James Fleming

Were I swimming for my life with these four books between my teeth and were I to be tried more sorely, the first to go would be Parrot. It has three gems: that Warren Hastings, who died (from starvation) in 1818, owned a parrot that was still alive in Swindon in the 1920s; that Charlotte, George V’s parrot, would perch on his shoulder and in a ‘strident, seafaring voice’ call out, ‘Well, what about it?’ as the monarch deliberated over state documents; and that in Australian slang tight male swimming briefs are known as ‘budgie smugglers’. But these are insufficient rewards for trawling through Paul Carter’s unfocused and matey prose. Too often his meaning eluded me. And his style verges on the cute.

Birds are our pals. They awaken us, sing us happy songs and delight us with their plumage colours. In the garden they are undemanding visitors, not inferior to neighbours or family. The migrating species perform feats of navigation that in a human would have that person crowned upon landfall. They can fly at great speed and do amazing acrobatics. The literature on them is huge. Languages are stuffed with references to our friendship. Every house in Britain has a bird picture somewhere. And all this stems from what is, most often, a tiny frame. That little scolder the wren weighs the same as a green table grape. Moreover, they’re big business. Along one flyway alone in the USA wildfowlers have an annual expenditure of $58 million. And they’re big in politics.

Kathleen Jamie is a poet. This might be described as her occasional book, in the sense of being a record of what she saw, smelt, heard or felt during these various experiences and expeditions. Most are concerned, loosely, with natural history —ospreys, wild salmon, corncrakes, whales; all of them pertain to Scotland (of which she is a fine-voiced native). There is nothing fey or arty about her writing. She has an inquisitive, unpredictable, generous mind that she speaks firmly. In this connection, much of one chapter discusses a pair of peregrines trying to nest nearby. It is notorious that J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967) is the last word on the subject: an unrepeatable and magical combination of observational and literary skills — the Tristram Shandy of bird books.

The Wolof call it a goui, the Tswana a moana, the French the calabash tree and all Australia the boab. Welcome to the strange world of the baobab tree, the subject of Thomas Pakenham’s excellent new book. The tree was discovered for Europe in 1749 by a 21-year-old Frenchman, Michel Adanson, after whom it has, taxonomically, been named. He was paddled out to the island of Sor, in Senegal, ‘to hunt antelope’ and instead found the baobab. It’s one of the largest living things in the world, as well as being among the most useful. Its girth is often over 100 feet. The seeds are eaten roasted and their pods made into snuff-boxes (for instance). Their protective pulp is rich in vitamin C.

‘Naturalist-in-charge’ was Shel-ton’s title as fisheries expert on board the Tellina, a research vessel. It holds good throughout this excellent memoir, which contains much pertinent information and few idle sentences. By page 30 I’d learned that apple wood makes the best catapult, about the guanine crystals in fish scales, about lampreys, the names of his grandmother’s two Rhode Island Reds, what the lower quadrant signal means to the railways, conjugated valve gear ditto, how to load a muzzle-loader (‘the flinty grains shining as they trickled from the measure at the head of the tooled copper flask’), and the weight of a Duchess class locomotive — 160 tons or about 140 mature Limousin bulls.

The story is a good one. Lady Anne was born in 1837 and died, in Egypt, in 1917. Her mother, Ada, who was connected with Babbage and his prototype computer, was Byron’s only legitimate child. Aged 32 and wealthy, Lady Anne was plucked off the shelf by the poet and philanderer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. After miscarrying several times, in 1873 she gave birth to their only living child, Judith, later Lady Wentworth. The Blunts then set out on their Arabian adventures, she being the first European woman to cross the northern desert. They met real danger and hardship. Winstone is excellent on these journeys, which undoubtedly had a profound cultural influence on Lady Anne.