I am in love with this picture. And not just because it shows the savannahs of Africa, my preferred habitat, the one I evolved for. It’s because it represents the most brilliant visual pun. It’s not a play on words, it’s a play on the concept of biomass. Or to put that another way, what has the greater mass? The elephant? Or the birds? It’s a bit of a guess-the-weight-of-the-cake competition, but my money’s on the birds.
All old Africa hands can name the species of bird without needing to check out plumage details or hear the calls. The numbers alone are diagnostic. These are red-billed quelea, sparrow-sized birds that have their being as a multitude: like a termite colony or New York.
I have seen many birds of great beauty and splendour: rhinoceros hornbill, bateleur eagle, carmine bee-eater; well, plenty of wonderful stuff. I generally forget the queleas when making such a list, and the crushing nature of their abundance.
The Kalahari, sky pale blue, one cloud the size of a man’s hand. You know the sort of thing. “Look at the cloud through your binoculars,” I was told. I did: the cloud was oozing, shifting shape like a vast aerial amoeba. It wasn’t a cloud; it was a flock — a flying city — of queleas.
On a mad ornithological expedition with my old friend Bob Stjernstedt we found an abandoned nesting colony of queleas. Little roughly-woven nests on every twig, every tree, every branch. A little bush with a 4ft diameter held maybe 100. It was like stargazing on a frosty night: more and more and more till your head started spinning. A proper numerical estimate was impossible. Between one and ten million, I’d guess. So many nests that you couldn’t even guess the order of magnitude: that’s quite a concept.
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How many queleas in the world? One estimate suggests 1.5 billion breeding pairs, another 10 billion individuals. I remember seeing a flock coming down to drink, in a scene very like the one in the picture: they formed a great wheel above the water, a moving Swiss roll of living birds, never growing any less despite the fact that half of their numbers had landed around the edges of the pool, making a vast beach of queleas.
Sometimes they come crop-raiding and descend like a plague, prompting desperate but futile countermeasures. There are just too many. Efforts at controlling them — a euphemism for killing — have very little effect on the quelea population but are often damaging to non-target species. Queleas are birds that induce despair as well as wonder. These numbers distress us, confound our sense of what is fitting. The idea of a flock of birds that can darken the sky and take five hours to pass is troubling; it doesn’t seem to be part of the world that we are at home in.
Mind you, numbers like that were once associated with the passenger pigeon: the great sky-blackening bird of North America. They were shot for the sheer fun of it. They became extinct in the early 20th century.
We are accustomed to celebrating very large and/or very beautiful creatures. We are growing more used to the idea of many forms in which life comes: biodiversity is a concept that has come to thrill us. But we don’t hear a lot about sheer abundance. Gulls at landfill sites fill most people with revulsion rather than joy. But I think it is time to celebrate wildlife in vast numbers wherever we find it. The wonder is that we can still find such abundance on this troubled planet.