HIDDEN CORNERS
ORNITHOLOGY COLLECTION Peter Stothard discovers the large number of early books on birds on the Library shelves whose purpose is more complex than a mere observation of the behaviour of the species Between Biology and Blindness sit the Birds. The Library’s ornithology collection is a flock of about nine hundred, its home on more than 30 shelves in Science & Miscellaneous, Back Stacks Level Four. Less conspicuous in this section than you might expect are the bold, bright and glossy books from the catalogue, the ones with plates by John James Audubon, Edward Lear, C.F. Tunnicliffe and Peter Scott. Perhaps they are out on loan for the summer. What is easily seen is a host of LBJs, those Little Brown Jobs, as some
Illustration of an Arctic tern, Sterna arctica, by John James Audubon, 1833, from his The Birds of America (1827–38), 1944 edition. 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
of us term birds that look like sparrows but may not be, Little Brown, Blue and Buff jobs as they appear in Science & Miscellaneous next to the histories of institutes for the hard of sight. These duller-coloured volumes, like those similarly clad birds, are more fascinating than their grander relatives, a small book of wrens typically teaching us more than do gold-leafed folios of parrots. The Library does boast some Audubon in the Birds section. There is Audubon’s Elephant (2003) by Duff HartDavis, recording the desperate saga of the American ornithologist’s struggle to publish The Birds of America (1827–38). Safe in the Safe there is also Audubon’s own, less snappily titled Ornithological biography, or, An account of the habits of the birds of the United States of America: accompanied by descriptions of the objects represented in the work entitled, The birds of America, and interspersed with delineations of American scenery and manners (1831–9). Titles by Lear include Edward Lear’s Parrots, published in 1949 with a commentary by Brian Reade, in which some of the chattering subjects are illustrated and recorded for the first time by the shy painter and master of the nonsense rhyme. Tunnicliffe is represented not by his Brooke Bond tea cards which introduced so many (including me) to the love of birds in the 1950s, but by the lovely A Sketchbook of Birds, published in 1979, the year of the artist’s death. Also in the collection are Peter Scott’s once almost as familiar
studies of geese in Wild Chorus (1939). But the pride of the Library is its mass of commoner stories (all too common in the field of ornithology) of human curiosity, vanity and greed. The shabby treatment of one bird-book-maker by another is demonstrated by Lear’s publisher, the once renowned John Gould, a giraffe-stuffing taxidermist, innovative businessman, luxury gold-leaf spreader and prolific borrower of other men’s material for personal gain. Lear’s plates were almost always credited to Gould who, although occasionally confessing his crimes and misdemeanours, seems for the most part to have got away with them. Bestsellers abound. A few hummingbirds may have been made brighter by gilded feathers, but the most important bird books in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were products for the mass market. This is not because they added much to Biology (and only occasionally to Art) but because birds have always said something to us about ourselves. Scientists study bird behaviour. Bird books describe human behaviour. In the Biology section there is hard science, hard knowledge about the natural world. Among the bird books there are fewer biological facts, and most of the information is about us, romantic, soft and frail. The Birds of the Green Belt (1936) by the Welsh authority on rabbits and puffins, Robert Lockley, is a typical example. Its purpose is to describe a place where we go to watch birds. It is not primarily about the birds themselves. It is about observation and the hunt, not about the observed or
