Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 38
A Nature Book Reader
TIM DEE
BBC radio producer for thirty years and a birdwatcher for almost twice that
time. He is most recently the author of ‘Greenery: Journeys in Springtime’
(Jonathan Cape) and ‘Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in
the Anthropocene’ (Little Toller)
The Redstart by John Buxton
An early monograph about
my favourite bird, in the
New Naturalist series. The
book helped the redstart into
my number one position.
An extraordinary story lies
behind it. A birdwatcher,
poet and English teacher,
Buxton was captured by
the Germans in the Second
World War and held as a
POW in camps in Bavaria.
He noticed redstarts coming
through the wire to breed
and started watching them.
He recruited other inmates
to help, his guards allowed
them paper and pencils
to record what they saw,
and a single pair of this
most delicately exquisite
of birds were watched for
hundreds of hours. The
book is still a key scientific
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text but it is also written
with great poetic beauty.
It thinks more about why
we watch birds than a host of
other books.
Desmond Nethersole
Thompson is known for his
lengthy studies of Scottish
breeding birds, most
famously, the greenshank,
but he also wrote Highland
Birds, a commission
from the Highlands
and Islands Development
Board in 1971. It is a
magically written survey
of the region’s best birds.
Nethersole Thompson’s
prose is gorgeous and
mixes passionate looking
with richly evocative
descriptive writing and
keen questioning. He
knew a lot but he always
