Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 138
A Nature Book Reader
ROY WILKINSON
Roy Wilkinson is official archivist for the rock group British Sea Power
Birds As Individuals by Len Howard
In Birds As Individuals we
meet a collective known as
Dobs, Baldhead, Judge and
Thief – plus a narrator called
Olive but who writes as Len.
They’re names strangely
suggestive of the great
Mancunian ASBO-funkers
Happy Mondays, a band
called things like Knobhead
and Bez. Olive Oil is one of
their songs. Another, Fat
Lady Wrestlers, hints at
peculiar gender transference.
Baldhead etcetera are, in fact,
names given to blackbirds,
great tits and other species
– in a book first published
in 1952 and as wonderfully
odd as the Mondays. It’s by
the late Olive Howard, who
wrote under the pseudonym
Len Howard. She lived with
the birds at Bird Cottage in
Ditchling in Sussex – meaning
they shared her house. The
furniture was habitually
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covered in crap-asborbing
newspaper. While The
Natural History Of Selborne
is one of the perennial naturebook givens, Baldhead and
pals are lesser known natural
wonders. Olive Howard was,
apparently, a naturalist and
musicologist who lived in
meticulous reclusiveness.
Her garden was constructed
to foster intimacy with
birdlife. In the book an
astonished visiting electrician
finds Howard with birds
perched all over her. “How
wonderful!” he exclaims,
before pondering things for a
second. “But why shouldn’t it
be like that? It ought to be like
that!” Birds As Individuals is
actually a sequel to Howard’s
earlier Living With Birds.
It’s an almost unbelievable
story, but the prose is
about undemonstrative
documentation of an
