BEHIND THE BINOCULARS &
BEHIND MORE BINOCULARS
Interviews with acclaimed birdwatchers
Mark Avery and Keith Betton
Pelagic Publishing
2017 / 2018
252 /212 pages
Paperback, £9.99 / Hardback £16.99
ISBN: 978-1-78427-145-9 / 978-1-78427-109-1
Review by Barry Larking
Last century a reliable source told me that the then birding ‘Kite Committee’ was so secret that none but its invited members knew who else was on it. You could do things such as that in those days. The time before the internet and social media must seem like the Stone Age to today’s 30 somethings. Ornithology, not then to be confused with bird watching, was a pursuit controlled by a select few. Around that same time I heard about clandestine bird committees 30 plus years ago, I had access to a library of rare-ish old books on ornithology and noted how many were written by people, nearly all men (excepting Baxter and Rintoul), who had, though precise details were sketchy, ‘private means’ with which to support their interest. Today’s bird watching scene is wonderfully different, as these two volumes illustrate.
When scientific ornithology in the UK was in its infancy, leisure time was restricted for most. Amateur birdwatchers used the Mk One eyeball and knew little beyond their own patch; travel was for conscripts and the wealthy. Bird guides were expensive and optics as field glasses were a big financial investment and by today’s standards a threat to one’s eyesight. Full-time bird watchers were toffs, to put it bluntly. Guy Mountfort’s Portrait of a Wilderness (1968) about his expedition (!) to the Coto Doñana is an exemplary instance of how it was even when British society was clearly changing faster than it had for a century or more. Mountford’s ‘party’ went complete with diplomatic assistance from HM Government and looked after by servants. Reading his account after I had been to the same place in a Land Rover and not much else was, to say the least, to learn how the other half did these things once.
Reading was the only way to learn the ‘names’ of the famous bird men, almost all dead and gone but somehow still in charge. A few poor black and white photographic portraits (rarer than an American vagrant) to go by and occasionally someone dressed in woolens and tweeds on the telly when everyone else now was wearing flares. Then something happened: Bill Oddie.
In these two volumes, Mark Avery and Keith Betton have compiled a series of interviews with numerous contemporary ornithologists and amateur birdwatchers, including the said Mr. Oddie. The format is like a Q & A interview in a Sunday supplement – no harm in that – and includes a file of good photographs of the selected names, cataloging in a few instances the progress of time from bright spark to grizzled veteran. I should know.
Are these just gossipy books about celebrity birdwatchers?
It is claimed by people who only know what happened in the last 10 years that we are a celebrity obsessed culture. Pardon? Napoleon, Beethoven, Liszt, von Humbolt et al. My grandmother shook hands with Buffalo Bill when he came to Earl’s Court! Celebrity is nothing new. It simply reaches out further in our electronic age. Details of most people one learns of are a few keystrokes away. Get over it.
Avery and Betton try to craft a more rounded portrait to the routine names that crop up in bird magazines, web articles, books, and journals: “ … how they got interested and what they think of birds … and other birding people seemed quite a fun thing to do”.
I can’t think anyone would have asked the Rev Jourdain ‘what is your favourite wireless programme?’ but now it seems ‘normal’ and yes, people do wish to talk about themselves. These are men (and very few women) who, as it turns out, are like ourselves. People we might pass in the street or shuffle alongside through airports.
Avery and Betton split the task between them and managed to get interviews with 35, plus each other, quite well-known people who have in one way or another had an attraction to bird’s that impacted significantly on their lives – perhaps even psyche. (I imagine this interviewing was something of a demanding field work problem in itself; they don’t say so, but I wonder how many and who refused their invitation?)
The result is an imaginatively varied group, not all professional ecologists either; Journalists, an entertainer, an artist, presenters, twitchers and a few administrators, but not so many of the latter to make it an incestuous back slapping exercise: “For all, birding has been the most important and engrossing pastime and for some it has also been central to the way they have earned a living”.
The questions to each interviewee follow a loose formula with some genuine interplay between the questions and answers, so that issues, disappointments, comedy or moments of epiphany, get a chance to shine. Despite a tendency towards ‘right person in the right place’ pure good fortune explanations for having had a career in this tiny world, a few times one gets a sense of struggle and of personal cost also. No bitter controversy makes it to the page however, perhaps understandably. There is little point scoring either, that I could judge.
The finishing touch in all but a handful of interviews, is a Desert Island Discs castaway style list of a favourite book, music, film and television programme, placed I presume to show a human side we all can share. Not everyone though has a favourite film or music and book choices are frequently just more bird guides; David Attenborough turns up a few times on the telly question as one might expect. But which well-known birdwatcher springs to mind as having Tender is the Night as favourite book?
Sceptical at first with the concept of these books, I was won over after reading the first few interviews. There is an essential honesty at work here – one that binds together these different generations of people. Overall we get a gentle insight into some of the birding characters we may have occasionally met or heard in the media or in person, across this small world of devotees. These two volumes are a bit of a field guide themselves.