she stretched: accelerating or braking required her to sit as far forward as possible, reaching for the pedals with her toes and gripping the steering wheel like she was captaining a storm-tossed galleon. Even a thirty mile round-trip was going to take a huge amount of effort and concentration on her part…

She didn’t really “do” the outdoors either. And Martin Mere at the time was most assuredly “outdoors”. Bought to protect a small remnant of what had once been the largest inland lake in the UK - and the flocks of Pink-footed Geese that wintered there - the Reserve hadn’t been open to the public very long. Nowadays the reserve is pretty much state-of-the-art and cleaned-up to allow access to the most misophobic visitor, but when we went to see the “again, darling…Parlincut” the reception centre was an old lean-to and the paths out to its hides were little more than the impression of birders’ boots sunk into the rich, dark soil. Nial and I had our birding clothes of course, but back in the 1970s ‘dressing-down’ for my gran meant leaving her pearl necklace off and her handbag in the house. I can’t think of a single occasion when she’d had anything other than smart shoes on her feet, and she’d probably have preferred to go out naked than wear jeans. She was neither wealthy nor snobbish, but my Nan was brought up with standards that she wasn’t going to let slip for anyone or anything - not for a bit of mud or a hundred yards of manure-filled puddles anyway. Not if we wanted to see…”Say it again my darling…the Pratting-gull…”

Memories going back over thirty years tend to be a bit unreliable of course - and I’ve probably re-interpreted them in the light of adult understanding and experience - but I really can picture my Nan taking her teeny delicate steps along the banking to the hide as Nial and I did our respectful best to resist the impulse to push on and leave her behind. We must have looked like a couple of manic Jack Russell terriers straining at a long (invisible) leash as we towed our gran along, but she did her best to keep up and finally we all three strode up the last few concrete steps into the hide just as the Collared Pratincole raced past the window, swivelled like a falcon, and shot back past again. Nial and I were ecstatic. My Nan, still catching her breath, too polite to push to the window past the birders already in the hide and too short to see over them, missed it.

I’m not sure exactly how long she let us wait for another view, but the next time the bird showed it was way off in the distance: we had binoculars, but my Nan didn’t - she’d lent her pair to Nial. I’m pretty sure she never actually saw the bird, but it didn’t matter. She’d brought us to see the - “I’m sorry, my darling, one more time…” - pratincole and she was proud as punch that she’d managed it, despite the car, and the walk, and the mud. She glowed with pride that day: not because of what she’d done, but because we were so excited and so grateful. Because she was a grandmother who loved her grandchildren more than anything, and we loved her…

Actually my nan never stopped glowing, never stopped being proud, never stopped loving - right up to the moment when last week, bed-bound and with her bloodstream pumped full of morphine to kill the pain of an ulcerated leg, the most incredible woman I have ever known died. I wasn’t there for her - I was on a plane coming back from Los Angeles - but I’m told it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had been: forget remembering something as unwieldy as “pratincole”, my nan couldn’t have even remembered her own name. Or mine, or my brother’s.

My aunt was telling me her stories about starting me off birding with tears in her eyes. We’d just come out of a small crematorium after saying goodbye to my gran (her coffin looked so large I kept thinking. Such a tiny body in such a large box) and I wanted to say, “Actually, it was Nan,” but of course I didn’t. I know and that’s what matters. I know in my heart that virtually everything that makes me what I am today came from my Nan, and my Nan knew it too. I made sure I told her every opportunity I got, never knowing how many more occasions there’d be when she’d be able to understand what I was saying to her. I told her the last time I saw her, which I’ll forever be thankful for, and I’ll going tell her every day for a few more weeks yet. I’ve no idea at all whether she can hear me - but of course I’ll say it again my darling: “thankyou and I love you.”

(In memory of “Nan” - Jessie Lillian Rainford, born 27 March 1908, died 15 August 2007)