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.

Illustration of an Arctic tern, Sterna arctica, by John James Audubon, 1833, from his The Birds of America (1827–38), 1944 edition.

What is easily seen is a host of LBJs, those Little Brown Jobs, as some 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 Hart- Davis, 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 the hunted. To see the first Little Owl in Loughton is an achievement for us if not for the owl. We regard so many birds as rarities now, not because the birds have disappeared but because we do not care to look and do not know what they are.

Among popular bird books by the historian of Roman religion, William Warde Fowler, are A Year With the Birds (1886), originally published anonymously as ‘by an Oxford tutor’ , and Tales of the Birds (1888). He counts among his Oxford birds a stormy petrel who lives only ‘in Mr Darbey the bird-stuffer’s window’ . Bird-stuffer? So much better a term than taxidermist. It took a classicist to seize the English and avoid the Greek. Fowler was a very individualist observer. Even in his later years, when he walked little and heard less, he could still find fascination under any hedgerow. Deaf to the song of the tree-creeper, he stood resolutely by his view of its rarity, despite Julian Huxley’s assertion that its song was audible in Oxford every fine April day. Determined bird men do not have to travel afar, and many are slow to change their minds.

Illustration by Edward Lear of a hyacinthine macaw, Macrocercus hyacinthinus, from his book Illustrations of the family of Psittacidae, or parrots (1832). By permission of the Linnean Society of London.

Rows of the Library’s bird books carry the name of a place. But The Birds of Nottinghamshire (1975), edited by Austen Dobbs, The Birds of Cheshire (1962) by Charlie John Sherratt, A History of the Birds of Essex (1929) by William E. Glegg and A History of the Birds of Hertfordshire (1959) by Bryan L. Sage are about how we once defined the counties where we lived, not how we have ever defined the birds themselves. A Nottinghamshire thrush is no different from a Nantwich thrush. A Rutland thrush evokes perfectly the loss of Rutland.

The Birds of Norfolk (3 vols., 1866–90) by the stationer and newspaper publisher Henry Stevenson is confined today to the Safe, and is a particularly fine example of the unadorned county guide, illustrated only by a bittern, a coot and an extinct great bustard. Stevenson was one of the earliest writers of bird books to recognise the danger that bird-lovers posed to the objects of their love – and spent his final years campaigning to protect the avocet and reduce London’s culinary demand for the eggs of lapwing, redshank and bearded tit.

Scan the shelves and you will notice that most of the bird books are about using birds for human purposes. This Bondage (1929) by Bernard Acworth is ostensibly about bird migration, which he argued was a random phenomenon driven by the winds. Flying feats by gulls were an optical illusion, he maintained. Cuckoos, to which Acworth later gave a separate treatment in 1944, were parasitic hybrids born by miscegenation with honest nest-builders. The author’s real purpose was to defend Christianity against immoral Darwinism, and to use bird study to mock the utility of flight and attack military reliance on the newfangled aeroplane. Acworth, a submariner by training, was a supporter of more money for those fighting underwater.

‘Mallards and the Mourne Mountains’ by Peter Scott, from his book Wild Chorus (1939), 1942 edition. © Dafila Scott.

A volume by Colonel Willoughby Verner is titled, with rare honesty, My Life Among the Wild Birds in Spain (1909). The most important word in the title is the first. There are 90 pages and 32 illustrations before the reader reaches a picture of any bird, a white stork. Necessities for birdwatching described in My Life include compasses (ideally the Service variety, of which Verner was the inventor), U-shaped springs to stop field glasses falling from a man’s saddle and, absolutely essential, a pair of alpargatas, boots with rope soles. Verner’s kit collection is illustrated profusely. After that the Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, his yacht Miramar and the Spanish Queen Victoria-Eugénie take due precedence over any friend that is feathered, although by page 185 we do begin to learn a certain amount about the snake eagle (‘a lazy bird’) and the black vulture (‘a difficult stalk’).

Edward Armstrong’s The Way Birds Live (1943) was written in Cambridge and published with irreproachable conformity to Authorised War Economy Standards. Advice on domestic propriety is neatly wrapped in the language of ornithological observation. In Chapter One: Finding a Partner, the author describes the heron’s mating technique: he ‘points his beak to the sky with his head thrown back and calls hoo, then lowers his head towards his legs, making a snapping sound … He goes on doing this until at last a female becomes interested; then things warm up and after some preliminaries housekeeping begins’ . The writer compares this behaviour with that of eligible bachelors, who instead of going to dances to meet nice girls might rent an empty house, stand at the open window and take off their hats to them. Chapter Nine is titled ‘Toilet and Tidiness’ , Chapter Thirteen ‘What’s for Dinner?’ He also poses the critical question, of constant fascination to bird-watchers with eyes on themselves: ‘Do Birds ever pair for life?’

