FLORA & FAUNA

maged around in my change pocket, where I usually keep at least one acorn.’ Other chapters explain in absorbing, practical detail how oak has been used in shipbuilding by the British and the Viking navies, in coopering, tanning, construct

ing houses and making ink. Logan rails, too, against steel battleships, iron nails, the Eiffel Tower, and the awful cruelties of the modern steel-toothed sawmill, because for him the oak is and always has been sacred. To order these books, see order form on page 78

P ETER D AVIES ENJOYS BIRDS

nonsense poem: ‘The common cormorant (or shag) / Lays eggs inside a paper bag’. Yet, drying its

B IRDWATCHING , ANDTHE accompanying concern for the conservation of bird populations, has never been as popular and widespread in Britain as it is now. In an age rich in excellent field guides, we have ample means of familiarising ourselves with the wealth of species that can be seen in this country. The magnificent Birds Britannica (Chatto & Windus 528pp £35) by Mark Cocker, its principal author, and Richard Mabey, whose companion Flora Britannica was its predecessor but who was prevented by ill-health from playing the major role in the writing of this book, is not intended as a work of recognition. Although its photographs are of superb quality, the authors’ aim is not identification but rather to illustrate moments and quirks in bird behaviour; they complement a narrative that harnesses myth, history and folklore to offer a beguilingly discursive approach to its subject. The book takes us from the nightingale of myth and reality, whose first notes heard in an Essex wood are one of the wonders of spring, to that ruffianly longshoreman among waders, the turnstone, which, if sandhoppers and molluscs fail its diet, will happily ingest potato peel, dogfood, or discarded bars of soap from holiday caravans. That dowdy little passerine the dunnock, which spends much of its time skulking no higher than the lower reaches of hedgerows (seeming, as Lord Grey put it ‘to apologize for its presence’), leads, we learn, the most expansive of sex lives. Not only does it mate ‘more frequently than has been recorded for any other small bird’, but male and female vie with each other in promiscuous infidelity. The robin was often thought to base its fellowship with man in these islands on something inherently sympathetic in the British character – while on the Continent, fearful of Homo sapiens’s intentions towards it, it sought the shelter of deep thickets. Our authors gently dispel this self-flattering conceit. The British bird is simply a separate race, noted for its confiding nature. Its European counterpart honestly prefers a woodland habitat to the handle of your garden spade. That master fisher the cormorant is an early acquaintance of childhood, thanks to Christopher Isherwood’s

A horned screamer

outspread wings on tree branches, rocks or fairway buoys, this bird makes, perhaps, one of the most sinister sights in nature. It was an act of genius in Milton, as Cocker reminds us, to have Satan, on a reconnaissance mission to spy on Adam and Eve, enter Paradise not as the serpent but in the guise of this darkly resourceful predator. Birds and literature regularly cross paths in Birds Britannica. ‘Detested kite!’, the epithet with which an enraged King Lear castigates his profoundly disagreeable daughter Goneril, says much about the low esteem in which this gracious raptor was held in Shakespearian times. A scavenger, a stealer of crusts from the very paws of impoverished children, it was apparently fair game for the fate that overtook it once its function as an airborne refuse-disposal system had outlived its usefulness. Heavily persecuted, the bird of medieval and Tudor townscape found itself gradually becoming a denizen of wild places. Driven into the natural fastness of the Welsh Plateau, with its steep-sided valleys and melancholy humped uplands, the species numbered by the beginning of the last century just five breeding pairs. In the last twenty or so years the kite’s fortunes have undergone a remarkable transformation, beginning with the release of birds of Spanish origin in the Chilterns. It is now a frequent sight, wheeling aloft, or descending to allow its marvellous burnished copper plumage to make a contrast with the fresh green of spring beech woods. Other colonisations have needed no assistance from human agency. The population explosion over the last fifty years of the dainty collared dove, a gentle and welcome addition to the dominant bullying wood pigeon and the ubiquitous feral pigeon, is simply an unexplained marvel. In Germany familiarity has already bred contempt, and its habit of calling from the aerials on apartment houses has earned it the nickname Fernsehtaube (‘TV dove’). The most exciting and recent arrival of all has been that most elegant of herons, the little egret. Its lacy plumes, sought as a fashion accessory, led to severe depredation in Europe in the nineteenth century. But

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006