PURPOSEFUL

BIRDWATCHING
GETTING TO KNOW BIRDS BETTER

ROB HUME
with illustrations by the author

PELAGIC PUBLISHING
 CONTENTS

Preface  xiii

What is birdwatching, anyway?  1

What to do with your interest in birds  8

Buy a good book  12

Get a notebook and pen  30

Distribution, habitats and time of year  41

Colour and light  47

Early days  55

More good days, bad days, ordinary days  84

Waxwings  99

Some dusk encounters  104

Soaring birds and birds of prey  109

Local patches  119

Wonderful Wales – Croeso i Gymru  164

Superlative Scotland  177

Great shrikes  198

If at first…  202

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October rarities  204

Flight lines over the house  223

There will always be questions  225

Up on the moors  239

Gulls  242

Seabirds and sunshine  265

From a distance  276

Acknowledgments  279

Birdwatching rules and the Birdwatcher’s Code  280

Index  283

x
 WHAT IS
BIRDWATCHING,
ANYWAY?

For more than 50 years, although I swear I am no older than 34, my reason
for looking at birds has not changed: I like them. For some reason, I respond
to them. How it all began, long ago, when I was five, I’m not sure. I listened
to Romany on the radio, pretended to be David Attenborough, even then. My
parents came from very different backgrounds: one from farming families on
reclaimed land in Essex, who, after surviving the war, moved to find a job and
start a family in the industrial Midlands; the other from a Staffordshire coal-
mining area, in which the miners would often find a connection with the outside
world through racing pigeons, or keeping caged finches (brown linnets, green
linnets, seven-coloured linnets). Both had a good reason to try to get out into
the countryside, and I benefited from being taken out and about into beautiful
rural Staffordshire as often as possible. A bunch of us kids had a brief interest
in birds’ eggs but none of the others pursued things further, just me. The eggs
thing soon stopped.

From time to time there has been a greater emphasis on this or that, a few years
of chasing rarities (twitching, in a rather mild way mostly, but with plenty of
effort and excitement along the way), a few migration holidays, a bit of survey
work or whatever, thousands of hours looking at gull roosts, some holidays
around the world, even leading tours to exotic places – but essentially, I have
always looked at birds from an aesthetic point of view and at best with some sort
of emotional response. I watch them like a frustrated artist really (painting is no
relaxation for me, it’s too difficult), but it has served me pretty well, all things
considered.

Yet a famous birdwatcher – Ian (D. I. M.) Wallace – whom I knew in a small
way and spoke to now and then – called me not so long before he died in 2021
and said I might be in a good position to promote what he called ‘purposeful
birdwatching’. He wanted to encourage people to make something a little more
useful and lasting out of an otherwise ephemeral sort of hobby. He called it our

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 PURPOSEFUL BIRDWATCHING

A dozen or so different eggs in a couple of little biscuit tins was about the
extent of my collection when I was maybe eight or nine: most were ‘swaps’
or given to me, and my interest may only have lasted one or two seasons.

‘hobby–science’. I also recall Ken Smith, expert RSPB researcher into all kinds
of things, perhaps best known for his woodpecker studies, saying that anyone
wishing to go further should just choose a species, then study it.

I haven’t really, mainly because I never thought I was good enough. But I never
trained as a ringer either, so colour-ringing, such an invaluable tool in population
studies, was out of my reach. I used to find birds’ nests – all kinds of exciting
things – but even the joy of the gloriously sky-blue, inky-black-spotted eggs of
a song thrush seems to be a distant memory now. So, not being a great nester
reduced options for a close species study; as, perhaps, did available time. But
all the same, putting a bit of purpose into your hobby – not simply paying
something back, but adding a bit to our cumulative knowledge – seems to be
worth encouraging. A simple way is to study a place, if not a species: just to
watch, regularly and repeatedly. Even just counting things helps. Over the years,
such basic data builds up a picture.

What is it that birdwatchers do all day? Why do they do it? Non-birdwatchers

could be forgiven for wondering. Well, as you know, it can be one of many things.
For many it is just a way to get out and about in the countryside: like fishing,

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 WHAT IS BIRDWATCHING, ANYWAY?

it is a pursuit that brings you into close contact with other things, and those
other things can be as much a part of the enjoyment as the birds themselves.
Why bother, then, to fish? Or watch birds? Many people don’t: enjoying the
countryside is enough. Or they may climb mountains instead.

