The Birds of Britain!

Our book today is the lovely 1947 volume The Birds of Britain, written by zoologist James Fisher as part of the wonderful “Britain in Pictures” series from Collins that was once so popular and that now stands in bad needs of a series-wide reprint. That day will never come, I suspect, but The Birds of Britain – all 50 elegant pages of it – can still be found in second-hand shops all over the UK (and even, as if you couldn’t guess, on the shelves of my beloved Brattle Bookshop here in Boston, “the next parish over”).

And it’s such a find! All the “Britain in Pictures” books are, from Sir Francis Meynell’s English Printed Books to Edith Sitwell’s English Women to Sean O’Faolain’s The Story of Ireland to Rose Macaulay’s Life Among the English, but there’s something fascinating about any book on British birds, because Great Britain is perhaps the only place on Earth where the bird-watching crowd is even more obsessive and deeply, deeply unhinged than in New York (New York magazine recently did a photo-spread on the Summer plumage on display in Central Park – it was pretty damn disturbing to see so many institutionalizable individuals out roaming around with binoculars). When The Birds of Britain identifies its author as “a young and distinguished zoologist,” what it really means is “he keeps multiple lists.”

The book is very generously illustrated with paintings and engravings by all the giants of bird-illustration, from Benjamin Fawcett to Joseph Wolf to Thomas Bewick, and the thing starts off very forthrightly in a short chapter called “A Bird’s Eye View of Britain” that indulges in the ur-British habit of preparatory throat-clearing:

Gilbert White, the curate of Selborne, introduced his Hampshire parish to posterity with a catalogue of its natural features. There is every reason why we should follow his example. Modern convention might have it that the main character should, as it were, amble casually in from the wings somewhere in Scene II. Britain cannot be so treated. We cannot delay the description of what is the subject and the scene, of this essay – the countries of England, Wales and Scotland, and their place as the home, and the support, of many different kinds of birds.

There follows short and spirited accounts of all the usual suspects from the British aviary world, all the harriers, owls, warblers, avocets, ruffs, spoonbills, cranes, godwits, bitterns, bearded tits, eiders, fulmars, wrens, hawks, martins, grouse, wagtails, grebes, crows, and mergansers – all given brief, punchy outlines of appearance, habits, range, behavior, and conservation, which was just becoming a preoccupation among nature-lovers who were realizing that the pre-war industrial boom might be endangering all the wildlife in the islands:

There is scarcely an acre in Britain where man has not altered the habitat, and with it the bird life. One complete bird community which we have so far not mentioned in detail, has been completely upset by man. This is the community of the marshes and fens … Conservation has rescued these in the nick of time; a few sanctuaries, snatched from the tentacles of utilitarian agriculture and saved from draining, now support them.

It’s a tribute to conservation – and to the severely mentally imbalanced obsessions of the aforementioned tribe of avid birders – that there’s still a great variety of these birds from half a century ago to be seen in a leisurely stroll through Britain’s various natural habitats. Notebook in hand, of course.