Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 62
A Nature Book Reader
SALLY HUBAND
Sally’s PhD involved chasing butterflies through Romanian hay meadows. She
now lives in Shetland and writes when not chasing two young children.
Haunts of British Divers
by Niall Rankin
I bought this book in a hurry,
lured in by the title and
beautiful dust jacket, with
scant regard for the text.
Haunts of British Divers
was published in 1947 and
I wrongly assumed that the
three species accounts would
be dryly written and purely
factual but the author’s love
of these birds and the places
they inhabit is tangible.
The red-throated diver
section starts in the Shetland
island of Unst and includes
vivid descriptions of the
seabirds of Hermaness. On
this northernmost of the
archipelago’s islands he has
no success photographing
rain geese, to give them a
local name, so he moves
south to Yell ‘a solid mass
of rolling, bog-ridden peat’.
Reading his observations
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of red-throated divers on
their Yell loch makes my
spine tingle, just as it does
when I’m out watching
these curious birds. His
photographs are beautiful.
The book ends with the
chicks leaving the nest. He
glimpses the entire family
swimming together on the
loch as the fog closes in ‘and
they passed for ever from
my sight. For the first time
a slight feeling of loneliness
came over me’. That downer,
when time spent being
completely and happily alone
and absorbed by nature must
come to an end, so perfectly
described.
To read the book now is
also to face a sense of loss and
this all the more poignant
because Niall Rankin was
clearly concerned with the