But birdwatching, and its bewildering array of associated subjects, increases your
understanding of the world out there, natural and unnatural – like an appre-
ciation of the physical geography and geology of a place, local culture and more
distant history that influence buildings and land use, anything that helps you
to appreciate why places look the way they do. It adds purpose to your time
outdoors. And you meet new people, make friends, see great places, maybe
you travel. It is a hobby, a science. It’s good for your health. And the birds are
wonderful.

Birdwatching expands your mind.

Very often it starts with some sort of influence from family or friends, maybe
even a mildly competitive element quite early on. There used to be letters and
postcards. ‘This week I’ve seen up to six long-tailed tits in the garden, and on
Wednesday a sparrowhawk flew over and something that looked like a garden
warbler appeared, but I’m not sure about that.’ Now more likely are quick-fire
texts and Instagram posts: an instant sharing of experiences, photographs (but
making few lasting memories?). A more knowledgeable friend is always a useful
bonus, but who has one of those? There may not always be one about, and you
can’t just conjure one up. Try a county bird club – the focus for local good and
experienced birdwatchers – and the nearest RSPB group, which will be more
about helping people meet each other, learn a bit more, and naturally encour-
aging them to support the RSPB (which deserves and needs your support in
equal measure). My first proper RSPB job was to help these groups, which my
boss, Trevor Gunton, an RSPB hero if ever there was one, was responsible for
creating. Or just chat to birdwatchers you meet outside: most are a sociable lot,
although birdwatching itself can, admittedly, be a very isolated, solitary activity.

For most of us, we watch birds simply because we like them. We meet beings
of wondrous variety and endless activity – and they can fly! And it is all basically
free. A bit of learning will enhance their gift of company and entertainment with
understanding. They may add a bit of colour and life to our surroundings, or they
sound nice (if not always, perhaps, gulls on the roof at 4.00 a.m.). Individually, or
collectively, they can look beautiful, impressive, dramatic, or delicate, exquisite,
fragile and vulnerable. Some might look funny: I tend to resist laughing at
them because I think they deserve better than that. I don’t think of a puffin as

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 PURPOSEFUL BIRDWATCHING

‘amusing’ despite the media image. And while any given species has its own
character and characteristics, all birds are individual beings.

Soon birds will be linked with time and place: great memories of moments or
days or holidays, or wonderful places we’ve visited where the birdlife played a
major part. Knowing that a swift has come from Africa and hasn’t set foot on the
ground since it was here last year adds a bit of wonder, too. Birds and places will
be linked with family and friends, holidays and days out: great memories. Yet it
is strange what memory does and doesn’t do. I can recall ordinary, simple things
from decades ago with enormous pleasure: yet, when looking back through my
notebooks, I can now find long descriptions of rarities that I can’t recall even
seeing. I’d forgotten a white-tailed eagle in Suffolk; I remembered a sociable
plover but forgot about a couple of others; likewise with blue-winged teal. Some
things leave an indelible impression, others a transient little dent, but I find that
writing things down generally helps reinforce the later recollection.

My background education in geography also, I believe, helps me understand

a bit more about the natural world. Biology meant cutting up rats and frogs,
so I dropped that very early, before O-levels. But I still have a bit of a biological
slant when looking at things, which you need to have, especially if conservation
becomes a concern. That adds to the fascination of birds. How does a tiny warbler
fly to Africa and then return a year later to the very same tree? Anyway, why does
it bother? Think of everything that makes a human keep going: brain, nervous
system, liver, lungs, kidneys, stomach, intestines, immune systems, heart and
blood and arteries and veins, inner-ear complexities to keep you balanced and
sort out the sounds, eyes and optic nerves to see the world and understand it.
The tiniest mouse has the same… the smallest warbler is so much better at many
things than us, its reactions so much quicker. Even a butterfly can migrate across
Europe. How does it know? Why does it decide to get up and go? Those bats in
the evening, using their sophisticated echolocation systems, something entirely
beyond our own physical capabilities. Watch a tiny insect zip along a hedge then
climb up and away across the garden, in a matter of seconds: in proportion to a
six-foot human, what fantastic speeds it must achieve! Such forces of acceleration
and deceleration, probably while going sideways. And how ever do those moles
under my lawn find their way about? The natural world, from the smallest beetle
to a distant black hole, is exciting yet difficult to understand or comprehend.

