Talented high-flier spreads his wings
BIRDWATCHERS scan their bookshelves with the same excitement and veneration as when they gaze over an estuary carpeted with sandpipers and wildfowl.
The hunter-gatherer gene that drives the pursuit and tally of elusive species on treasured checklists also manifests itself in the way birders assemble libraries.
And identification guides are the alpha specimens for the rewarding pleasure of putting the right name to the right bird, ready to fly off the bookcase to answer any which-bird-was-that? conundrum.
Suddenly, out of the blue, a dazzling flash of electric aquamarine to be exact, a new title has alighted and taken pride of place next to my treasured Witherby’s Handbook Of British Birds.
This new interloper does not explain how to tell a chiffchaff from a willow warbler or decipher the vagaries of gull moult. But Alex Preston’s sublime As Kingfishers Catch Fire has opened my eyes to a whole new dimension of birding that I overlooked during my misspent younger years chasing rarities.
While I spent my teens being dug out of sewage slurry in pursuit of pectoral sandpipers, this most accomplished of writers delved deep into literature and discovered birds are as resplendent in the prose and poetry of literary greats as they are numerous in migration hotspots or woodland glades.
The catalyst of Preston’s bookish birding forays was adolescence. Grunge and girls. Fears of being declared a bird nerd by peers sent him on literary expeditions to seek out species on the page rather than deep in boggy marshes or windswept hillsides. Such adventures have given him an insightful understanding of a state described by Gerard Manley Hopkins as “instress”.
Preston describes this condition as “when a writer manages to capture the ‘inscape’ of a bird, the disparate elements that make each creature identifiably unique, expressing what Hopkins described as its ‘simple and beautiful oneness’.”
This is a definition that I constantly used to calibrate my journey through his interpretation of how Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Clare and Hopkins, to name but a few, understood the birds they had immortalised in their works.
Preston’s ornithological expedition through these collective writings teaches us how to appreciate the freest of all wild creatures in their metaphysical state. We see the stooping peregrine through the eyes of JA Baker and starlings as perceived by the late poet laureate Ted Hughes. In all, 21 common species are profiled: kestrel, wren, nightjar and of course the dazzling kingfisher, to name a few.
AS A life-long birdwatcher, I thought I knew every bird intimately until my eyes were widened by this phenomenal book that commends the author’s own prowess as a writer as highly as those whose works he explores.
Those giants of language who have expressed their discoveries and emotions about the planet’s avian wonders with ink can enhance our communions with nature.
Preston’s exquisite narrative is a joy. Written with such elegant language, the black print shimmers like a magpie’s plume on the page, stealing the heart and mesmerising the eye. It soars with all those books I hold dear.