A bad birdwatcher's companion

I listened to this very delightful audiobook recently after I saw Aimée Anders talking about it on her lovely book tube channel. Aimée is Dutch, and we often have quite similar interests including bird books. I was soon seeking this book out on Audible. I'm so glad I did. 

Simon Barnes is nothing like a bad birdwatcher to my mind, despite his best efforts to deny it. 

A bad birdwatcher is me, a bad birdwatcher is you. A bad birdwatcher is anyone who looks at birds and feels a lift of the heart - but doesn't have to do anything about it. If you don't take accurate field notes; if you don't keep a bird diary; if you are a mite hazy on the differences between a first winter lesser black-backed gull and a second winter herring gull; if you don't know what a rachis is, still less a supercilium; if you don't own a telescope and above all if you don't keep lists then you are a bad birdwatcher. 

I certainly feel that lift of the heart, and I certainly am a bad birdwatcher- by anyone's definition, not just Simon Barnes'. My name is Louise and I am a bad birdwatcher. I didn't know what a rachis was, or even how to spell it- I had to go to Amazon and Look Inside a text copy of this book to work out how I might even try to spell it. I did know that supercilia had something to do with eye brows. 

We are drawn to birds because above all else they can fly. 

The subheading .... or a personal introduction to Britain's 50 most obvious birds, gives a more obvious clue to the actual content of the book beyond the foreword. Simon Barnes gives us a bird a chapter for 50 chapters, helpfully divided in to section as to where you might find them - Garden, City, Sky, Seaside etc. The final section is Pilgrimage Birds, those birds that are worth travelling to the "cathedrals of wild Britain" to see - avocets, Bewick's swan and bittern amongst them. Each chapter begins with a little handy guide to help bad birdwatchers see each bird. 

Robin
Where to look: gardens, spade handles, Christmas cards
When to look: all year
What to look for: red breast
What to listen for: thin, pretty song

Then because of the magic of audio were are treated to a snippet of their bird song. This quite often alarmed my dog if I was listening to it at home. I was most excited to hear the whoom, whoom of the booming bittern. I so need to hear that for myself. Australasian bitterns boom too, but it's a bit different.

Even though this an English book about English birds, I was actually familiar with a goodly number of them at the start. Many of these very common English birds - blackbirds, sparrows, pigeons and starlings etc - were introduced into Australia, brought by English settlers in the nineteenth century to bring a piece of home with them. That goldfinches were popular cage birds in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is most certainly why I have been able to watch them out of my kitchen window in Australia. 

Simon Barnes is a skilled journalist and author and a wonderful English sense of humour flows through the whole book. 

Mallard
Where to look: any bit of water, once seen in trios over mantlepieces, now almost extinct in this environment
When to look: all year
What to look for: green head, orange feet
What to listen for: quack, quack

That's not to say that there are not some serious discussions, on the distressing nature of nature, and human activities. I realised a number of years ago that pretty much every living creature gets eaten by some other living creature. It can be rather visible with birds. 

I have received many a heartrending letter from nice people who put out food for the birds and then feel guilty when a sparrow hawk bursts in and takes a blue tit just as he's tucking in to the peanuts. I sympathise with the distress, but blue tits eat caterpillars which is not all that pleasant for the caterpillars. It's not nice, no, but then as I've said before the fact is that nature is not nice. Beautiful, thrilling, challenging, enthralling and altogether wonderful yes, but nice no. 

Sparrow hawks eat nice birds just as lions eat nice antelopes. Both sights can be distressing I know, I've seen both in extraordinary detail. It is all the sadder when the sparrow hawk fails to kill the bird with his first attack, as is quite often the case. His victim must then die a piteous and protracted death during the plucking and the eating. Still, that is the way that life works and anyway the blue tit whatever else you can say has certainly lead a better life than a battery chicken. Humans are much crueler than sparrow hawks. 

The chapter on pheasants is particularly fascinating in this regard.  

Pheasants are ground birds by inclination, they run well and forage on the grounds for seeds and insects, they're not fussy feeders and they'll take a wide range of food. That makes them relatively easy to keep and means that the wild and semi-wild birds don't find it hard to survive.... They might have evolved to please a man with a shot gun. They get up to fly with great reluctance and when they do they keep low because they have heavy bodies and do not have huge stamina. Thus a flushed pheasant becomes an instant target for what some people refer to as sport. Personally, I can't see the pleasure in blasting fat, half-tame birds to bits, especially when they're incompetent flyers.

