“Birds and Men, The Bird Life of British Towns, Villages, Gardens and Farmland” by E.M. Nicholson, Collins Press, 1951
I have just finished reading “Birds and Men” by E.M. Nicholson. Anne got me this book as a present from the online Oxfam shop. It is an original hardback.
Max Nicholson, who died in 2003 aged 98, was one of British ornithology’s giants. His developed an early interest in bird watching and began to maintain a list of birds seen from 1913 (aged 9). At Oxford he read history, and visited Greenland and British Guiana as a founder member of the University’s Exploration Club. At Oxford he organized bird counts and censuses on the University’s farm at Sanford.
According to his Wikipedia entry from which all the following comes :
“He already had published his first work in 1926, Birds in England, and had three similar books published soon after. In The Art of Bird-Watching (1931), he discussed the potential of co-operative bird watching to inform the conservation debate. This led, in 1932, to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology, of which he was the first treasurer and later chairman (1947–1949).
In 1949 he oversaw Part 3 of The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act which established a British state research council for natural sciences and ‘biological service’, The Nature Conservancy (1949–1973), and allowed for the legal protection of National Nature Reserves and Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). He replaced Captain Cyril Diver as Director General of The Nature Conservancy in 1952 and served until 1966… In 1961, he together with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott and Guy Mountfort formed the organising group that created the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) (now the World Wide Fund for Nature).
He was also a founder of the International Institute for Environment and Development. In 1966 he set up and headed Land Use Consultants, remaining with them until 1989… In 1978 Nicholson was instrumental in founding the ENDS Report which was later to become a highly influential journal for environmental policy specialists. In 1947–1948, with the then director general of the United Nations’ scientific and education organisation UNESCO, Julian Huxley, he was involved in forming the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN) (now International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN))…
From 1951 to 1960 he was the senior editor of “British Birds” and was the chief editor of The Birds of the Western Palearctic (“BWP”, 1977–1994, OUP) from 1965–1992. He was the only author to stay with the project from start to end, personally writing the habitat sections of all species in the nine volumes… In 1976 he was an instrumental part of the setting up of Britain’s first urban ecology park and the Trust for Urban Ecology…He was President of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds from 1980–1985, helped set up the New Renaissance Group and was a trustee of Earthwatch Europe.
As well as his ornithological activities he had a distinguished career in the civil service working for the Ministry of War Transport, attending conferences at Quebec and Cairo, and he was with Winston Churchill at the post-war peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam. From 1945 until 1952 he was private secretary to Herbert Stanley Morrison. He also chaired the committee for 1951’s Festival of Britain. During the war years he was in charge of organizing shipping operations and convoys across the Atlantic. He was involved in the planning of “Operation Overlord”, the invasion of Europe.
He wrote many books including Birds In England (1926), How Birds Live (1927), The Art of Bird-Watching (1931) and The Environmental Revolution : A Guide for the New Masters of the World (1970)”
This book also has the wonderful addition of 42 colour photographs and 41 black and white photographs by the bird photography pioneer Eric Hosking so in every way it is a classic bird book.
Basically the book is split into bird habitats – open country, farmland, towns and cities etc. and many of the birds found in these habitats are described in terms of their relative frequency, events that may have led to their increase or decrease, their nesting, breeding and feeding habits etc. As well as fascinating accounts of the lives of birds the book is imbued with a concern to understand the ecology of it all and this is perhaps even more interesting as a result of the passage of time since the book was written. At times he speculates as to the possible future for certain species of birds as the modernisation of farms and cities gathers pace. From our position in history this makes for very interesting reading and all the more so because he is very measured in his judgements and speculations neither looking for a doomsday scenario or the opposite as a result of human development. He is at pains to point out the birds themselves have complex systems to control their own numbers and to make sure that the available food supplies do not get exhausted to the point where species can become extinct. In the present age such sophistication of argument is not that easily found so this makes for a very satisfying read.
At first glance this might seem to be an outdated book but I venture to suggest that its historical context makes it all the more interesting from the modern viewpoint and there are many parts of the book where you can see that many modern writers are merely quoting his work. I found it a really good read , full of interest – possibly at least partly because it was published in the year of my birth so that the natural and technological world that he describes as emerging is that of the world I grew up in – perhaps typified by his discussion of the decline in Sparrows as a result of the decline of horses for horsepower in favour of tractors and trucks.
Eric Hosking’s photographs add a great deal to the book and they must have set a very high bar for photographers that followed. Although very many of the illustrations are of birds on the nest, he extends the art beyond this into birds in flight and bird behaviour as well.
Click Here For A Guardian newspaper Obituary of Max Nicholson