Jeremy Mynott on Birdwatching

To start off, I asked if you could recommend a book that really captures the atmosphere, the magic of birdwatching, that gives a sense of what it is about it that gets people so addicted. You chose J A Baker’s The Peregrine. Why?

This book caught my imagination when I first read it, which was in the late 1960s. It’s a book about one man’s obsession with a particular bird. He was fascinated with a peregrine that he found locally, and he stalked it for a whole year. He tried to follow it in all its movements and get the bird used to him so that he could approach it more closely than a peregrine would normally allow. It’s the story of this pursuit of the bird and how he came to feel a kind of affinity with it, and how he uses the bird as a symbol for the things he feels, or wants to feel, about the natural world. The writing in the book is really rather extraordinary – it’s a very lyrical, very elevated kind of prose that could completely fail, or become too lush or rich or something. He just about teeters on the brink the whole time, and you think, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s overdone it now!’ and then he gets away with it. I think it’s a magnificent piece of writing that I find very moving.

And it really gets into his mindset; you understand why he becomes obsessed?

Yes. He wants to become the bird, in a sense. And the book finally ends with him approaching the peregrine as it comes to roost. He walks up to within five yards of it, and the bird goes to sleep in front of him. It has accepted him. So it’s a very striking book about what is for many people still a very charismatic bird, the peregrine falcon – which has gone from being a bird of wilderness places, to a bird of our cities. There are peregrines nesting in London and New York now, and many other cities, but they will never be ‘domesticated’.

Say I wanted to go birdwatching this weekend. How do I set about it? What do I do? Is that where your next choice, Birds Britannica, comes in?

There are many good field guides for the beginner who wants to go out in the field and start identifying birds and looking at their differences and so on. In the UK, I would recommend the Collins Field Guide, in the US, David Sibley’s The Sibley Guide to Birds (now divided into two books: Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America and Field Guide to the Birds of Western North America). Birds Britannica is rather different. It’s an encyclopedic work and it’s arranged on a taxonomic basis, so it treats each bird both as part of a family and individually. And it’s a wonderful book to read about any particular bird that you’ve got an interest in, like the robin, or the thrush or the blackbird, or indeed the peregrine. You look up the bird, and there’s a very readable piece not only about what the bird is like, but how it behaves and what its place in our history and our culture has been.

A tremendous number of stories and anecdotes were garnered in the course of putting together Birds Britannica, because the book was produced very interactively. Readers were invited to write or e-mail in as it was being produced with their own stories about these birds, and these were then woven together very skilfully by the editor, Mark Cocker. Each entry has a little history of the part that bird has played in our culture. So you can imagine that for iconic birds like the robin, swallow, eagle, barn owl and nightingale, their entries are stuffed with interesting references from literature, art and everyday life. They’re part of popular culture – they crop up in legends, proverbs and songs, we make images of them on tea towels, wallpaper and ornaments, and they’re familiar to everybody. So this is a wonderful book of stories about these birds, which also gives you a lot of good scientific information about them. And it’s enhanced with some wonderful artwork and photographs of birds. So it’s a great reference book, and if you want one reference work on the shelf, this is the one I’d recommend.

Your next choice is a book of poetry by John Clare.

Birds are very prominent in poetry. Think of Shelley and the skylark, Browning and the thrush, Keats and the nightingale – and Coleridge and the albatross. Birds pop up in poetry all the time, and my favourite nature poet is John Clare, whom I like because he has got such a wonderful eye and ear for birds and such a strong ‘sense of place’. He’s a very good observer. He was brought up in rural Northamptonshire as a poor farm labourer, and he had an intense feeling for his local landscape and a very deep knowledge of all the wildlife around him. And he was a wonderful describer of birds. Whereas Keats speaks from his imagination, Clare speaks from experience. I quote him extensively in my book and include quite a few of his poems. He’s got a wonderful eye for just seeing exactly what the birds really are like, and seeing them as part of the landscape that he knew so well.