Pheasants are of course an introduced species in the UK, introduced before the Normans, and the preference of pheasants for sheltering in copses and small woods has meant that these areas have been left to break up the farmland of rural England, helping preserve biodiversity. 

.... without the blood lust for the lovely ungainly pheasant we would have a greatly impoverished countryside. 

I had no idea that pheasants were reared artificially and released to the wild for this sport. "Pheasants are perpetually doomed birds, and they have given the countryside life."
I also had no idea that there are (incorrect) theories that magpies are responsible for the decline of song bird populations in the UK. Hint- "it's mostly to do with changes in farming practice".

Nature does not exist in order to seek the moral approval of humankind. It is about surviving, breeding, and the ultimate goal of becoming an ancestor. 

Or that the Great Crested Grebe was known as Arsefoot in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because of the relative placement of their feet to their um, arse. 

Picture source

Simon Barnes is endlessly encouraging for us bad birdwatchers to get out there and look at birds, and I greatly enjoyed his enthusiastic narration.

A growing interest in birds is rather like looking for stars at dusk on a frosty night. The more you look, the more you see.... The birds were always there, but when you become a bad birdwatcher the world is made new again.

Learn to listen and there will be so many more birds in your life. 

Peregrines are perhaps the ultimate pilgrimage bird, and they are an inspiration. An inspiration to carry on, to see more birds, to enjoy birds more, to enjoy life more.

To write this post I got what I thought was the physical book of this audiobook from my library, but it turns out it was an earlier, related Simon Barnes book - How to be a bad birdwatcher. I will of course need to read that now too. I am becoming more and more convinced that actually finishing a book does nothing whatsoever as to actually decreasing the reading you have ahead of you, instead it actually increases the number of books you want to read. 

I expect that I'll listen to A bad birdwatcher's companion again, hopefully before a trip to the UK sometime soon. 

The Art of Taxidermy

I do love a verse novel, so I was very excited when I spied The Art of Taxidermy in the Text Catalogue earlier in the year. I eagerly awaited the publication date, and then ordered it from my local bookshop. I picked it up this week. I've really been in a bit of a reading slump for the past few months (and a blogging slump too), and I thought a verse novel would be good for what ails me. It was. 

The Art of Taxidermy tells the story of Charlotte, Lottie, living in South Australia with her father. Her mother has died and her Aunt Hilda hovers closely, helping look after both Charlotte and her father. Lottie is 11. She is a rather sad and lonely child. Alone at school. 

Back there with the kids

who didn't talk to me

was like being at a funeral

every day. 

Lottie becomes obsessed with death.

At the age of eleven

I fell in love

with death

She starts collecting dead things - frogs, skinks, lots of birds, even a red-bellied black snake. But of course all this creates a "fusty fug" in her bedroom and attracts the attention of Aunt Hilda, who is far from enthusiastic about Charlotte's new hobby. 

On a visit to the museum with her scientist father Charlotte sees taxidermied specimens for the first time.

They are perfect-

perfectly dead. 

Not shrinking?

Not disintegrating?

Lottie becomes even more interested in the dead, subsuming her grief for her mother. 

I pulled on layer after layer of her:underwear, stockings,shirts and skirts,coat and shoes.I wrapped myself in herfolded myself upuntil it feltlike a warm hug.

Besides the more obvious themes of grief and death, there are themes of friendship, loneliness, glimpses of Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal relations with white Australia, and the history of German immigrants to South Australia. The book is also full of appreciation for our Australian wildlife and in particular our wonderful birds. 

The Art of Taxidermy was shortlisted for the 2017 Text Prize. The gorgeous cover and illustrations are by Edith Rewa. 

Sharon Kernot is a South Australian author and poet. The Art of Taxidermy is her second novel. 

Teaching Notes

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Cockatoo

I am SO terrible at TBRs - no sooner had I completed by Nonficition November 2017 TBR than I was in my local bookshop in a bit of a buying frenzy. I plucked this book off the shelves because it was so, so pretty, and very soon had it read. 

