Anyone for dunnocks?

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 shelf-space.

The fattest fledgling in this new nestful demands not a shelf but a sturdy coffee-table. 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.

Most popular

Ross Clark

Could China collapse the US economy?

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).