A bird in the bush is always best

Jonathan Bate reviews A Bird in the Bush by Stephen Moss

Gilbert White was a quintessentially English figure: an 18th-century country parson who observed the passing of the seasons and kept careful notes of such milestones as the first cuckoo in spring and the departure date of the last swallow in autumn.

In this very readable "social history of birdwatching" Stephen Moss suggests that White was the father of English ornithological enthusiasm. Equally honoured places in the early part of the book are given to Thomas Bewick, whose wonderfully engraved History of British Birds was the first popular guide to the identification of different species, and to John Clare, our greatest bird poet. As Moss rightly says, Clare wrote about nightingales from the point of view of a field observer while Keats romanticised them in the voice of a townie.

For most of the 19th century, birdwatching was conducted with guns. The way to identify a new species was to shoot and stuff it. Egg collecting was also the norm - Clare was exceptional in objecting to the habit. Naturalists generally took the view that the killing of a few birds was a price worth paying for the furtherance of ornithological knowledge. Before the advent of powerful binoculars - developed for military purposes in the First World War - the only way of examining a bird up close was by shoot ing it.

The real threat to avian populations came not from the gentleman collector en route from the fields to the taxidermist's shop, but from the fashion trade and in particular Victorian millinery. In 1889 a group of redoubtable ladies in the Manchester suburb of Didsbury banded together in order to start a campaign against feathered hats. Such was the origin of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Within a decade it had 20,000 members, most of them women. Today it has over a million, and for more than a generation its lobbying power has been such that John Betjeman could quip, "Who runs the country? The RSPB. Their members are behind every hedge."

Moss, who produces Bill Oddie's bird programmes for the BBC Natural History Unit, knows his subject intimately and writes about it with just the right mixture of affection and occasional quizzicality. He combines broad brush social history with brief character sketches of key individuals, such as Roger Tory Peterson, whose Field Guide to the Birds was the foundation stone of birding in North America.

There are some very funny anecdotes and occasionally quite moving ones, such as an account of Captain Scott's last letter home to his wife, in which he wrote, "Make the boy interested in natural history if you can - it is better than games." This dying wish was fulfilled: the boy grew up into Sir Peter Scott, who had enormous influence on conservation and birdwatching, especially through his natural history television series Look, which ran from 1955 to 1969 and regularly attracted five million viewers.

The book covers all the right ground: the decline of egg collecting, the origin of ringing, the success story of the osprey's return to Scotland, the role of technology in the rise of the "twitcher". Moss rightly insists on the distinction between the birder who is interested in behaviour and population in a particular environment (whether urban garden, woodland or wetland) and the twitcher whose sole concern is to notch up a list of the hundreds - even thousands - of species he has seen in his career.

Twitchers are predominantly male and are prepared to travel hundreds of miles at the drop of a hat for the sake of a glimpse of a storm-diverted Siberian Yellow-browed Bunting. They inform each other of rare sightings by means of websites and even pagers of the kind usually reserved for doctors on call and New Labour politicians being kept on message.

Perhaps because Moss gives an undue amount of attention to the modern phenomenon of twitching - which I'm afraid I regard as more akin to trainspotting than ecology - he suggests that women are a marginalised minority in the world of birding. I am not sure that is the case today, and it certainly wasn't in the early days of ornithology.

Among the pioneers were a number of women whom Moss neglects, such as Elizabeth Kent, sister-in-law of the poet and radical literary editor Leigh Hunt. The other omission is a European perspective on the story: Moss's emphasis is almost exclusively Anglo-American. But then again, in much of continental Europe birds continue to be viewed down the barrel of a shotgun rather than through a pair of state-of-the-art Zeiss binoculars.

  • Jonathan Bate's 'John Clare: A Biography' is published by Picador.