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Favourite Book About Birds/Birding? (1 Viewer)

I originally intended to list my top five but that proved impossible and I found listing my top ten so tricky that as I wrote it morphed into my top (Baker's) dozen. Even then several excellent books just missed making the cut. It is more weighted towards American books than I'd have anticipated as a Brit birder but I think that's simply because they seem to produce more books of this genre than ourselves.
So in the order which chance delivered them into hands here they are -
Kingbird Highway - Ken Kaufman - the birders' Jack Kerouac; an evocation of the start of modern birding
Lost Among the Birds Neil Hayward - the best of recent "big year" books deceptively well written with an interesting theme of birding as redemption
Down and Dirty Birding - Joey Slinger - an American Bill Oddie's 'Black Bird Book' only with attitude
Quest for the Griffon - Robert Atkinson - ever wondered what it was like birding in Europe before modern motorways, field guides, trip reports & digital cameras? This obscure book gives you some idea!
Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience - Jeremy Mynott - a wonderfully erudite but readable potpourri of bird-related literature, history, philosophy & science. Just squeezes out James Fisher's Shell Bird Book which covered similar ground a generation & more ago.
Tales of a Low-rent Birder - Pete Dunne - anything by Pete Dunne could have been included; the man knows his birds and writes like a dream
Rebirding - Benedict MacDonald - a timely & thought-provoking book packed with information but very readable
Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book - Bill Oddie - still a classic
Beguiled by Birds - Ian Wallace - a great read packed with ideas, information and DIMW's quirky but handsome illustrations
The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud - Brian Garfield - it just squeezes out Mark Cocker's (better written) book on the same topic ("Richard Meinertzhagen; Soldier, Scientist, Spy") as it benefits from having access to information unavailable to Cocker
Night Parrot: Australia's Most Elusive Bird - Penny Olsen - the story of how one of ornithology's great mysteries was unraveled and the controversy at its heart
Best Days with British Birds - Edited by Malcolm Ogilvie & Stuart Winter - over thirty marvelous birding days in the UK largely from the 70s & 80s to remind us what we're all missing.
..... and finally to make it a Baker's dozen & for the botanists amongst us Orchid Summer: In Search of the Wildest Flowers of the British Isles - Jon Dunn - another superbly well-written book that reads like a first-class detective novel and yet packs in a huge amount of information. Being an expert birder as well as superb botanist I hope Jon Dunn will do the same for birds somewhen.

Right, that's the list done so back to reading Bannerman's 'Birds of the British Isles' the dozen hefty volumes of which should keep me going for a while yet ....
 
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Chris Gooddie's "The Jewel Hunter", a quest for all the then recognised species of pitta in one year. A great read and some fabulous sightings, particularly gripping these days, and with the pitta quest now much more complicated following the split of Red-bellied Pitta.
 
It is a perfect time of year to read THE NESTING SEASON by Bernd Heinrich, very informative and enjoyable read.
 
Don Stap 1990, A Parrot without a Name. Univ. Texas Press.

I got a copy of this book thanks to the recommendations here and although it's well written and interesting I confess I found it very hard to get past the "we got there, saw brilliant & attractive birds and so shot them narrative" although I do understand the rationale behind the 'collecting' of specimens. So, if like me, you're uncomfortable with collecting bird en masse it may not be the book for you.
 
A few more gentle well-written reads, the first three constantly pored over and read in early birding days:
E. A. R. Ennion 1942, Adventurers Fen. Methuen.
G. K. Yeates 1946, Bird Life in Two Deltas. Faber & Faber.
Alan Davidson 1954, A Bird Watcher in Scandinavia. Chapman & Hall.
Tim Birkhead 2018, The Wonderful Mr Willughby. Bloomsbury.
 
Thoreau. Walden.

Seconded. And I will add another title that is not a pure 'birding' book although birds are discussed (and it is better than any of the books devoted purely to birding that I've ever read):

The Forest Unseen - by biologist David George Haskell. This book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It is not another another travel memoir (I admit I lose patience with these pretty fast..."first I went here and saw this, then I went there and saw that...") A deep dive into forest ecology, especially focused on the small side of things we mostly tend to overlook.
 
Recently read
The Seafarers A Journey Among Birds by Stephen Rutt
Wintering A Season With Geese by Stephen Rutt
 
Quest for the Griffon - Robert Atkinson - ever wondered what it was like birding in Europe before modern motorways, field guides, trip reports & digital cameras? This obscure book gives you some idea!
I had to look that one up as it sounds intriguing.
How did he manage that in the late 30s with the Spanish Civil War going on ?
Might have to get it.
 
I had to look that one up as it sounds intriguing.
How did he manage that in the late 30s with the Spanish Civil War going on ?
Might have to get it.
I found it fascinating but then I am a retired History teacher with an interest in birds and Andalusia. The trip wasn't during the civil war but just before it started.
 
This year I was very happy because I got a Glimpses of Paradise by Penny Olsen, a book which is out of print for several years.
 
I've just ordered Tanz der Kraniche (the German translation of Tranedans) by Carl Christian Tofte which belongs to the best book on cranes.
 
I love the work by Ralph Steadman, especially when he creates his very own extraordinary animals. After Extinct Boids and Critical Critters, I've got now his third book on threatened and extinct species, Nextinction, which is as great as the predecessors.
 
Some of these have been mentioned upthread; I'd class them all as being in the 'twitching autobiography' category; although they are very different in terms of literary style, I have to say all were enjoyable reads, I most recently devoured 'Birding on Borrowed Time':
Neil Hayward: Lost Among the Birds (US year list / mental health issues)
Adrian Riley: Arrivals and Rivals (British Isles year list / other lister issues)
Ruth Miller / Alan Davies: The Biggest Twitch (World year list / warning: contains mild sexual references)
Noah Stryker: Birding without Borders (World year list / great travel writing at cost of being selective about places / birds)
Phoebe Snetsinger: Birding on Borrowed Time (World life list / less novelistic although very candid, more catalogue of birds & places*)

I've not read 'The Big Twitch' yet, but a copy of Ken Kaufman's 'Kingbird Highway' just dropped through my door earlier today. I've only read the first page of the preface, but first impressions are head and shoulders above the rest in terms of the quality of prose - it is compared to Kerouac's 'On the Road' on the cover which is a very high bar to reach, but I can already see why the comparison is made.
To me Neil Hayward and Noah Stryker also pass literary muster, insofar as they are well written and entertaining beyond their birding subject matter - although I'm perhaps not the best person to judge this, as I'd just as happily read a series of species lists.

(* - maybe unfair, as she was killed while birding and the book was compiled from her manuscript, so she didn't have any chance to refine it)
 
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