It's an unusual little book. A small palm sized book, priced for the impulse buy ($19.99, yes that is cheap in Australia). There is no author credited, just "with Bird Life Australia". It's an art book. It's a lesson about cockatoos.

There's lots of cool cockatoo facts. 

Most cockatoos are left footed.

I'm so going to have to watch out for that. 

Only female Black Cockatoos incubate eggs. The smaller cockies and corellas tend to share egg-sitting duties.

And some sad ones. 

Five of Australia's 14 cockatoo species have populations that are on the national threatened species list. 

I must say that I find this description from the Hardie Grant Gift website rather odious and unappealing. I do realise that it's a description for booksellers, but it makes it sound awful.

A contemporary design-conscious souvenir for international and local tourists. Featuring international and local illustrators. 

Cockatoo is a companion book to Koala (published last year) a book that I completely missed, but now of course would like to read. I am now firmly convinced that every book I read only serves to make my TBR grow ever bigger. 

The Birds of the South Coast

It almost seems a life time ago, but last September/October Master Wicker and I had a short holiday on the beautiful South Coast of NSW.

It's a lovely area, one where I hadn't spent much time. See my South Coast Panoramas.

Naturally, I was keen to check out some birds while we were there. We did see some, but sadly I don't think any of them were new for me. I did get some good photos though.

Lewin's Honeyeater (Meliphaga lewinii)

It's almost impossible to get good photos of lyrebirds though. They are always in dimly lit areas, and are constantly in motion, continually pawing (can birds paw?) through the undergrowth looking for dinner. 

Superb Lyrebird (Meura novaehollandiae)

You'd think this bird would be easy to identify, but I had a hard time. It should be a Spotted Turtle Dove I guess, but there aren't any obvious spots. 

New Holland Honeyeater (Phyildonyrus novaehollandiae)

This Grey Butcherbird was an exciting sighting for me, I've had glimpses of them before. This fellow flew off as soon as I got this photo. 

Grey Butcherbird (Practices torquatus)

We stopped at many beaches, one of them had a distinctive rooster noise as we got out of the car. And sure enough there he was!

It's always a joy to see some Rainbow Lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus), they're so pretty. 

An Australasian Gannet (Morus serrator) on the wing.

Pied Oystercatcher (Haemtopus longirostrus)

Australian Pelican (Pelecanus conspicillatus)

Long-billed Corella (Cacatua tenuirostrus)

Happily, I see Crimson Rosellas most days near home. I've even been bitten by one as I released it from bird netting in the back yard. They hurt. 

Male Crimson Rosella (Platycercus elegans)

The birds at Pebbly Beach are very used to people. The beach is also famous for the resident kangaroos hanging out on the sand. 

Rainbow Lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus)

Male King Parrot (Alisterus scapulars)

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Circle and Flying for Your Life

Jeannie Baker is a big name in Australian picture books. She has made such a wonderful body of work over the years. The illustrations in her books are all photos of the amazing, intricate collages she makes, and her books often deal with environmental themes or urbanisation. I've read most, but not all of her books, and seen a previous exhibition of her artwork. 

I'd somehow never heard of Jeannie Baker's new book Circle until I walked into my favourite bookshop and snatched it off the shelf recently. I read it standing there, then I bought it. I was rather excited. You see it's about migratory birds, and bar tailed godwits in particular. I stalked godwits in New Zealand a few years ago and am thrilled to see their extraordinary lives highlighted in this book.

Circle tells the story of the godwits migration, leaving Australia for the Arctic, and later returning. Their departure is witnessed by a young boy, a rather enthusiastic birder, in a wheelchair who longs to fly like the birds.

As with any Jeannie Baker book there are a fabulous set of collages, 23 here. Jeannie Baker began making collages at art school, initially collecting textures, but becoming more representational as an illustrator. Children love pouring over illustrations with lots of detail and Jeannie Baker provides so much of it- there's always a new detail awaiting discovery.

My favourite Circle collage, a glorious double page
Picture Source

She has taken some artistic licence as the godwits appear to be in their breeding plumage all the way along their journey (sorry for the nerdy very amateur birder comment), the red providing a better contrast and more colour to the images.

I was a bit confused by the final image for a while. Why are people shown taking their dogs and horses where they are clearly prohibited?