The way we react to the world around us is fascinating too. Is it too strong to say
that many people look at the world through the television screen? This thought
goes back a long way. When I was a student in Swansea, a huge wooden cabinet
appeared one day in the coffee bar. A colour television! No-one had ever seen one

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 WHAT IS BIRDWATCHING, ANYWAY?

of those – a small crowd gathered round. I clearly remember one comment, ‘Look
at that red! That bright red, what a colour.’ And equally clearly, I recall my own
mental response: yes, bright red, but it’s only a garage door… there have been
red garage doors out there for decades and you’ve never looked at one before. Of
course you must appreciate the wonders of television, and natural history films
in particular have reached an incredibly high level, but do people perhaps look at
a wonderful sunset on the box but never notice the real thing outside?

Sadly, many people who get out into a ‘green space’ for the benefit of their mental
health just stick in the earphones and run, or cycle, and don’t really have any
kind of reaction to the world around them, or at least not in any detailed sense.
But there I go again, judging others… I must stop. It is up to them. We may
be stimulated by beautiful things or simply ignore them as ordinary, everyday,
background patterns. Or, realistically, both, depending on our mood at the
moment. But whereas I will stand and look at the moon, or stop to admire a
rainbow, I know most people simply don’t take the least bit of notice. Children
look at rainbows; why not everyone else? I can’t not stare at and feel moved by the
brilliance of Venus or Jupiter whenever I see them, but most people are unaware.

Life is immensely complex, and the world as a whole even more so (let alone
the universe). There are millions of grass leaves on a large lawn, which have
millions of dewdrops reflecting the early-morning sun, each with sparkles and
intense rainbows of colour, tiny spectrums (spectra?) of brilliant hues. Within
a lawn there may be so very many eggs, cocoons, larvae of this and that, tiny
insects, slugs and snails and spiders, all of which have their own complicated
and brilliant nervous systems, digestive systems, remarkable eyes (complete
with whatever is needed to make them work and process the information they
provide), extraordinary jaws, legs, wings and other means of locomotion, senses
and reactions to external events. Or maybe they’re just insignificant ants or gnats,
to be trodden on, swatted without a thought, smacked against a car windscreen
or snapped up by a robin. A spider to be squashed. And the lawn can just be
ignored most of the time; indeed, it must be ignored most of the time, because
you can’t simply worship it all day long… it’s a bit of green.

Or we may drive by a bit of woodland, a fantastic ecosystem built up on such

minutiae with seemingly infinite numbers and variety of flowers, butterflies,
beetles, birds, leaves that glow green with chlorophyll or turn red and gold with
accumulating sugars as autumn approaches. Or, as a rule, it’s just that clump of
trees across the field.

Even the most mundane, everyday bit of life is amazing. The temptation for a
writer from time to time is to try to describe all of this, to react to it in some way,

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 PURPOSEFUL BIRDWATCHING

to try to encourage the same response in the reader, to impose some reaction
upon them. In fact, everyone will respond in their own way. Producing a bird
book can suck you (me) in to enthusing about the way a big bird of prey tilts
and turns in the air. How its upcurved wingtip feathers, the outermost curling
more than the next and so on in sequence, change the overall appearance as it
turns, from a broad, fingered, rounded wing to a pointed one. Changing from
a long, oblong slab to something more elegant, with bulging secondaries, an
S-shaped trailing edge, shapely wingtips caressing the air. How the tail reacts to
air currents, the alula (thumb) moves in and out to give extra control over airflow
and turbulence. Trying to enthuse, trying to show off or boast about what you
know (which only ever reveals how much you don’t). I’m just trying to appreciate
things properly, because surely they deserve it.

Blackbirds on the lawn beneath the apple tree, with strong sunshine
casting dark shadows. Such complexities of light and shade are always
fascinating, however commonplace the setting or the bird.

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 WHAT IS BIRDWATCHING, ANYWAY?

