B field guide lifers
innovative volume to set alongside the initial The Birds of South Africa by Austin Roberts, illustrated by Norman CK Lighton (South African Bird Book Fund, 1940). This new guide is by Hugh Chittenden, Greg Davies and Ingrid Weiersbye (new illustrations), published by the John Voelcker Bird Book Fund. It follows Chittenden’s 2007 first edition.
Field guides tell you quickly and concisely what the bird is and looks like; scientific and common names; size; where it’s found; plumage differences arising from gender, age and season; status (endangered or not); and perhaps how it sounds and flies. Handbooks can elaborate on all those and then some; they are the Encyclopaedia Britannica macropaedia entry to the field guides’ micropaedia Britannica.
The new Roberts Guide has many unique selling points. Its dimensions, at 210mm x 140mm, make it much wider and a little taller than a Sasol or Newman’s guide (and a little heavier too). It has scores of telling new portraits by Weiersbye to add to the old friends we know, done by Graeme Arnott, Andrew Barlow, ACV (Tony) Clarkson, Ronald Cook, Penny Meakin and Chris van Rooyen.
Telling males from females becomes easier given the extensive notes on the differences, amplified by seasonal and age variations pointed out where applicable in the more than 240 annotated colour plates. Status, habitat, call and food are part of each entry.
Particularly enjoyable are the pithy notes on eating habits: in other words, digestion digested.
To accommodate all this has meant crowded left-hand pages (the other side carrying the colour plates). Every now and then the reader feels a little cramped; the serif typeface for entries might add to this effect (sans serif is used for species header-entries).
But that’s a possibly idiosyncratic quibble. The guide has the latest distribution maps, and breeding and seasonality bars. It is a commodious compendium, a fine example of a cooperative at work.
Imagine listening voluntarily to a lecture about a topic of great interest to you: that’s the second Roberts Guide.
Set against that is the singular vision of an ornithological iconoclast: Newman’s is like having a conversation with another mind.
The monograph that is Guide to Birds of the Kruger National Park is not that far removed from those two fine holdalls. Customised for a visit to the park, and so slimmer and lighter than a general field guide, there’s a bonus in that it has a use beyond the Kruger, where 500 of the almost 1 000 bird species in Southern African have been recorded. Given that 500 is more than half the bird life in this region, there’s a chance that winged visitors to upcountry gardens might be found here. For use in the park itself, there is the boon that its distribution maps are based on actual sightings there.
At R320 for the hardcover and R280 for the flexicover Roberts and R250 for the Kruger book, these are very affordable. Either Roberts Bird Guide or Guide to Birds of the Kruger National Park would make excellent Christmas or anytime gifts. An even better idea would be to give both to a birder or would-be birder.
Fallen sparrows aside, why should non-birders and non-would-bebirders care? A chilling comparison between Newman’s X and Roberts II is this: in 2010, Vanessa Newman could write that the lammergeier (bearded vulture) had an estimated South African population of more than 250 pairs. In 2016, the Roberts compilers list the same Gypaetus barbatus, the baardaasvoël, as critically endangered, with about 200 pairs.
I cherish the ancient name lammergeier, German for “lambs vulture” (they don’t hunt lambs), which gives an idea of the size and strength of this, the largest European bird of prey.
Ever the lammergeier, just as for me louries will always be louries, never turacos and grey go-away birds; Muriel Spark’s The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories excepted. Adopting global bird-naming conventions used by the International Ornithological Congress has seen the 2010 Newman’s and the Roberts guides change many long-held, traditional common names.
So seek not the Rameron Pigeon — it’s become the African Olive-Pigeon while remaining Columba arquatrix; the scientific names for birds using Latin and Greek haven’t flown away.
In classical legend it was a lammergeier, mistaking the bald head of the Greek playwright Aeschylus for a rock, that dropped a tortoise on the shiny dome. In fact, Aeschylus died rather less suddenly at Gela in southern Sicily.
As Roberts II records of the bearded vulture: “Often drops bones in flight on to rocky ground to break them.” A lammergeier, a tortoise, a great tragedian’s head: those are among the many reasons that we should care about birds and their world, which is ours too.