Soaring Sunward on Fluttering Pinions: Selected Writings of the Bird-watching Bards

Dip into the birding literature of the pioneer ornithologists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and you'll quickly realise they were all budding/frustrated bards who, after covering the formalities of beak size, rump colour and distribution to satisfy the publisher and honour the book's title, would take to the proverbial skies like their subjects and begin blending the phrasing of Wordsworth with the parody of Wodehouse.

Soaring Sunward on Fluttering Pinions celebrates our British birds through these writers and their informative, meticulous, and joyous observations. The earliest ornithologist to feature here is Selborne's Gilbert White. Then there is the mild-mannered bird-lover Edmund Selous-whose wretched older brother inevitably received more conservationist plaudits and fame for slaughtering big game out in Africa-as the natural successor to White. Where Frederick Selous spent four pages documenting how he 'bravely' took down a bull elephant by shooting it in the back, his brother would use the same amount of paper to communicate the movements of a moorhen through a reed bed or the ear covert variations of the whinchat.

I know who I would rather read.