Birds Britannica

"I have a vested interest in this book because I did more than five years of research on it, which was some of the most interesting work I’ve ever done. The book was inspired by an earlier book, Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey. It’s about birds and every aspect of human reaction to birds. It’s not at all a book about how to identify birds, and although it does tell you something of bird biology, it’s primarily about our interactions with birds, from shooting and eating them, to celebrating them in various ways, including art and poetry. Crucially, it has a core of contributions from members of the public and one of my jobs was reading and selecting from the sackfuls of mail and e-mails from all over the British Isles. These were interwoven into wonderfully erudite, witty and beautifully crafted accounts by one of our greatest nature writers, Mark Cocker, and illustrated with photographs taken or selected by a fine bird photographer, Chris Gomersall. The public contributions reflected a huge range of responses, from saying: ‘This is what this bird means to me’ or ‘This is what we used to call these birds’. As you can imagine, there was a vast array of responses to birds like cuckoos or magpies and various other birds that loom large in myth and folklore. There was one man who said that when you see a magpie you must hold on to your left collar with your right hand until you see a four-legged animal. If you are wearing a T-shirt you should hold the neck where the collar would be. There is so much superstition about birds. Birds being so visible, there is more superstition about birds than about other animals. Well, the books talks about hunting and eating birds from medieval times, when they had swans stuffed with geese, pies stuffed with blackbirds and so on. The pie with four and 20 blackbirds has a basis in fact. Sparrows were an agricultural problem and they were netted in millions. We had some wonderful contributions on this subject – such as the memory from one contributor of an old Hertfordshire man who killed sparrows by blasting a whole row of them in one go, using a shotgun loaded with cartridges filled with sand, after the flock had flown up on to a washing line. I got many strange submissions about trapping and poaching birds. I had forgotten, for example, that moorhens are still legal game until I saw them hanging in the window of my Greek butcher down the road in London, although they are there no longer, since even the Cypriots who used to buy them aren’t keen to spend time plucking them as the feathers are difficult to remove. I’m just about to review a wonderful book on the birds of Malta. More than half the book describes how the birds are killed in Malta – nowhere is worse in terms of devastating birdlife. Italy too. I was just in Tuscany and I was impressed by the fact that they seemed to have moved on a bit – there were lots of signs saying ‘No hunting’. Quail are hunted on passage between here and North Africa but they have long been protected in the UK, where few breed. In the areas in Southern Europe where they are more numerous they are widely hunted."

"There are many good field guides for the beginner who wants to go out in the field and start identifying birds and looking at their differences and so on. In the UK, I would recommend the Collins Field Guide, in the US, David Sibley’s The Sibley Guide to Birds (now divided into two books: Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America and Field Guide to the Birds of Western North America ). Birds Britannica is rather different. It’s an encyclopedic work and it’s arranged on a taxonomic basis, so it treats each bird both as part of a family and individually. And it’s a wonderful book to read about any particular bird that you’ve got an interest in, like the robin, or the thrush or the blackbird, or indeed the peregrine. You look up the bird, and there’s a very readable piece not only about what the bird is like, but how it behaves and what its place in our history and our culture has been. “My interest is in the relationship between human beings and birds.” A tremendous number of stories and anecdotes were garnered in the course of putting together Birds Britannica , because the book was produced very interactively. Readers were invited to write or e-mail in as it was being produced with their own stories about these birds, and these were then woven together very skilfully by the editor, Mark Cocker. Each entry has a little history of the part that bird has played in our culture. So you can imagine that for iconic birds like the robin, swallow, eagle, barn owl and nightingale, their entries are stuffed with interesting references from literature, art and everyday life. They’re part of popular culture – they crop up in legends, proverbs and songs, we make images of them on tea towels, wallpaper and ornaments, and they’re familiar to everybody. So this is a wonderful book of stories about these birds, which also gives you a lot of good scientific information about them. And it’s enhanced with some wonderful artwork and photographs of birds. So it’s a great reference book, and if you want one reference work on the shelf, this is the one I’d recommend."