Buckenham Carrs and cars in Buckenham

AFTER Simon Barnes's article in The Times, today had to be the day to see the roosting rooks, crows and jackdaws for myself.
The first thing that strikes you isn't the birds, it's the people. The prospect of seeing thousands of corvids dancing across a dusky sky is becoming a mini-tourist attraction. Through Lingwood and Strumpshaw I was just about the only car on the road. But get beyond Buckenham and you are suddenly aware of a lot of parked cars in the middle of nowhere. People with big coats and binoculars hove into view from unlikely angles. It's all terribly British, but a polite sign has gone up warning us to steer clear of parking near houses and advising us to avoid a particular footpath.
I won't lay it on about the spectacle itself. So many people have done it better already. But yes birds do fly in from every direction, spectacularly out of the glowing west tonight. And yes this noisy swirling mass of birds waxes and wanes as dozens become hundreds, become thousands. Tonight wasn't a classic according to one lady next to me. It had been better in November. But it's definitely worth going to. Get in before the ice cream vans turn up too,

The crowded road to Crow Country

I LOVE the way that an isolated, out of the way place can suddenly become fashionable simply through the power of good writing.
Step forward Buckenham Carrs, a previously unheralded strip of woodland on the north bank of the Yare Valley, half way between Brundall and Cantley. Its unlikely rise to stardom started with the publication of Crow Country by Mark Cocker in 2007. Cocker moves to a house nearby and - as the book's dust-jacket says - soon notices that "twice a day flight-lines of rooks and jackdaws pass over the house on their way to a roost in the Yare Valley. Following them down to the river one winter's night, the author discovered a roiling, deafening flock of birds which rises at its peak to 40,000".
Since then it sometimes feels as if every bird-watcher and TV nature programme has made the same trip. In fact, a cleverer writer than me could talk of a roiling, deafening flock of birders competing in a cacophany of praise. ....As I say, someone cleverer than me.
The latest birder to pay homage is Simon Barnes in today's edition of The Times. On patrol with Cocker, he spots a peregrine falcon, but has to move on because "after all we had crows to look for".
"How fabulously funky - to hurry past a peregrine and barn owls to see crows, to see birds ignored by birders and despised by non-birders."
Now I'm no naturalist, but my reading of the book is that birders can often ignore the commonplace in their hunt for the rarities. Cocker argues convincingly that that's a mistake, because there is much beauty and mystery to be found in all of nature, even the noisy, ubiquitous corvids. So yes the numbers in the Yare Valley are particularly impressive, but if crows are so ubiquitous haven't we all got our own Crow Country just down the road from us?
It must just be the power of good writing that draws people to Buckenham Carrs.