Waiting for the Albino Dunnock by Rosamond Richardson
Waiting for the Albino Dunnock: How Birds Can Change Your Life by Rosamond Richardson Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99
The title alone gives a perfect sense of Rosamond Richardson’s book. It is rare and charming and unforgettable. The pages are filled with a glorious wonder at the living world, for Richardson possesses ‘holy curiosity’, as Einstein called the qualities of watchful patience and joyful astonishment which she exemplifies.
Until 2009, Richardson’s interest was in wildflowers. Then, after a picnic at Mycenae, she went to look for wild tortoises in the scrubby, stony hills nearby. She scrambled about in company with a zestful ornithologist who would come to a sudden halt crying, ‘There’s a woodchat shrike!’ She returned from the walk radiant with happiness, filled with what theologians call agape and psychologists call oceanic feelings, and determined to learn to identify birds, to learn their impact on our cultural life and to celebrate their hold on our imagination.
Richardson began her learning experience with a July walk through Breckland in Norfolk. Other locations include riverbanks in Essex, Lakenheath Fen, Dunwich Forest, the Ouse washes, Spain, Macedonia, the Outer Hebrides and the Cairngorms. Richardson is lyrical about the countryside, elegiac about the creatures lost to pesticides and the landscape scarred by ribbon development, but there is a wiry ruthlessness about her approach and never a touch of sentimentality. She also makes elegant excursions into taxidermy, photography and the touching story of the murderer known as the Birdman of Alcatraz.
I enjoy the variety of birdsong and plumage, but know little of ornithology. Richardson’s book captivated me with her descriptions and explanations of bird voices, habitats, silhouettes, flight patterns, migrations, mating games, food and vulnerability to predators. Readers are uplifted by beautiful pen portraits of such birds as nightjars, kingfishers, cormorants, hobbys, snipe and wheatears.
Richardson’s throwaway facts are transfixing. A sedge warbler never sings the same song twice, but reshuffles some fifty elements to sing new songs, for example. Airline pilots have seen barheaded geese flying over the Himalayas at an altitude of five and a half miles.
It is her account of bird migration that fills one with wonder. In the spring each year, some sixteen million birds arrive in Britain, having flown thousands of miles through sandstorms, crosswinds and cloudbursts, surviving windfarms, sportsmen’s guns and gunfire and predators. The Arctic tern, which stops in Britain on its trans-global journey, flies from the Antarctic, where it winters, to the Arctic, where it breeds, twice a year for up to 34 years. This little bird can cover one and a half million miles in its lifetime.
The northern wheatear, which is only six inches long and weighs about an ounce, flies from breeding grounds in Alaska across Siberia and the Arabian desert, averaging 180 miles a day, along migratory corridors that were learned millions of years before the evolution of homo sapiens. The bar-tailed godwit, a bird half the weight of a curlew, flies in a single hop of 8,000 miles, without rest or food for a week, on its way from Alaska to New Zealand. Are these seemingly supernatural powers of navigation guided by the sun or the moon, the stars, Earth’s electromagnetic field, chemical mechanisms in the eye, receptors in the beak that are sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field, or by ancestral memory?
I did not realise until I had finished the book and read the publisher’s blurb that it is billed as a memoir. It is the most modest, recessive memoir that I have ever read. One gathers that Richardson is a solitary being, inclined to rueful melancholy, and perhaps disappointed in people whom she has trusted. She finished the book while undergoing prolonged hospital treatment for grave illness. She does not mention that her father was Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge for a quarter of a century, and one of the masterminds at Bletchley Park, yet I fancy his subliminal influence is everywhere in the book. Her prose has the clarity, poise, precision and transcendent beauty of someone who was brought up reading the classics and knows the joy of finding the right words. Every sentence is perfect, but there is nothing fancy or twee.
I reflected on the congruence between the quiet watchfulness of ornithologists and intelligence officers. After all, Ian Fleming named his hero after James Bond, the avian expert who wrote the definitive work Birds of the West Indies. To order from Wordery for £15.12 incl p&p, go to http://www.theoldie.co.uk/books