More tales from WFT Arundel.

Andrew Dawnay, our curator was quite a character. He had been in the Guards and he had also been a bush-whacker in Australia before working at Slimbridge. He still wore his Ozzie hat when it rained. In summer he looked more like a French peasant because he rode a bicycle and almost always wore faded French canvas trousers. He completed his bohemian look with a pair of bedroom slippers and the Gallic effect was increased by the ever-present smell of garlic that he chewed like gum, perhaps to cover up the smell of wine?

Dinner parties with Andrew could end in a food-fight with profiteroles at ten paces, but he was undoubtedly a good cook, though not to everyone’s taste! He kindly invited us round to dinner one night when we had an extended visit by random Stevenson’s including my brother Alex, who is a picky eater. The starter was kidneys in garlic which my brother wouldn’t touch. Luckily there was second starter, but it too was mostly garlic, followed by a chicken stuffed with garlic and with a garlic gravy. I don’t think Alex ate a thing, but the wine was always good.

Andrew worked long days. He liked to be out on the reserve very early because his mission was mostly to shoot the crows that took so many eggs and ducklings. He could not openly walk across the road with his gun so he drove his Ford Carpri (yes, that’s right, a Capri!) the 500 yards to a side gate and let himself in. The clatter of the gate disturbed the birds, so he would bang it again and again until they got used to it and calmed down. The crows were pretty clever and often outwitted him. That's how his car came to have a bullet hole in the door. At least, that’s what I was told. It’s equally possible, given his background (and my imagination), that he was a spy and the hole was the result of a failed assassination attempt.

Before I took on the role, Andrew was often out at night giving talks and film shows. We had a couple of Peter Scott films and a 16mm projector that wasn’t always reliable. If the projector failed, Andrew could repeat the whole sound track on his own, which he did a couple of times. If everything was going according to plan, he might nip out while the film was running and come back at the end, only to find the floor covered in a mile of film that had to be wound back onto the spool using a pencil as a crank-handle. If the gallery was quiet and we had no groups booked in, I would often run a film in the lecture theatre and just let people wander in and out as they wished. I never learned the script like Andrew did. In fact, the sound of a buzzard on the sound-track would send me running outside to look up at the sky for the bird. I did that a lot.

I don’t know why, but Hanna and I were chosen to stand in for Peter Scott at a posh dinner for the Law Society in Chichester. We prepared a really clever slide show and hoped to get a good donation. Unfortunately, I dropped the carousel of slides onto the carpet and they went everywhere. There was no way I could get them back in the right order so I just fed them into the carousel and told Hanna to keep talking about what popped up. Slides were backwards, upside down and covered in fluff. There was no order to the thing at all. Fortunately, this was after dinner, so people were well-oiled and joined in with hoots and comments. It was a disaster, but a hilarious one. Hanna never quite forgave me until, years later in Dundee, we had David Bellamy come and talk to us. He was 30 mins late, the slides were faded and filthy and he kept walking away from the microphone to gesticulate in front of the screen, but we mostly remember how good he was!

Fletch and I did a lot of the publicity. At the outbreak of the Falklands War we decided that people needed to know more about the wildlife there and wrote a story about our Falkland Islands Flightless Steamer Ducks. (Yes, they are real). These bulky grey birds are very aggressive and will launch off after any interloper that comes within a mile of them. They give chase by milling their wings around like the wheels on a paddle steamer while their huge webbed feet peddle behind. (It gets more surreal by the minute doesn’t it, but wait.) We thought this was a good story for the national press, and the Daily Mirror thought so too. They took a thoroughly jingoistic view of the war and supported Maggie to the hilt. Their commentary on progress of the battle to regain the islands from the Argentinians was more suitable for a sports magazine or a kids comic than for a newspaper. They treated it like a game of soccer, at least until it turned nasty.

Anyway, they decided to use our text but they would send their own photographer who would come with a model of an Argentine battleship that they hoped the ducks would attack. We pulled the story at that point.

The Gentlemen of the Press (they were all men) arrived in force when we had a visit by Prince Charles. During his speech in the theatre, my projection room was filled with bulky men in baggy raincoats who reeked of fags and beer, but I got to shake hands with the Prince who remarked on our classic set of Frederick Warne wall charts that were illustrated by Noel Cusa. He said "I have those on the back of my loo door. That’s how I learned my birds.”