Yet I can still at least say that something is beautiful and remarkable. Perhaps a
wave breaking on a beach, glaucous and transparent in that last, curling, over-
toppling moment, the sun reflecting off myriad facets on the sculpted surface of
the underside of that glistening curve. I might clumsily try to paint it, more likely
photograph it. But it is just a wave. Splash. Wait for the next.

The lawn with its multitude of reflecting diamonds is a just a lawn, the bit of
grass where you throw out crusts for the birds. The blackbird is just a bird,
hopping along with its bright eyes alert and expectant, reflecting the sky and the
trees, the garden shed and the roof if you are close enough; its wings drooped,
tail raised as it pauses and slowly lowered again as it stands still, its legs flexed,
the tension in its neck giving just that right kind of poise that defines a blackbird.

Just a bird, but fantastic: black, but beautifully black, lamp-black, carbon black
and inky-black and soft charcoal-black, and brownish black and bluish black –
even pale black, if you can have such a thing, when the morning light catches
it and filters through the minutely raised feathers. And somewhere within it,
the capacity for producing one of the most musical of all bird songs. And those
lovely softly mottled eggs. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more it becomes
a favourite bird, giving more pleasure, more of the time, than most.

Just a bird. But I like it. I hope you do, too.

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 WHAT TO DO WITH
YOUR INTEREST
IN BIRDS

Birdwatching has no rules (except that the welfare of the bird comes first: look at the
Birdwatcher’s Code at the back of the book). Do what you want, so long as you
don’t trespass or do damage. But who knows where you might end up?

One aim of this book is to recount real birdwatching experiences of all kinds: a
walk in the countryside, an hour in the garden, a long-distance journey to see
something new – all the different ways in which I have enjoyed birds over the
years. You don’t switch off. Birds are there outside the window, on the way to
school or to work, over the car park by the shops, a reflection or a shadow. Even
while I’m writing this there is a sparrowhawk doing a recce outside… once you
start, you never stop.

I feel sure my education in art and geography has given me a particular view on
birds, their habitats, the landscapes they inhabit, the way they look in changing
seasons and ever-changing light. You may be knowledgeable about or interested in
climate and the effects of weather on bird behaviour; you might check the excellent
weather-forecast maps after the BBC news to predict what tomorrow might bring,
bird-wise. You may almost subconsciously think about the geology of places
you visit, and see what birds might be there in the particular vegetation types
growing on soft underlying chalk or limestone, or dark, unforgiving millstone
grit or slate. We often had family trips to the Peak District, so clearly divided into
the White Peak (limestone and green grass) and the Dark Peak (dark grits and
heather moor). A bit of geography – real geography, I mean, physical geography,
not place names or flags – informs your understanding of habitats, which helps
you predict the birds and understand them a bit more. You might study biology
or ecology; or birds might stimulate you to look into these subjects. All of these
things just tend to build up slowly over the years and become routine, subliminal.

You could record bird sounds and analyse sonograms (can you count a bird if
you have only heard it?), or get a camera and long lens and take thousands of

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 WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR INTEREST IN BIRDS

photographs (can you count a bird if you see it only on a photo later?). It is no
longer a case of saving up for a 36-exposure 35 mm film and taking pictures
carefully at 50 pence a throw. A photographer in a local hide is not unkindly
known as ‘Machine Gun’ for his habit of keeping his finger firmly to the button.
Or just use your phone: the pictures (and videos) they take can be incredible,
and you can get all kinds of adapters for telescopes and so on. Maybe you can
draw and paint. That would open up another couple of books. Or perhaps write:
Dylan Thomas included plenty about birds in his stories and poems; Thomas
Hardy wrote one of the best evocations of a songbird in his poem The Darkling
Thrush. My favourite, Dorset dialect poet William Barnes, was always writing
about rooks ‘fleeing to their elems’. The elems (elms) have long gone. Nature
writing is currently very much in vogue. And Vaughan Williams produced the
perfect rendition of a singing skylark in everyone’s favourite, The Lark Ascending
– maybe you will write more bird-inspired poetry, prose or music.

You may well wish, though, to add something to just looking at birds for
enjoyment with no aim in view: add a bit more purpose. That is easy enough

Some people see Thomas Hardy’s Darkling Thrush as miserable and

pessimistic, but its ending is surely a joyous sign of hope and optimism
for better times ahead: ‘there trembled through / His happy good-night
air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.’

