Seventy years of birdwatching

Poyser Monographs

by Horace Gundry Alexander

Seventy Years of Birdwatching is not truly an autobiography, there is too little about the author in it, though the personality of this exceptional, shy and gentle man comes through. This is a book about birdwatching, birdwatchers and, above all, birds. It is, in some measure, also a history of the development of modern ornithology in Britain -although the author's birdwatching extended over parts of three continents, Europe, India and North America. H. G. Alexander began birdwatching in earnest in 1898 and has never stopped. He has met or corresponded with most of the leading ornithologists of this century; his first article in British Birds appeared in 1909, and it may surprise many to discover how much of practical ornithology that is deliberated today was debated and practised so many years ago. During more than seventy years the author has witnessed important changes in resident and migrant bird populations in Britain. Dungeness, for example, was almost as uninhabited as the moon when he first knew it and Kentish Plovers bred there by the score, but Carrion Crows were a rarity. Over the years he saw the gradual decline of the Red-backed Shrike, Corncrake and Wryneckbut he was instrumental in bringing one bird to Britain, the hitherto 'undiscovered' Willow Tit which he, with others, helped to identify. Fifty years ago H. G. Alexander had already covered scores of six-inch Ordnance Survey maps with his mapping records and these, together with his notebooks and correspondence with contemporaries, supply an absorbing glimpse of a birdwatching era that was fascinatingly like and yet unlike our own. Perhaps this is why today's birdwatcher has only to turn the pages to be enthralled.

264 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2010

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

H.G Alexander's memoir of a lifetime's love of ornithology begins with the recollection of watching a chiffchaff flit around his uncle's garden in 1897. The author maintains that thrill he first felt in childhood but combines it in his later years with a scientific mind. He talks about many aspects of birding, including the discovery of visible migration as an important part of ornithological study and the observation of nesting waders at Dungeness.

For anyone with an interest in birds or natural history, this book is a joy to read. The author is aware that he has a great deal of knowledge and data that he has accumulated over his life but he offers it generously and modestly. Occasionally, he mentions that he spent time in India but he never discloses why he was living there. He was in fact working closely with Gandhi, who described him as "one of the best English friends India has". Alexander was also a consultant on the film of Gandhi's life directed by Richard Attenborough.

Alexander spent the last twenty years of his life in America where he still found much joy in watching birds:

"I began with my less-than-eight-year-old self spending a spring morning in southern England listening to an early chiffchaff. I write this conclusion seventy-six years later, when at nearly eighty-four I am still watching and listening, day by day, for the first insectivorous birds returning from the south - this time from the mid-Atlantic states of North America. When the first Phoebe or Kinglet or Black and White Warbler appears, it gives me just the same thrill that I got from that English Chiffchaff long ago."

H.G. Alexander lived to the age of 100 and Seventy Years of Birdwatching is a testament to a life well lived.