And what is the boy doing with that dog? It helps to realise that it is not his dog that is chasing the birds into flight. The boy casts down his crutches and binoculars and is trying to stop the dog from charging at the birds. In one of the videos linked below Jeannie explains that she was using the boy to show that we can all individually make a difference in our local area. 

There is an Author's Note at the end giving more information about godwit migration, and a Godwit Migration Map.

There is an exhibition of Jeannie Baker's marvellous collages for Circle travelling Australia at the moment, and will be for the next two years. I can't wait to see it somewhere. The exhibition is then proposed to follow the path of the godwits internationally and be shown in Alaska, South Korea and China.

You can hear Jeannie Baker talk about Circle here. And an interesting SMH profile of the artist here.

Coincidentally I recently listened to an amazing 4 part radio documentary Flying for Your Life, an ABC and BBC coproduction. It complements Circle beautifully. If you can access these extraordinary episodes I'd highly recommend it. I learnt so much from each episode. Episode 1 is in Australia and explains our main threats to shore bird populations here - development, environmental degradation and dogs. It also describes how a migration actually starts.

Episodes 2 and 3 deal with the Yellow Sea, the most important staging and feeding areas for their migration north. The Yellow Sea is shallow and provides 20% of the world's fishery products. Sadly two thirds of the intertidal habitat of the Yellow Seas has been "reclaimed", i.e. destroyed in the past 50 years. It is funny to hear North Korea described as the "biggest organic farm in the world" and portrayed as possibly the saving grace for migratory birds. It had never occurred to me that people could eat shore birds before.

Episode 4 tells of the behaviours of the birds in their Northern summer breeding grounds in Alaska and Russia. Here global warming is the biggest threat to the birds, they are starting to hatch at times to miss out on the peak feeding times and are becoming smaller birds with smaller beaks. The birds completely change their foods for the southern and northern hemispheres, and change their body composition to prepare for their flights. The birds appear to monitor air pressure to time the start of their migration, and can fly at up to 80 km/hour! Bar-tailed godwits fly nonstop, up to 1500 km per day to travel the 11-12,000 km from Alaska to Australia and New Zealand in 8 or 9 days.

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Oddball

I hadn't heard a lot about Oddball before we went to see it the other day. But I knew it was about a cute dog and some even cuter fairy penguins. I knew that it was based on a true story. And what a wonderful story it is.

Oddball tells the slightly modified story of how an unconventional free-range chicken farmer saved a penguin colony from foxes. The fairy penguin colony on Middle Island at Warrnambool in Victoria had been depleted nearly to extinction by foxes who had learned to cross to the island- either by walking over at low tide or even swimming over. Baiting wasn't working, neither was trying to shoot the foxes.

Swampy Marsh used Maremmas on his chicken farm to protect his flock from foxes, so when he heard about the plight of the penguins he knew that his protective dogs could work wonders, and thankfully they did.

Of course there are other plot lines in the movie, some of which work better than others, but I'm really glad I went to see it. Shane Jacobson known to many from his sterling work in Kenny is endearing as Swampy. It took me a while to recognise Frank Woodley (yes I was just talking about him the other day as an author) as the dog catcher- he does sport one of the most unflattering hair cuts ever known. Naturally the dogs and the penguins steal the show. Warrnambool comes off fairly well too, with lots of atmospheric coastal shots, and I'm sure the movie will do great things for tourism there. Thankfully lots of Australians are heading out to see Oddball this school holidays.

Yes the movie is a little bit hokey. And it's a bit predictable. But it's sweet, and uplifting, and it's important. There aren't all that many good news stories on the conservation front. Polar bears are starving. The last male Northern White Rhino will die in the next few years. Tasmanian Devils are under threat from the devastating Devil Facial Tumour Disease.

But with this great program, just by putting a few dogs on an island to guard the penguins, that penguin population is making an incredible recovery. Sensibly there is a pozible campaign to raise money to train the next generation of Maremma dogs to stand watch over the penguins of Middle Island. Perhaps this is exactly what the Sydney penguin colony needs too?

Forgotten Songs

I've been keen to see the Forgotten Songs artwork for some time now. This week I had my chance, and I wasn't disappointed.

Forgotten Songs was initially a temporary laneway artwork program in Sydney in 2009-2010. Thankfully it wasn't lost to us and was recommissioned as part of an upgrade to Angel Place in 2012.

