Bill Oddie Unplucked by Bill Oddie

Author:Bill Oddie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

chapter twenty-six

On the Fairway

Birdies, eagles, albatrosses. Am I talking wildlife or golf? Well, both actually.

The fact is that most naturalists – and birdwatchers in particular – are rather fond of golf courses, especially if they are sited by the sea, which many of them are. It means that many migratory birds’ first landfall is on a golf course. The greens and tees may be a bit too velvety, manicured and possibly doused in insecticide, but the short-cropped fairways are much beloved of wheatears, pipits and larks, while warblers and thrushes lurk in ditches and any available scrub or bushes. What’s more, landing in the ‘rough’ may be a nightmare for golfers but it is a joy not only for birds but also for small mammals, wildflowers and attendant insects, especially butterflies. Indeed, there are some golf courses that look as if they have been designed for nature. Some of them have.

A few years ago I was given a guided tour by the environmental manager of a holiday village in Suffolk. He showed me an area destined to become a golf course, but also a nature reserve. Islands of ‘rough’ had been left undisturbed and – encouraged by a little planting and management – were glowing on that May morning with heath-loving wildflowers, many of which had lain dormant until the construction work had emancipated them. These included some of the common orchids. If you hanker after less common varieties, there are few better sites than Sandwich Bay in Kent, or – to be more specific – the fringes of the Royal St George’s Golf Course, sporadically home of the British Open and permanently home of Lizard Orchids.

So, is there a Ryder Cup of nature-friendly courses? Well, I have to admit that my most lavish experience of ‘life on the links’ – surely the title of a TV programme? – was in the US, at Walt Disney World, in Florida. There is a lot more to the Disney complex than Mickey Mouse, Thunder Mountain and Cinderella’s Palace. An area almost the size of an English county is covered by woods and waterways, much appreciated by the usual brazenly tame Florida birds, such as herons, darters and ibises, plus the occasional alligator, and three kinds of chipmunks: real, animated and actors in furry suits.

There are also many golf courses. One of them became my temporary local patch for the week. I saw warblers and woodpeckers in the surrounding trees, kingfishers hovering and diving into what I assumed was a ‘water hazard’, but was also an ideal nesting beach for a small colony of Least Terns. I wondered if they ever ended up incubating a stray ball instead of their egg. Most fortuitous of all, it being a baking late August, the drought was drenched every morning by a cascade of sprinklers that left the greens and fairways soggy and soft and an ideal habitat for migrant waders, the passage of which varied entertainingly from day to day. When the golfers arrived the

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