Growing up in a city in a two--up-two-down which opened out onto a treeless, and for the most part still carless, road with a tiny yard come back-garden meant that birds were absent from life up to 10-11 years old. I have absolutely no recollection of sparrows, starlings or any some such, either at home nor on the walks to respective infant and junior schools.
The first sign of an interest in birds was an old black-and-white snap from a Cornish holiday in 1962 standing with a macaw on one arm and a parrot on the other, sadly neither identified to species!!
With an absent services father, a non-driver mother and little spare money TV formed the backbone of most evenings at home and here the combined works of Hans and Lotte Hass (underwater), Armand and Michaela Denis (safari) and of course early David Attenborough were preferred viewing after the usual kids programs. A little later these were bolstered by Jacques Cousteau and of course the much more 'offbeat' Animal Magic with Johnny Morris. And of course this was all in wonderful black-and-white. Some other memorable inspirations came from family and school visits to London Zoo and Natural History Museum - after the former I remember being horrified at how small the vulture cages were and after the latter the uncomfortable feeling that all the old and faded stuffed birds would have looked so much better alive in the wild.
In North America they have a term - spark bird- to describe a species which can be directly linked to the inspiration for a life with birds, In my case it was a trip to Scotland where an albatross was in the middle of a turning circle in front of a great-aunt's prefab and Capercaillie in a nearby field - and both just outside the Gorbels-dominated Glasgow!! It didn't take too long to figure out the albatross was a black-backed gull species; the Caper a pheasant? a pigeon? or just a figment? Who knows? Either way there was now a definite interest in and awareness of birds.
The next 'spark' was a house move prior to senior school and this during the 1966 World Cup finals. I well remember sitting on an upturned, empty tea chest cheering as Bobby Charlton's long range shot rocketed into the back of Mexico's goal!! The garden birdlife was still 'slim pickings' but the local pond held plenty of exotic wildfowl - Wood Ducks, Mandarins, Rosybills, Red-crested Pochards and so on. The domestic Muscovy Ducks were less attractive. Beyond this pond an old allotment patch was covered in collapsed sheds and corrugated iron which provided a great hunting ground for an 11 year-old looking for Bank Voles, Common Shrews, Slow-worms and newts. And also the start of a very short phase of egg-collecting, starting with a Lesser Whitethroat and only extending to half a dozen eggs of the same number of species; after just a few weeks I realised this was wrong.
Beyond the allotments was 'home' for the next six years, high school and views across to the harbour. One teacher commented in an old end-of-term report - ' Russell appears distant and in a world of his own' - probably too busy watching the Pied Wagtails running around outside or the Kestrel which used to sit prominently just outside the English classroom.
Finally, the streaming process put me, the youngest, into the same group as another fledgling birder seven months older than me and hence seven months further down the birding road and an ideal companion for the next few years if only because of his father's binoculars.... but more of that later.