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 PURPOSEFUL BIRDWATCHING

to begin with, at a simple level (the kind I have managed myself without going
very much further, most of the time). One easy thing to do when you see birds,
especially at a place you visit regularly, is just to count them. Numbers add interest
to any list, give you a better idea of what you saw when looking back, allow you
to send in your records to a local bird club or online records system, and help to
reveal what is going on from day to day, season to season and year to year. Not
just increases and declines, but seasonal movements become obvious.

Counting is the simplest, most basic element of survey work. Bird surveys can
get far more complex. Counts are invaluable, but you need to add an element of
discipline. It is of little use recording, say, a single high count of meadow pipits,
without some context at least, such as a regular series of figures or at least an
informed summary of variations, so that the one high figure takes on some signifi-
cance. Counts need to be frequent and will require some sort of basic analysis to
be of much use, but that is all you need, to begin with. Add that bit of purpose,
that desire to illuminate the changes, the movements that are always going on.

And do, please, submit your records: just look online for the local bird club or
bird recorder or your county ‘goingbirding’ website. Years ago, we used to go
through our notes each new year, to write out a summary of records to send in
to the county bird recorder. These would be on little record slips supplied by the
bird club. Later, when I was one of the co-editors of the bird report for a short
while (for the admirable West Midland Bird Club), we used to divi up record slips
according to species or area and have shoeboxes full of them, all arranged in
species/date order. From these we would try to produce a useful and meaningful
summary. These old published reports still have interest and value. I always
thought the vast amount of material contained in county bird reports was grossly
underused. A different function, now, is to bring back memories of those days
and the places and people involved: mostly known by recognisable sets of initials
of the observers, put in brackets after any significant record.

There are also nationwide surveys organised by ornithological and conservation

bodies that you can become involved with, given sufficient experience. These
monitor common birds in town and country, and along waterways; numbers of
nesting pairs in the UK’s heronries; the numbers and distribution of wintering
waders and wildfowl; there are also periodic counts of wintering gulls. There is
plenty to join in with and plenty more that you can start up for yourself. You do
not, of course, have to become a dedicated survey worker; you very likely won’t
have the time. But it is a possibility, should you wish to consider it.

There are, of course, volunteering opportunities, and some professional possi-

bilities with organisations such as the RSPB, BTO, Wildlife Trusts and others.

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 WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR INTEREST IN BIRDS

These will be limited and relatively infrequent – but why not make yourself
known, if you are keen? Volunteering might be a way to start on the precarious
career ladder. Somehow, I bumbled my way into a career because other people
noticed me. I should have been more active in trying to get myself known, but
I did once speak to Trevor Gunton at an RSPB event long before I got to know
him, and once made a phone call to Roger Lovegrove in the RSPB Wales Office,
asking if there was any chance of a job. A few years later, he phoned me. Still
fancy working for us? Yes please!

Joining the RSPB is a good way to help birds; joining the BTO (British Trust
for Ornithology) is a good way to learn more about them and to find practical
and useful ways of getting involved. Look at their websites. For an international
perspective, look at BirdLife International, and All About Birds, the wonderful
website that links the recent Handbook of the Birds of the World with the Cornell
Lab of Ornithology. It is through the BTO, too, that you can be trained as a
bird ringer. This is a specialist pursuit, involving catching a bird (or handling
a nestling) and putting an individually numbered ring on the leg. If it is later
caught by another ringer or found dead, the details will give an exact record
of two points in its life history when it was at a precise location at a particular
date. It might be just down the road next day, or in a remote foreign country
years later. Ringing (and the subsequent development of satellite tracking, even
for small birds) has revealed an immense amount of information that could
never have been accumulated in any other way, regarding longevity, population
dynamics and migration.

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 BUY A GOOD BOOK

Okay, I know you can download the app… But books have a place. Many of us
older birdwatchers have an attachment to our early books, too. There may be
rows of them on the shelf, even if they are never used. Mine are battered and
bruised, some covered in brown paper, bindings falling apart. I’m not going to
give detailed advice to help you buy a good book now, although there are so many
excellent ones around, but the history of bird guides is an interesting subject in
itself and, one way or another, I have somehow crossed paths with a few of the
field-guide writers in a very small way.

