BIRDERS by Mark Cocker

[Dr Richard Nowotny <>]

For those Birding-aussers who did not see this review in the SMH and did
not access it on the Web:

Field guide to the common scorned twitcher 
BIRDERS 
By Mark Cocker 
Jonathan Cape, 228pp, $49.90 
Reviewed by Paul Sheehan 
"And there, amongst the heather, witnessed only by the smiling
heavens above, these two young adult men, sound of mind and body, proceed
to punch the air, screaming and whooping in demented
exultation."
Welcome to the bird of birdwatching. It may be a quiet activity, but not
dull. The inner life of the birdwatcher is captured by Mark Cocker in
this eccentric book when he describes "those sensations of liberty
and clarity that are so much more difficult to find in ordinary
life". But a good pair of binoculars is crucial:
"They convert life into something else, something almost abstract,
something purer, clearer, usually more beautiful and almost always
something you've never really seen that way before. That's what birders
are hooked on - not the physical object ... but their wondrous alchemical
power to transform you and your state of being."
Judging by the sales of field guides in Australia, a lot of people feel
the power. The Simpson and Day field guide has sold more than 400,000
copies since it arrived in 1984. The Pizzey and Knight has sold 40,000
since it was published in 1997. And there is Slater's guide, selling
something like 150,000 copies since 1986, but nobody at the publisher
seems to know.
Not that you could carry one of these around in the presence of Cocker -
"no self-respecting birder would ever dream of carrying a field
guide in the field ... There is no more humiliating admission of
inadequacy".
Birders is not so much a book about birds or even birdwatching,
but about the obsessives who have shaped the birding culture of Britain.
How obsessive are these people? The stars of this book are a sub-species
known as "twitchers", who will go anywhere at any time when
they hear a report of a rare bird sighting.
In 1998, a British twitcher, Chris Batty, was on a birding trip to the US
when a companion's pager announced a mega-alert - a major rarity, a
common nighthawk, had been sighted on an island off the English coast.
Batty promptly walked three hours from Cape May to Atlantic City, caught
the dawn bus to New York, flew to London, caught another flight to the
Scilly Isles, travelled to St Agnes and waited, and waited, with growing
despair, until the nighthawk appeared just before dusk. Nothing special
for a twitcher, except that one of the birds Batty had been watching back
on Cape May was the common nighthawk.
Perhaps it's an English thing, but the sub-culture Cocker depicts is
hierarchical, even arrogant, populated at the bottom by people referred
to as punters and amateurs (like me), and at the top by a gifted,
rigorous, fraternal - yet competitive - core of watchers who retain a
truly astonishing amount of bird knowledge.
"Non-birders frequently presume that a birder's rank is measured by
the length of a list. Not so ... In fact to have seen a large number of
species without any parallel credentials as a field observer invites its
own kind of scorn."
The scorn comes from those he refers to as "birders", as
distinct from mere birdwatchers, hence the title. As for birds, they make
many cameo appearances, often beautifully depicted - in the author's
journeys to see the great bustards in Spain, for example, or the satyr
tragopan of Nepal.
This is a book about men, a certain kind of man who is only fully alive
while birding and who will go to absurd lengths to see what is difficult
to see.
Paul Sheehan is a Herald journalist and author of Among the
Barbarians (Random House).