Forgotten Songs commemorates 50 bird species once heard in central Sydney before European settlement. These birds disappeared from the area as Sydney developed.

During the day the songs of these missing birds ring out above your head from their empty cages. 

I saw one of these beautiful birds just last weekend
(not in Sydney though)

As we went to a concert that night at City Recital Hall I got to go back in the evening. It was raining though so we didn't really hang around. At night the nocturnal bird calls are played. 

I'd long thought that Forgotten Songs reminded me of Dickens' Miss Flight in Bleak House. And what did I find in Dymocks that very same day? 

Art imitating life?
Life imitating art?

Actually it looks like Penguin have a lovely new set of Dickens hard back editions. I might really need these.

Forgotten Songs
Angel Place (just off George St, near Martin Place) 
Sydney

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Uhu

The cover of UHU is so familiar to me. UHU is a book from my childhood, indeed a book that had survived my childhood, and a book that still sat on a book shelf in my house. I hadn't given it a lot of thought in decades. I knew it was there, that was comfort enough. Then I came across this list of 25 Classic Australian Kids Books recently. And there was UHU. I just knew that I had to read UHU again.

There were surprises right from the outset. The dedication from my cousins for my birthday in 1971.  My name written in my childhood hand on the inside dustcover. And the story, long forgotten by me. Published in 1969, UHU was the CBCA Book of the Year in 1970. It's beautiful and moving. A memoir of an owl who had too short a life in 1960s England.

Annette Macarthur-Onslow was an Australian living in a rented cottage in Gloucestershire, England when she found a baby owl fallen from his pine tree nest one spring. "A defiant white ball of fluff with enormous blackcurrant eyes and a tiny beak clicking a warning". Annette and her partner weren't planning on caring for a baby owl, they try to give him away- without success, and so begin looking after this funny little ball of fluff in their home. From the foreward:

Uhu's story was brief but devastating. He came and went, between May and September, like a feather on a puff of wind... upsetting our whole existence, grubbying the furniture, rearranging the house and temporarily banishing the cat (unlike the characters in the song, our owl and pussycat did not agree).

The cat isn't happy at all.

When we brought his box into the warmth of the house, Minnie the cat, who had ruled the roost for seventeen years, took one look, made a wry face, and went on strike. 

UHU is an often funny account of little Uhu's exploits, habits and adventures. In 1969 Uhu became a picture book, a modern Uhu would be an internet sensation, a youtube star, as he interacts with glasses, windows, curtains and befriends a monkey.

But it is all tinged with sadness, as Uhu breaks his leg twice, and their hopes of rehabilitating Uhu to the wild are dashed. .

I love the gorgeous 60s vibe

There are musings on keeping wild animals as pets.

Occasionally a whisper from the wild reached Uhu like a note on a passing wind. He might be standing at a window watching sparrows, when suddenly he would go all hawk-like and eerie. The the moment was over and he was once more the woolly, twittering infant. 

Sadly UHU seems to be out of print. But you could seek it out at your library, or second hand book store. I'm very glad to reconnect with UHU after all this time.

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The Birds of Rottnest Island

A few weeks ago I showed you some photos of our all too brief visit to Rottnest Island in Western Australia. Another reason Rottnest was so special is that I saw many really cool birds, many new to me.

Australian Shelduck (Tadorna tadornoides)
The female has a white eye ring and is sitting here

They have such beautiful burnished colours

Darting in and about the rocks on the shore of the salt lakes was a
White-fronted chat (Epithanura albifrons)

Black-winged Stilt (Himantopus himantopus)

Juvenile black-winged stilts

This one was very far away, I believe it is a
Red-capped Plover (Charadrius ruficapillus)

The eagle eyes of Master Wicker spotted this amazing robin for me
Red-capped Robin (Petroica goodenovii)

But he couldn't see the Osprey nest!

Even with a sign….

An Osprey in action (Pandion cristatus)

Crested terns (Thalasseus bergii)

Some more familiar ducks
Grey teal (Anas gracilis)

And one of my favourite birds
Our Australian pelican (Pelecanus conspicillatus)

I bought a copy of the local bird guide so I can check
the ones that got away
and why I need to go back soon.

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