Self Isolating Bird Books from the 70s

Today's video is here 

Observer's Book of Birds

 Skylark & Swallow page

In today’s video I thought I’d do something different and talk a little about the books which were available about British Birds for a beginner in about 1970.

Green Woodpecker & Great Spotted Woodpecker

The first book I remember getting was the Observer’s Book of Birds.  I must have spent hours looking again and again at the wonderful Victorian plates by Archibald Thornburn.  On the whole many of those held good in 1970, although there were some notable exceptions.  One noticeable feature of most of the post-war birds books is that they very rarely were in colour throughout.  The Observer's book would have a page of double colour plates, followed by a double page of plates in black and white.  This wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds as the birds which were generally more colourful than others were usually, but not always depicted in colour, and dull birds were often in black and white.

Green Woodpecker & Great Spotted Woodpecker

The second book I remember was a Christmas present: Bird Spotting by John Holland.  I’ve never seen this mentioned elsewhere, so I guess it wasn’t highly regarded, or is not well-remembered.  This one in particular fell to bits from over use, so the book depicted is an eBay replacement.  Again, some birds were reproduced in full colour by a contemporary artist (Rein Stuurman), in fact more birds than the Observer’s book, whilst some species were depicted in what amounts to as mere sketches.

 Woodpeckers

Linnet

 treecreeper - rather poor artwork - should be brighter white underneath & greater contrast of colours on upper parts

The third book I’ve shown is the Ladybird Book of Garden Birds.  These came out in a wide variety of titles, usually focussing on habitat, but there was a separate books on “Birds of Prey”, which included Owls and Shrikes.  The Ladybird books were fairly well illustrated - always in colour - but they didn’t always have the accuracy of highlighting ID features which some other books did.

 Woodpecker Plate

 Woodpecker info Page

Finally, a book I didn’t have at the time, but which would probably have been of more practical use than the others was “The Field Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe” by Peterson, Mountford and Hollom.  This contained colour plates in which whole families of birds were grouped together, and ID features to look out for were highlighted by arrows on the plates.  For reasons of economy some less colourful, or less often seen families were shown in black-and-white.  The text opposite the plate give the common name and the scientific name, plus the page number of elsewhere in the book where more information was provided.  This was the only one of these books which included distribution maps.  Nearly all modern books provide more detailed fairly accurate distribution maps.  

Skua Plate - Black & White

Yesterday's walk along the main road of the cemetery is here