Anyone for dunnocks?
Nicholas Harman
BIRDS BRITANNICA by Mark Cocker with Richard Mabey Chatto, £35, pp. 518, ISBN 0701169079 A BAD BIRDWATCHER’S COMPANION by Simon Barnes Short Books, £9.99, pp. 281, ISBN 1904977375 ✆ £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 THE CUCKOOS by Robert B. Payne, illustrated by Karen Klitz Oxford, £95, pp. 618, ISBN 0198502133 THE HERONS by James A. Kushlan and James A. Hancock, illustrated by David Thelwell Oxford, £95, pp. 433, ISBN 0198549814 As soon as the British had pretty much done for their larger mammals, they took up birds. The ones you shoot or eat had been protected from time immemorial, and in the 1880s people began to look after the ones that it was just nice to have around. Parliament began passing protective laws, lobbied by the forerunner of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which now claims a million members and owns vast tracts of land. The publishing business followed the action; the shelves in rustic bourgeois households like mine are bent down with bird books, which have to earn their shelfspace.
The fattest fledgling in this new nestful demands not a shelf but a sturdy coffeetable. The defective grammar of its title, Birds Britannica, occurs because its original begetter, Richard Mabey, wrote a fine book called Flora Britannica, and thus established what one must call a brand. When Mabey fell ill (this year he published another fine book, Nature Cure, about his recovery) Mark Cocker picked up the pieces, tried to follow the pattern, and managed fairly well. The formula is to list and cheerfully describe the required birds, surrounding them with ‘lore’ — partridges in pear trees, place-names, pub signs, jolly anecdotes from bygone bird-fanciers. There are plenty of other resources for identifying birds, but this is where you might go if you want to think about them without getting cold and wet. It could be the ideal Christmas present for an elderly or inactive relative who wants to build a reputation as a nature-lover. There are lots of those about.
The Bad Birdwatcher’s Companion is, both physically and intellectually, much more lightweight, and none the worse for that. Simon Barnes has picked just 50 of the ‘most obvious’ fowl (but he cheats; under Crow, for instance, he sneaks in four separate species, without mentioning ravens). His most unobvious one is the avocet, a reclusive wader, recently rescued from extinction, that is rarely glimpsed. But since it is the emblem of the RSPB, you will recognise it if you are one of that body’s million.
The author adroitly skirts the dangerous swamp of cuteness, and dutifully includes a few species that are seriously dull — anyone for dunnocks? He mounts an eloquent defence of magpies against charges of mass murder in the hedgerows, and is honest enough to admit that he has trouble telling a chiffchaff from a willow warbler without listening. People who get this book will be at risk of taking up birds seriously, so do not present it to anyone you enjoy normal conversations with.
The Oxford monographs, by professors from places like Michigan and Florida, perch at the other extremity of the birdperson’s range. British cuckoos are mainly famous as the subject of competitive springtime letters to the papers. Somewhat more rural folk will know that, weirdly, they dress up as hawks to scare birds much smaller than themselves, sneak eggs into the little fellows’ nests while they are taking cover, then push off back to Africa. It takes Mr Payne to inform you that
Cuckoos have a desmognathous palate, no vomer, no basipteroid process, a holorhinal nasal septum, deep temporal fossae and short mandibular processes.
But he is not really a graminivorous quadruped chap. His scholarly material, when the jargon stops, is elegantly written and enlivened by interesting anecdotes. As well as some pretty pictures, he offers eight pages of statistical DNA analysis tracing the lineages of the 141 cuckoo species, some resident, some peripatetic, that live in every habitable corner of the world. There isn’t much about the cuckoos that people write to the papers about, but I was pleased to learn that the Roadrunner, the annoying hero of a cartoon series that my children used as an excuse for not talking to me, is just another cuckoo.
The Herons is the same sort of thing, although its authors write less elegantly and only 62 heron species (including egrets and bitterns) are recognised, so there is more space for each. Our own blue heron does not get a lot of it. Personally I love the great flapping creatures, except when they ruin springtime days by screeching at, and with, the ravens, in savage competition for nestsites in my garden.
These books, so various in their style and purpose, share the usual birders’ triumphalism about species that, with or without human help, have re-established themselves in places where they were lost, or found new homes where they had never been heard of. They also lament the frequent disappearances of once familiar birds. The invention of the breech-loading shotgun did away with a lot of them in the 1800s; nowadays the loss of species is blamed with more sophistication on the destruction of their familiar habitats by farming, draining, cutting down woods or building towns.
Yet one near-loss, rightly lamented by both Mr Cocker and Mr Barnes, has no convenient explanation. The house-sparrow, that snippy, loveable Cockney the bird in whose fall there is a special providence — is disappearing fast from Britain. Mr Barnes says that in 1925 the number of sparrows in Kensington Gardens was 2,600; 75 years later the counters found eight. Mr Cocker thinks that ‘in eastern England the fall is running as high as 90 per cent in 30 years’, and that London lost three-quarters of its sparrows in 1994-2000.
If the loss could be convincingly blamed on a large multinational company there would be no end of a fuss. But nobody knows why it is happening — the Independent newspaper is apparently offering £5,000 for research into the question — whether it will continue, or whether it will turn out to be terminal. For a century and a half the study of birds has been fashionable, well financed and officially promoted. Yet when it comes to something we would really like to know, something that is really sad, the answer is a lemon.
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