How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher - Simon Barnes
This book was quite a fun read, and unexpectedly uplifting and touching. Despite being a very popular pastime in the UK, birdwatching rather unfairly carries with it a slight whiff of anorak, partly because of the image of the avid ‘twitcher’, chasing rare birds all over the country just so that they can add that species to their list. That image is—-in itself—-unfair, because many twitchers also love watching common birds. Anyway, Simon Barnes’ argument is that you don’t really need to know much at all about birds to enjoy watching them, nor do you need expensive equipment, or to travel to exotic countries for it to enrich your life.
In many ways, he was preaching to the converted as far as I was concerned. Despite birds being part of my job, I’m pretty hopeless at identifying them, but I could watch any bird for ages. I’m the kind of person who walks into lamp posts because my attention is suddenly caught by a bird in a tree. In fact, this passage from the book sounded terribly familiar to me:
I might be in the middle of a conversation of amazing importance about the Direction of Our Marriage, but my eye will flick out of the window at a hint of movement, caught in the tail of my eye, and I will register: bloody hell, sparrowhawk. I might say it out loud too—-not necessarily a wise decision.
He has some lovely passages about the glory of birds, but the book is also a rather touching portrait of his relationship with his father, who originally inspired his interest in birdwatching. They have (or had) a slightly awkward relationship, it seems, but their shared love of birds gave them something in common, something to talk about.
Just this morning I was standing at the bus stop in the gloomy pre-dawn light, and marvelling at the contributors to the dawn chorus gamely trying to make themselves heard over the roar of the traffic. At this time of year, they’re particularly welcome as heralds of the coming Spring. Now, I know that what they’re really doing is yelling at their male neighbours to get the hell off their territory (or else), and trying to impress the females, but what I hear is: “Welcome back, Persephone. How was the Underworld? Been a bit nippy while you’ve been away.”
My new favourite phrase
There was an excellent quote on Hyperdrive last night, which might well become my favoured expression of mindless enthusiasm: “Set lasers to patriotic”. I like it despite the fact that I’m not in the least patriotic.
