Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book
Bill Oddie
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 1907554270
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
can bite your tongue off, you’ve said it: ‘Yes, Richards’ Pipit’. You may qualify a teensy bit: ‘Yes, probable Richards’ Pipit’, but that’s just as dangerous. In fact, it may be worse in a way, because ‘probable’ implies that you are not quite sure and the other birder will be tempted to cross-examine you. So they ask: ‘Oh yes, good . . . where was it?’ To which you reply truthfully, having not been given the time to lie: ‘Er . . . in the field with the pools, near the airport’. To which they
tractor.’ You reply: ‘Oh yes . . . there was a Skylark there, too’. ‘By the tractor?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Oh, actually, for a moment I thought it was going to be a Pipit, but then it flew up into the air, sang for ten minutes and dropped down like a stone and started feeding its young.’ ‘That was a Skylark.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I saw that (which is true) and I saw the other bird – the Richards’ Pipit (which is not true). There were two birds.’ (This is probably also true: the truth is that there were actually six
Press, printed in Sydney) will not help you to decide what that little grotty brown bird was you saw yesterday. What you use for that is a field guide. There are quite a few books masquerading as field guides – they are usually called British Birds, or Birds in Britain (it seems there is no copyright on bird book names, so lots of them share the same ones . . . confusing). There are also lots and lots of books which just cover a certain selection of birds – Birds of the Seashore or Birds in your
will amend this chapter heading to . . . Going to the right place There are of course many nationally-known good localities for watching birds and trying to find rare ones. In fact, there are so many of them that I’m not going to make any attempt to list them here. If you are a birder, you probably know more good places than I do. If you know any new ones please drop me a line. There are now two or three excellent ornithological equivalents to The Good Food Guide, most notably perhaps John
are endless. Little wonder then that some birders choose to limit themselves to certain specialist areas. I remember when I was birding in New York, I asked a local watcher for her advice on some of the small confusing little grey waders that occur on American shores. She replied, ‘Oh I don’t look at those anymore, they upset me’. They upset me too and I admired her solution. She seemed much happier for her decision. Neither had she copped out entirely: she didn’t bother with those waders but she