We could be cleaning toilets on minute and talking to Royalty the next but showing groups around the reserve was the core of our work. Guiding a blind group around can be really interesting, especially when there is no fence between the lake and you (there is now), but the experience we had to offer included sounds and touch. The very first pen was full of cooing eider ducks, some soprano Bewick’s swans and some murmuring Hawaiian geese that didn’t mind being touched. It was best to sit down to enjoy this so Hanna guided her group of three ladies to a bench. Unfortunately the bench had sunk a bit in the soft ground. The ladies felt their way back and proceeded their descent, which went on and on until they all three fell over backwards in a helpless heap of laughter.

The only people who regularly fell into that pond where brownies. We kept some spare clothes in appropriate sizes ready for their visits but the number of people falling in declined rapidly when the eels showed up. They were as think as your leg having grown fat on high protein fish pellets that we fed to the sea-ducks (or did they eat brownies?) They took to nosing around the margins and scaring off the visitors.

We had too many groups to manage in summer and so we trained up the most amazing group of volunteers to do it for us. They all had a manual to work from, but they brought their own characters very much into play. One guide would set out with a group just before or after mine and we would do a double act. I would tell my group all about the fastest duck or the duck that could stay underwater the longest and he would say “Rubbish! Come over here and I’ll show you a better duck!"

The season kicked off at Easter, which is when we had Downy Duckling Days. We started our sessions with a show in the theatre that involved a special egg song. Hanna and I wrote the song on our way into work one day and used it an hour later with 100 kids. It wasn’t exactly Bob Dylan but it went something like this.

"An egg is round, and egg is long. An egg’s not weak, an egg is strong…….., “ We made various props to go with this and explained how a duckling breaks out of an egg using a poor kid who had to break out of a cardboard box and stand there wearing a duck’s head. There were egg jokes, egg facts, eggsperiments and eggsplanations. (Sorry, I know there’s no eggscuse!)

In the gallery we would have incubators with eggs and baby ducklings, but one year it all went wrong because Easter was early, or the ducks were late. We had no ducklings, but we did have baby rabbits so we put them on display with some wooden eggs which we told the children were rabbit eggs. I think we messed up a few people’s minds that spring.

We ran a kids' club and had events for the Young Ornithologist’s Club. I particularly enjoyed a day on camouflage for which we teamed up with Ken Smith from the RSPB at Shoreham. Ken was as daft as I was, having cut his teeth at the Trust's centre at Martin Mere. He made us some birds out of polystyrene tiles that we hid in the grounds. The idea was that the brightest birds like kingfishers would be spotted first and the camouflaged ones like snipe would avoid detection. It worked too well and we lost a few of the models. Weeks later I found the nightingale (which had a red tail) pecked to bits by the local robin. The children made their own birds too, but the best idea we had was to put them in pairs and give them a big cardboard box and some paints. They had to make their own hides and then take them out into the grounds to use. Most of the boys used military style camouflage, but two girls painted their box with pretty girlie flowers and insects and then put it in a flower border. It worked a treat and we all walked right past them.

We took another group of Young Ornithologists out for a boat trip around Chichester Harbour. Some had come from London and they were really excited. Some were quite nervous and had not slept much the night before. Two of the boys spent the whole trip below deck with their checklists, ticking off the birds while we spotted them, but not seeing any of them which was a shame because it was a brilliant day out. On another trip to Pagham Harbour I tried to enthuse the children about a dull brown American wader (white-rumped sandpiper) but they rightly preferred the crowd of bright yellow wagtails that were bobbing about. They spotted the odd one out too; a blue headed wagtail.

The juiciest stories about our time at Arundel happened outside of work. There were parties all of the time, outings to see birds and orchids, and pub crawls which we often conducted in the Trust’s anonymous dark green transit van. We can still remember the pub names. Who could forget the "Black Rabbit", or the "Shoulder of Mutton with Cucumbers” (now gone)? The "White Horse" at Sutton was our favourite for a drink and the “Sportsman" at Amberley was a good base for a walk. I used the van to move house and, despite the lack of any seats in the back, transported all the witnesses to our Registry Office wedding in Worthing. Unfortunately, I hadn’t bothered to find out exactly where it was so there were some very nervous moments as I raced around the back streets to get there in time. You will have to ask Johnny Smith how the van was eventually written off by a man who thought it was a road and drove up it!