Most people thought Bob was more than a little mad but I’d have faced an angry lion with him. In fact I did. To stand unarmed on foot a cricket pitch away from a furious, black-maned lion is a powerful experience: and it was just one of the adventures Bob and I shared. Always in pursuit of birds.
I told the story without embellishment in my first novel, Rogue Lion Safaris. One of the characters was based on Bob, but I took certain liberties. I toned him down considerably, in order to make him believable. For example, I missed out the story of the time we walked into a herd of elephants in search of an Angola pitta.
And the time he was arrested as a spy. That was during the tense times, when Nelson was still on Robben Island and every one in Southern Africa was jumpy. The police found Bob’s vehicle full of maps of Zambia, tape recorders, reels of tape, an omnidirectional mike and a vast, home-made parabolic reflector. He was locked up and questioned for weeks: “We’ve cracked your code.” “No, honestly, it really is just birdsong.” He was eventually released unharmed.
Bob stories are legion and legend: the time he drove into the Bangweulu Swamp, the time his vehicle fell off the pontoon because he had seen a small brown bird on the other side (Bob always insisted that that one was untrue) and the time he fell from a tree and lay unconscious in the bush for 24 hours before walking into Kapani covered in blood, politely requesting a beer.
Bob was more properly Baron Robert Stjernstedt, inheriting the title, if little else, from a Swedish father. He went to Africa as an undergraduate and the glorious soundscape of the African night had him enthralled. A crazy screaming electrified him: no one could tell him what it was. Years later he found out it was tree hyrax.
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That hyrax changed his life. Right from the moment he heard the scream, he dedicated his life to the sounds of the wild world: especially birds, especially the birds of Zambia. That was where I met him more than 20 years ago when he was working at Mchenja, a bush-camp in the Luangwa Valley.
The picture shows an expedition to the Northwestern Province of Zambia and also, accidentally and illegally, southern Zaire. “Never mind where we bloody are! Stop when you see a bird!” Bob said, perhaps the most characteristic remark of his life. We were looking for Pearson’s cisticola, a small brown bird that hadn’t been seen since 1936 and, alas, still hasn’t. Still, the expedition made a useful contribution to the Zambian bird atlas.
Bob and I made another expedition, following a tributary of the Zambezi, and found an isolated and unexpected population of cloud cisticolas. Look it up in the atlas. I am not credited, which is a scientific injustice: I paid for the petrol and the whisky.
I spent a couple of months at Mchenja with Bob back in 1992, on a self-allotted sabbatical. We had some times all right: sometimes with clients, sometimes without, walking (when with clients we were properly responsible and took an armed scout) and driving across the loveliest place on Earth, on first-name terms with a marvellous pride of lions.
Bob was a genius on birdsound. Nothing less. I got pretty useful myself, because Bob was the best teacher, always treating me as colleague rather than a pupil. Even now, when I get back to the Valley, I can put name to song in a wonderfully showy-offy way. Bob was also wonderful company — clever, funny, generous. I have sat round many a fire with him, drinking Mosi, the great beer of Zambia, turning to whisky as the evening drew on.
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Bob died last week in Lusaka, after a stroke. He leaves his life’s work: mostly recordings of the voices of Zambian birds — other places, other expeditions too, but the core of his work was Zambia. The best of it he donated to the British Library of Wildlife Sounds.
He was a crack field ornithologist, but he was also the most wonderful guide, lighting up the bush, lighting up the world for birders and for people who had never looked at a bird in their lives. His secret was simplicity itself: he loved it out there, and everyone around him caught the love like measles.
Bob gave me Africa and Bob gave me birdsong: two of the most important things in my life. With Bob I have had the best kind of adventures, but then everybody did. Bob was an adventure; an adventure driven by birds and the sound of birds.
“Do you think we should try a river crossing?” Always I found myself saying: “Why not?”
And Lord, we were off again.