A birder’s life and times

A memoir from Norfolk birding stalwart Moss Taylor contains a number of fascinating stories.

ON a cold winter night in the Seventies at Sheringham Youth Hostel, Norfolk, an excited group of youngsters on a Young Ornithologists’ Club course sat enthralled as a guest lecturer regaled them with stories of birds and birding on the Norfolk coast. One anecdote involved a plaster-of-paris model of a Black-winged Stilt that was stuck out on Arnold’s Marsh at Cley and ‘ticked off’ by many unsuspecting – and presumably not very diligent – observers.

The storyteller was Moss Taylor, and the tale is retold in this very readable account of a birding life well lived. This reviewer was in the original audience, so it was a treat to be reminded of the yarn in this look back over 70 bird-filled years, richly supplemented with material from some of the author’s earlier books, magazine articles and newspaper columns.

Moving from urban south

London at the age of seven to the green fringe of metropolitan Essex, the author recounts the experiences of his formative years with clarity and fondness. He started ringing in the late Fifties before any training or a licence was required, but quickly got involved with the BTO Ringing Group at Romford Sewage Farm and went on to acquire the proper permits.

Ringing was to interrupt his studies when the opportunity

arose to join an expedition to Morocco in April 1965 as medical officer – despite not being fully qualified. The first bird out of the nets was a male Collared Flycatcher, previously unrecorded in Morocco, though the team went on to catch six more, as well as the first River Warbler for the country. Other overseas adventures follow later in the book, from visiting Australia and sailing along the Amazon to tour-leading in Trinidad and Tobago and travelling on the ill-fated 2014 Marco Polo cruise, famously hit by norovirus and violent storms.

Moss Taylor has been in his

adopted county of Norfolk since 1969, working from 1972 until retirement as a GP in Sheringham, where he still lives. Many of the memories in the book come from this half century in the county, where he has loomed large on the birding scene – from having ringed a staggering 22,000 birds in his garden and pioneered ringing at Dead Man’s Wood (now Sheringham Bird Observatory) to monitoring his Weybourne Camp patch for more than 40 years and co-authoring the benchmark county avifauna.

There are tales of places and personalities, rare birds, big days, Nancy’s Café and much more besides that should appeal way beyond the county’s boundaries. This is a relaxing, enjoyable personal history spanning different eras of the British birding scene, from a bygone age when young naturalists routinely collected eggs right up to the current pandemic and lockdown in spring 2020.

Read and enjoy. Dominic Mitchell