There were early guides to seabirds, and books such as W. H. Hudson’s British
Birds, a bit of a cheek from a man recently arrived from the Argentine pampas.
If you look it up you will find several different dates cited, but 1895 was the first
edition, with a number of improved and expanded versions published into the
1920s, which were more useful guides and especially good at evoking bird songs.
The first comprehensive bird ‘field guide’ dealing with identification and nothing
much else, though, was developed in America by Roger Tory Peterson. He then
produced a European guide using a similar style and approach, together with
Guy Mountfort and P. A. D. Hollom: the 1954 Collins ‘Peterson, Mountfort and
Hollom’ guide, which quickly became a best-selling classic. Following these came
guides by Richard Fitter and Richard Richardson, and then Heinzel, Fitter and
Parslow, before a multiplicity of titles, good, bad and indifferent.

Around 100 years ago there were good, serious bird books, but nothing you
might call a field guide, or pocket guide, and certainly nothing cheap and easy
to get. Horace Alexander, a great British birdwatcher, watching birds from the
very end of the 19th century, said that as a child he was given the seven volumes
of Dresser’s Birds of Europe – but a grown-up had to make sure his hands were
clean before he was allowed to use them. His brother had Howard Saunders’s
Manual of British Birds, another multi-volume set, the standard until the 1930s,
before getting W. H. Hudson’s single-volume British Birds.

T. A. Coward was a pioneer who produced excellent essays, with just adequate
identification material, in Birds of the British Isles and their Eggs, in 1920. It was

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 BUY A GOOD BOOK

rejigged in the Wayside and Woodland series (published by Frederick Warne)

that I would much later borrow from the library.

A huge step came with the great Witherby Handbook of British Birds of the late
1930s, a wonderful set of five substantial books – these had breakthrough texts
on identification and behaviour by B. W. Tucker. He sent the draft texts, written
out by hand, to that same Horace Alexander for his comments. In a very tiny
tenuous link, just to allow a bit of name-dropping, although of course I could
never have known anyone involved in these books so long ago, I did once get a
letter out of the blue from Horace Alexander himself, about inland migration
of kittiwakes – a letter to me, from someone who helped write the Witherby
Handbook!

Strangely enough, in 1936, before the Handbook, Witherby had published a

different guide, written by someone who I didn’t really know but did at least
meet, through work, Max Nicholson. Max, a particularly deep thinker in conser-
vation, was ahead of the game in so many ways. He lived in Cheyne Walk in
Chelsea, where the footballers and rock stars live. He wrote the text for Songs

My old books still stand, battered and well-thumbed, on my shelves, alongside

newer volumes. Some still mean more to me than any of the current guides,
even though they may be far less useful. Now and then I pick one up just
to remember those early days, working things out as I went along.

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 PURPOSEFUL BIRDWATCHING

of Wild Birds, a set of 78 rpm records recorded by the amazing Ludwig Koch,
with illustrations – the first multimedia guide. Koch was German, Jewish, but
by a stroke of good fortune escaped to England and became famous for his
remarkable wildlife recordings.

But the Witherby Handbook of 1938 was a set of five books: you couldn’t take
them out with you. You had to write notes and make sketches while you watched
the bird and come back home to compare them with the book, or rely on your
memory. This was the way that birdwatching books recommended anyway, for a
very long time – but you could easily miss the very thing you needed to take note
of. And in that case you just had to go back and hope the bird was still where you
left it the day before.

The first bird books that told me how to tell one bird from another would have been
my brother’s Ladybird books of British birds – not the later ones by John Leigh
Pemberton, but the originals from 1953 and 1955, written by Brian Vesey Fitzgerald
with paintings by Allen Seaby, with a third one illustrated by Roland Green in 1956.
It’s remarkable how books, just like music, stay with you from such an early age.
I remember pictures of bullfinches and yellowhammers from these Ladybirds,
and these two are still among my all-time favourite birds, and with two of the best
names. Roland Green also wrote and illustrated Wingtips (one of our school library
books), a guide to birds in flight, in 1947, and he had much earlier illustrated simple
bird books by Enid Blyton in the 1920s, as well as the much more substantial
British Bird Book by W. P. Pycraft and Theodore Wood in 1921. Who knew that Enid
Blyton of children’s story fame was a pioneer of the bird-book genre too?

