Bird books invariably use illustration as a guide, whether through paintings or through photographs.
Carry Akroyd’s screen prints in The Oldie’s Bird of the Month column are interpretations, with bold, abstract solutions, to convey birds swooping, singing, perching and paddling. Hence the title of our book of Oldie illustrations.
As Carry is very much a landscape artist, it is always exciting to see her answer to the latest challenge of sky, land or sea, and how she captures the essence of the bird and fits it to habitat and season.
The aim of my bird columns is to celebrate, amuse and inform, in that order. Where possible, poetry, quotation and personal insight take precedence, to circumvent general knowledge and indispensable Google. John Clare has pride of place as a bird poet by right.
In our day and age, it is hard to avoid a repetitive lament when writing of birds, with technology reducing country-dweller numbers as remorselessly as it has hedges, reedbeds and the rest. As for pollution, even our bodies contain microplastics.
On the bright side, since 1970, of the 130 UK bird species studied in 2022, a Defra report estimated that 24 per cent increased in number, 46 per cent showed little change and 29 per cent decreased.
Age only increases the recognition of how like us in character and circumstance birds are. My mother found consolation as a widow through friendship with a barn owlet; my terminally ill wife in the welcome of a flightless Canada goose.
Adrian Richmond, whose Big Issue pitch is the piazza of Westminster Cathedral, daily pays attention to the needs of the local pigeons through shepherding his feral flock, 40 of whom he knows by name.
And how thrilling to receive a call from my grandson Oscar, aged 10, excitedly reporting having seen his first goldcrest.
Of the authors cited, Henry Douglas-Home, my Berwickshire neighbour, known since childhood, was BBC Radio’s bird man in Scotland – hence the title of his ornithological memoir, The Birdman.
Another boyhood influence, later a friend, was Denys ‘BB’ Watkins-Pitchford. Among the authors he admired was naturalist W H Hudson, himself a friend of Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916, who wrote another bird classic, The Charm of Birds.
Birds have been and always will be loved. For BB, there was no song more beautiful than the blackbird’s. For this bird-lover, raised in pink-footed-goose country, no chorus is more stirring than that of a skein of them in full cry.
Thanks to their liking for discarded sugar-beet tops, there are more of them than ever.
As a boy, I heard the geese with my parents and siblings. Now, in Norfolk, I hear them with Frankie and Albi, my great-great-nephews:
‘Then we heard them!
The tribes,
The generations since the tribes,
Coming back.’
Swarden Burn, Pinkfeet
Swoop Sing Perch Paddle (birds by Carry Akroyd, words by John McEwen) is available to buy through this link
