Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 54
A Nature Book Reader
JON GOWER
Jon Gower has over thirty books to his name, in Welsh and English -- most
recently ‘The Murenger and Other Stories’ (Three Impostors). He is a former
BBC Wales arts and media correspondent.
Shearwaters R.M.Lockley.
There is something genuinely
uplifting about seeing the
autodidact turn into an expert
and in this monograph about
one of our most numerous
seabirds, Lockley proves
himself to be just that – an
expert guide to the life and
marine times of the Manx
shearwater. Indeed the book
is in great part an account
of how he learns how to
study these members of
the petrel family – ringing
them and thus identifying
the individuals that nested
in the hump of rocks behind
his home on the island of
Skokholm, getting to know
them most intimately well.
Wales is home to over
half the world’s population of
these superb flyers, known in
Pembrokeshire as cocklollies,
which spend the summer
on the islands then winter
the other side of the south
Atlantic, off the coast of
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Argentina and Brazil. Lockley
pioneered ways of studying
individual birds such as
Adam and Ada, who lived in
holes in a rocky knoll.
But it is also a fine
introduction to Lockley the
writer, an author whose prose
is spare and clear, and seldom
too scientific. A good example
comes with his description of
shearwater flocks and flock
behaviour, qualitatively up
there with Mark Cocker’s
depiction of corvids in Crow
Country. The great rafts of
birds rise and skim in figures
of eight, waiting restlessly for
darkness:
“The flocks would swing
as one being, their white
breasts now a silver flash in
the sun’s last rays, and then,
as their dark upper parts were
simultaneously presented,
they showed velvet-black
on the grey-blue sea. They
would settle on the water