A book I learned a great deal from in the 1970s had the relevant bits of the
Witherby Handbook distilled by P. A. D. Hollom into the Popular Handbook of
British Birds. My well-used revised fourth edition of 1968 had line drawings
by Donald Watson, Richard Richardson, Ian Wallace and Peter Hayman, all
great in their own ways, all of whom I met or, in Peter’s case, knew quite well.
Watson produced scraper-boards of great richness and intensity, Hayman more
measured and angular drawings, while Wallace managed to get a multiplicity
of lines and scribbles to form a smooth, uniform surface; Richardson just did a
minimum of lines and got the thing to perfection! He is impossible to imitate.

Incidentally, the word ‘handbook’ became synonymous with multi-volume sets

with masses of information, not small books to be held in one hand – or put in
the pocket. Identification books became ‘field guides’: the name itself probably
put a lot of people off, thinking ‘that’s not for me’. Over the years I’ve been
involved in tracker guides, glovebox guides, field guides, pocket guides, easy
guides – all kinds of things.

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 BUY A GOOD BOOK

What can be better than a splendid bullfinch? What better name than
redwing? These things appealed to me when I was 11, and still do. I used
to share an office with Carl Nicholson, who said I drew birds standing in
grass because I couldn’t do their feet. This is for you, Carl.

When I was small I used to go on the bus to Lichfield with my Mum, and there
was a nice little bookshop where I could see, smell and feel real books, and I
would trot across to look at a shelf full of little white ones with coloured bands
and numbers on their spines. They covered anything from astronomy and
weather to music and cacti, from ships to freshwater fishes and mammals – and
of course birds and birds’ eggs. The Observer’s books!

The Observer’s Book of Birds used the same pictures as Coward – great paintings,
but not always of a field-guide sort of style and showing just one or two plumages.
But it was certainly a book for the pocket – the Observer’s Book may sometimes
have been in mine, though I suspect it was usually left at home. But I was using
a helpful book at a young age. And I was making notes – the early ones have
gone, but my first surviving bird record is of a jay in Sutton Park, when I was 11.
It was probably the Observer’s Book that helped me tell what it was – I can still
see it now, flying across a lake, while Dad rowed us across in a boat. Funny that
the first bird book I ever wrote was a complete rewrite of this one.

But I needed something better and more comprehensive to get beyond basic
beginner stage. I was able to twist what I saw into what I wanted to see with the

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Observer’s Book – I remember some bright finches on a hedge, tawny coloured with
big beaks and white wing patches – I wanted them to be hawfinches and wrote
them down as such, but really I think I knew they were chaffinches in the winter
sunshine. I needed to be a bit more disciplined in the way I looked at things.
And I needed something that would open my eyes to other birds I knew nothing
about, to make me aware of the possibilities – so I could do some homework.

I chose the Collins Pocket Guide written by Richard Fitter and illustrated by
Richard Richardson, originally published in 1952. I could have got the Peterson
Field Guide of 1954 (with many subsequent impressions), but I think I chose the
other one because I thought the illustrations were more realistic – more natural,
I suppose. Richard Richardson was a fine artist, unmatched in his line drawings,
and the pictures in the book were not all in the rigid, slightly flat style we tend
to associate with guides. They looked more natural, nicely composed, nicely
compared but not rigidly sticking to the same repeated pose. The text was good
but oddly structured, using habitat as the main division – land, waterside and
water, which never really works – then size, large, medium or small. But it was
a good book and got me through several years.

I thought the Peterson illustrations in the other guide were a bit flat, unreal, even
a tiny bit cartoon-like – I remember the strange forward-leaning moorhen and
coot. But, looking back, I see how real they are – people talk of Peterson’s pictures

My first surviving bird record is of a jay flying across the lake in Sutton Park.

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 BUY A GOOD BOOK

as patternistic, and his early ones may have been, but the European guide is a
fabulous piece of work. Many of the plates are just beautifully done.

