The rarest blend of white and gold

This unusual book is beautifully written, produced and illustrated, but its subject — the small Slender-billed curlew — is strangely absent. In his ‘introduction to a ghost’, Horatio Clare explains that, when he was commissioned to tell the story of the western world’s rarest bird, it did, at least officially, still exist. This grail of the birding world, which he has never seen, he describes as a beautiful creature, a species of curlew plumaged in a blend of whites and golds, with dark spots on the flanks, slim and graceful of form, more refined than the plump common curlew, with a thinner down-curving beak which makes it look as though it is chewing a stem of grass.

He tries to trace it in Sicily, Italy, the Peloponnese, the Balkans and Turkey. Clare is adventurous, and in his impressive book Down to the Sea in Ships he travelled on two container ships, depicting the hard lives of the sailors.

In this new, slimmer story, it is the men that he encounters, through their own quests for the elusive curlew, who stand out. I felt sometimes that the author was in a straitjacket, longing to travel further and experience other unusual characters. One is Istavan ‘Steve’ Moldovan, whom he first meets in the medieval Romanian town of Sighisoara, after breakfasting on bear salami. Steve bounces through the guesthouse gate,

a broad man in his prime, intense olive-coloured eyes and a double crease below his brows. ‘Birdwatching, my passion.There is only time for work and my hobby. I am Romanian, Hungarian and German. I am selling bill acceptors for cash machines, slot machines. No family! It’s not about business but about birding.