Birding - The beginning - Part 2 - Books

Books at home were few and far between growing up although the local library provided plenty of kids stuff. Two volumes of the Narnia chronicles, one a school prize and  the other a birthday present from a grandfather that same summer, an old and already battered copy of Jacques Cousteau's Silent World and John Hunt's Ascent of Everest was pretty much it. However there was an old Reader's Digest compendium which featured a chapter or so from Fred Boswell's fictionalised tale The Last of The Curlews which I found fascinating - until then I thought extinction was for dinosaurs and mammoths!!

Like most people my first birdbook was the Observers book which got thumbed until it disintegrated. However, it didn't take long to realise the limited number of species and 'victorian' style artwork made it mostly useless. The Observer's Book of Bird's Eggs was more useful early on!

Although having been available for a decade or more the Fitter and Richardson and Peterson guides were still not easy to find. The former came to me first ( a pocket money purchase? a just-because present?) but peer group suggestions were 'get the Peterson book, it's better'. So, like many people, that was my default ID guide for ages and again was thumbed until it fell apart. A cousin found a pristine copy inadvertantly left behind by a birder and promptly  sold it to me for 50p (or was it a quid!!). But by now, aged 14, it was made clear by more experienced birders that only 'dudes' carried a field guide; if you wanted to be taken seriously leave it on the bookshelf and take a notebook and pen it its place! So that copy of Peterson lasted much longer.

The other main work for UK bird identification was the already well out of date Witherby's Handbook - and well out of financial reach of someone who didn't even have so much as a paper round! But luckily the main library had a copy in the reference section  - I did consider slipping it under my coat volume by volume!!

Another glorious book was the rather wonderful House on the Shore by Eric Ennion - the tale of setting up Monk's House Bird Observatory, littered with lively paintings and tales of ringing nets and traps ; all of interest to a newly-taken-on trainee ringer. I can't remember if that's where I got the design of my chardonneret trap from!!

Some more inspiration came from the library in the form of Guy Mountfort's  two books Portrait of a Wilderness and Portrait of a River both published some years before I started birding but so exciting to read. Not sure how I missed out on Portrait of a Desert ; maybe its not too late to find an old copy.

I guess the final offering in those first few years was the weekly publication Birds of the World, edited by John Gooders and which gave a rock solid weekly fix of exotic and mostly unheard of birdlife for a couple of years. I well remember the back page being typically devoted to a single species painting by one of the many 'old masters' of ornithological art and in one case, Laughing Falcon. Not sure why but I was particularly transfixed by that one. Nearly twenty years later, stepping off a minibus in Costa Rica and there it was, the real life version and a species I'd not thought about in the intervening years. If I could have one birding moment over again from the last half-century that would be it.