Books Do Furnish A Life...And A Birder

The recent publication from Richard Dawkins and some activity on books on birding Twitter got me thinking about the books that make a birder ,and in particular, this birder.

I started out with truly awful books. Dusty, faded things, accumulated by my dad over decades of casual second hand browsing.

Observer's book of birds. Heritage trust guides (individual guides, split by habitat, woodland, farmland, seaside etc). Various birds of the world type titles. Most of very little use, generally British and generally lacking information. 

It's because of books like this I walked the dunes at curracloe thinking I might find a Red-Backed Shrike, or through the Raven looking for breeding Hobby. Awful books.

As I began to advance, this changed, and one of the first books to really alter and inform my view of birds and birding was Lars Jonsson's birds of Europe.

There's been many covers over the years, but that Eagle Owl still gets me every time.

This book exposed me to a wider world. The concept that birds move, come from other places, even other continents, opened the eyes of a very young birder. 

Prior to this, my concept of a rare bird was that of a rare breeding bird. Something that had a numerically low population. Vagrancy was new vocabulary.

Visually stunning plates that really showed what birds looked like, were also novel. A far cry above the often distorted, proportionally off depictions in my older books, or the pencil scribble feel of Irish guides, these were alive and jumped off the page. 

The hours spent absorbing this book cannot be accurately counted, but it still remains the case, nearly 30 years later, that the image that appears in my head when such and such a species is mentioned, stems from this book.

The MacMillan guide was next up in my ranking of influences as a young birder.

I found an original hardback copy in my local Ashbourne bookshop for 1 pound! You would pay some real money for one nowadays. 

This brought a new dimension to bird identification for me, and made the subject a focus of my birding, beyond just the enjoyment of looking at birds (which remains ever present). 

The tact of grouping similar looking birds that were confusion species, with the specific intention of separating them was a fantastic supplement to the jonsson guide (which was as much work of art as fieldguide). 

The text was simple and to the point and the artwork similarly so, a no frills approach to the hard work of bird identification.

This was another book which I again spent innumerable hours with, committing new groups of species to memory as I gained more experience.

Sadly, my original copy fell foul of an exuberant Samoyed puppy.

This, however, forced me to replace it with the comprehensive update that is the Helm Guide to Bird Identification. So I guess there's a reason for everything, a cosmic plan, that in this case favoured function over sentiment. I forgave the puppy.

I doubt there are many birders in Ireland that would fail to recognise the iconic cover of the next book in my list. 

You can't be a birder if you don't know where to go to watch birds. 

This was the Bible in that regard, and whilst there have been other books covering and updating the topic for Ireland since, none have the soul of the original. 

There was something about the illustrations in this and the writing that really captured the imagination and made you want to visit the sites. 

The entry for Ballycotton still sticks with me, and I was lucky to be able to visit in the last days of the lake, staying in the legendary Seaspray Bed and Breakfast, and flicking through the guest book to see the many names of famous birders over the years.

Next up on the list of local shop bargains was Rare Birds of Britain and Europe. Oh my.

Lewington's stuff...jeeeesus.

5 pounds in a little newsagents in Castleknock of all places!

This was real big boy stuff. And that plate of Sociable Plover still haunts me as one of my most desired finds. 

The layout of this book was perfect for skimming. All the plates where laid out in the middle of the book, with the extensive text elsewhere, which meant that if you were feeling lazy or just wanted to browse, you could skip straight to the glossy pages.

It was the Playboy Centrefold of bird books! 

This was my first time encountering images of the true mega vagrants, with species like Aleutian Tern, Little Blue Heron, Grey Tailed Tattler and Swinhoe's Petrel entering the search image frame. 

I still refer to this book today. It's lost none of it's accuracy or appeal, though of course, with new species having occurred since it's publication, badly needs an update. And if ever there was an issue that all birders could come together on, it would be signing a petition for a 2nd edition. 

I met Anders Blomdahl on Cape Clear in 1999 on my very first seawatching trip. It was he, along with Jan Hagg, who found my first Fea's Petrel from Blannan.

After a long day in the sun on the rocks, myself and Ciarán Smyth were leaving to head back to the pub, when suddenly the scream of "SOFTY!!!!! SOFTY!!!!" echoed over the sea. 

The caution normally applied to climbing on Blannan was abandoned and we ran back down to the Swedes, set up our scopes and enjoyed good views of our first Fea's slowly arcing it's way west. 

Was some craic in the pub that night!

Years later this book was a must for any serious seawatcher and is still excellent.

When you flick through this, you get a real sense that extensive thought was put into image selection.

It's easy to pick full frame beautiful images, but to pick images that really give a sense of how you see birds on a Seawatch, whilst still being instructive... that's a skill.

This still remains relevant today. Whilst there are many newer Petrel/Shearwater/Tubenose guides, this book, written from a Nordic perspective, remains the only one to include divers, geese, duck, waders and gulls as seawatching species, invaluable when you move to, oh say, Finland. 

That said, a second edition would not go astray.

There have been many books to enter my library over the years, and undoubtedly many more to come, but it's books like these, books that build a birder, that stick with me.