Armstrong’s answer is commendably more accurate than that of many books in the shelves seeking winged support for their author’s values. While crows, swans and geese are deemed comfortingly faithful (decisive DNA evidence to the contrary was unavailable in 1943), male bitterns and corn-buntings may have several wives and in some species (unspecified to hide their blushes) ‘the females have several husbands’ . Anyone seeking more of this might try The Romance of Bird Life (1921) by John Lea, which is subtitled ‘Being an account of the education, courtship, sport and play, journeys, fishing, fighting, piracy, domestic and social habits, instinct, strange friendships and other interesting aspects of the life of birds’ .

The recognised father of British ornithology is William Turner, who in 1544 published A short and succinct history of the principal birds noticed by Pliny and Aristotle, originally written in Latin but published in an excellent English edition in 1903, with an introduction and notes by A.H. Evans. Classicists are commonly fond of birds. The Oxford don Warde Fowler was in a long tradition of writers whose work spanned the humanities and science shelves, an essential requirement in Renaissance days when Aristotle’s writings about migration patterns, or the Elder Pliny’s about the cuckoo, were deemed superior to any observations by lesser men. Both ancients discussed the proper number of eagle, hawk and vulture species that should be identified under the overall classification of Acciptres. Ten for Aristotle, sixteen for Pliny, who thought the sighting of certain birds of prey particularly lucky for humans seeking happiness through marriage or money.

Turner was unusual for his time in being knowledgeable about his great predecessors but not in their thrall. According to Evans, he had a direct knowledge of buzzards, cuckoos and tree-creepers. He was also a well-travelled bird-man, a wise recourse for a learned protestant friend of the immolated bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. He was as potent a Christian proselytiser as Acworth would later be, but perhaps better able to separate birds from God.

The German, C.L. Brehm (1787–1864), was another churchman ornithologist, collector and dissector of disputed species. He published hundreds of scientific treatises on subjects from swans to shrikes. He was influential on his colleagues but was massively eclipsed in popular appeal by his son A.E. Brehm, whose Bird-Life, Being a History of the Bird, its Structure, and Habits, Together with Sketches of Fifty Different Species is kept in the Safe (1874 edition). The second edition of the younger Brehm’s 10-volume Life of Animals published in 1876–9, became one of the first international bestsellers of its kind, its illustrations attracting the praise of Charles Darwin.

The Library has a handsome fivevolume set of one of the great works of nineteenth-century ornithology, William MacGillivray’s A History of British Birds (1837–52). While biologists in distant labs were obsessing about classification systems and common theories (was the goat-footed ostrich really, or nearly, a mammal?) MacGillivray, the Scottish loner, was cataloguing what he saw. He painted too and might, with better luck, have published as successfully as Audubon, with whom he collaborated in Scotland. If MacGillivray had stuck to recording the oats and barley seeds in the crops of rock doves he describes in volume one, even his skimpily illustrated text might have done better in the bookshops. But by entering gingerly into the Franco-Swedish-German issues of whether a bird species might be defined by its gut construction he attracted the jealousy of his self-styled intellectual superiors. His History received what reviewers today term ‘a good kicking’ .

‘A Clear Drop’ by Ida Verner, from Colonel Willoughby Verner’s My Life Among the Wild Birds in Spain (1909).

Library members may often stop between Biology and Blindness for their own book-writing purposes. What kind of buzzard, hawk or falcon would the hero of a new novel be likely to have seen on the Thames at Southend in the declining years of Queen Victoria? Birds of Essex (1890) by M. Christy will do nicely for that. Avoid the honey buzzard, which is ‘now rare’ . Or do we need a little tern to mark the first whiff of Hitler? Try Sea Terns or Sea Swallows (1934) by George Marples. If that is out with another reader, there is The Home-Life of the Terns or Sea Swallows (1912) by William Bickerton; tern behaviour does not change too much from one dishonest decade to the next.

What breed of vulture might have hovered when Tutankhamun was interred or while Cleopatra was offering her body to the asp? I once asked that question in the Birds section myself, conducting some fact-checking for a memoir I had written in Alexandria. This research was only a partial success. I easily found Steven Goodman and Peter Meininger’s The Birds of Egypt (1989), a palpably respectable academic tome. It told of bird pictures painted as far back as 4,500 BC. But long-legged buzzards and vultures? ‘Nothing is more tantalising,’ runs the learned text, ‘than the lack of precision with which the Ancient Egyptians depicted the Acciptres'.