Roger Tory Peterson created his first guide to the birds of the eastern USA in
1934, then a guide to western birds, before taking on Europe after the Second
World War. He was credited with ‘inventing’ the modern field guide, but
apparently Edward Wilson had been working on something before he fatally went
to the South Pole with Captain Scott. This work was expanded and completed
by W. B. Alexander, who produced a real guide to the birds of the ocean in 1928.
I bought a copy of the 1963 edition in 1975, because I thought I should have it,
but I never used it, and it was not a very helpful guide by modern standards –
though still a massive breakthrough at the time, when there was really nothing
else. And of course, W. B. was the older brother of H. G. (Horace), the very one
who wrote me that letter!

My boss at the RSPB, Trevor Gunton, with my wife Marcella, used to devise
and run all kinds of RSPB events. With the help of Crispin Fisher at Collins
publishers, Trevor found out that the third edition of the Peterson Field Guide
was being reprinted in 1979 and invited Roger Tory Peterson, together with Guy
Mountfort and Phil Hollom, to celebrate it at the RSPB Members’ Weekend –
there would be a signing session and Roger would give a talk. Crispin’s father, by
the way, was James Fisher, who not only wrote books with Roger Tory Peterson,
but also produced a set of small identification guides for British birds, Bird
Recognition, illustrated with black-and-white drawings.

Anyway, I knew nothing of these plans until Trevor, out of the blue, told me that
he’d got Peterson to do a short lecture tour, and I was to drive him and his wife
Ginny around the country, deliver him to the hotels, and introduce him at his
lectures. It was, of course, an enormous privilege. Roger’s talk included the story
of the first field guide – which gave rise to the whole series of Peterson guides
to practically everything. His illustrations showed birds side by side in similar
postures; emphasised the pattern – flight patterns, for example, were in black and
white – and picked out the important marks with neat little pointers, a unique
feature at the time that came to be rather grandly known as ‘the Peterson system’.
The text had important features highlighted in italics, which we all copy now.
The same style was used in the European guide, first published in 1954, and the
original text was thoroughly updated by Ian Wallace and James Ferguson-Lees
for the enlarged edition of 1966. Revisions of Peterson, Mountfort and Hollom
brought it up to date and it became indispensable for many years.

It was not, to be honest, a big deal, but the illustrations were scattered through
the book, neither next to the relevant texts nor bunched together. It took only a

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few seconds to find what you wanted, but still, you had to flick through the pages
to match picture and text, and other people saw a way to challenge the Peterson
guides and put the text opposite the illustration for every bird. In America the
Golden Guide by Chandler S. Robbins put text and pictures opposite each other
on a spread. Richard Fitter saw it, and knew something similar would go down
well in England.

When I was editing Birds magazine I could for a while, up to a point, decide
what went in, as you might expect an editor to do, without too much worry about
RSPB brand or image or mission statement or whatever. I had an ambition for
years to talk to Richard Fitter about the development of the identification guide
in Britain, in parallel with the Peterson guides in the USA – Richard was really as
much a pioneer here as Roger was over there. So I thought I would just ring him
up and see what he thought. He was delighted. When I went over to his house
one day in 2005, not so long before he died as it turned out, he said his carer
wasn’t there at the moment but if I’d just sit down, he’d make a cup of coffee and
tell me all about it… which he did.

He had piles of Birding World, Birdwatch, Bird Watching and British Birds
magazines on his desk, bound sets of The Ibis and Bird Study and various
botanical journals, a neat shelf with a complete set of Ordnance Survey maps, all
the books you could think of, letters and papers scattered around his typewriter,
and he was busy revising one of his wild-flower books and starting on another
– he was 92!

He told me about his years of work with the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society
and his politicking on behalf of wildlife conservation – and began to arrange
a day out for us to go and look at some orchids. My esteem for this man went
sky high.

He had met Richard Richardson when he was a young boy – now, as I have
since realised from my own experience, this is a good example of field-guide
text pitfalls – when who was a young boy? Richard. They are both Richards.
When Richard Richardson was a young boy. Ah, right. Richard (Fitter) used to
call Richard (Richardson) Dick to avoid any mix-up. Later he (Richard) asked
him (Dick) to illustrate his bird guide, and then a guide to birds’ nests. And
Richard Fitter produced Collins field guides to wild flowers, as well. But on a
visit to America in the 1960s he saw the Golden Guide and said to Collins, if we
don’t do something like this quickly, someone else will – and so came the next
Collins guide, The Birds of Britain and Europe of 1972, soon universally known
as ‘Heinzel, Fitter and Parslow’.

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