Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 80
A Nature Book Reader
anthropological study and
half 70s popular biography,
contrasting the grand past
of this one-time symbol of
purity and life force (Pepys’
diary notes that pigeons
were placed at the feet of
the ailing Queen Henrietta
Maria in 1633) with the
daily habits of these scabby
city hoodlums who spend
“a high proportion of their
daylight hours... loafing ,
sleeping, sun-bathing
and preening.”
Simms, who always took
two carrier pigeons with
him when flying Bomber
Command Lancasters
during World War Two, was
of course most famous for
his Countryside broadcasts
for the BBC and the four
books he wrote for Collins’
New Naturalist series:
Woodland Birds (1971),
British Thrushes (1978),
British Warblers (1985) and
British Larks, Pipits and
Wagtails (1992). But this,
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along with his “natural
History of Dollis Hill”,
1975’s Bird of Town and
Suburb, is the book I most
return to. London has
always been a city at ease
with intolerance, often
directed towards its feral
outcasts and its funnylooking aliens. This is a book
that sticks up for them.
Kenneth who took his
own life in 1973 with an
overdose of barbiturates,
did not perhaps have the
happiest of lives, and
while In The Country is
undoubtedly a joyous book,
it is one tinged with sadness
and righteous anger. First
published in 1972, this
account of a year in “Hardy
country” from January to
Christmas, chronicles both
the changing of the seasons
and the coming of a more
industrial form of intensive
farming. “In the short term,”
he writes, “man seems to
have it taped, to have gained
