Natural Selection

Recently on Shetland I took the opportunity to do some bird related reading in the evenings on the less productive days. I started with ‘A Mind Blowing Trip To A Planet Called Earth’ by Nigel Wheatley. This weighed in at a whopping 737 pages, and when I got through it I was after something more concise and user-friendly.

I saw a post on Facebook by Mark Cocker about the new book by Aasheesh Pittie called ‘The Living Air’. I find Mark a good judge of nature writing, and the subtitle ‘The Pleasures of Birds and Birdwatching’ sounded like the thing for me on the back of a book that was a bit of a slog whilst the birding was quiet. Getting back to basics if you like.

There were a number of things that immediately drew me in to the work. At around 300 pages it’s not too daunting. There are 47 short to medium length essays, so it’s a great book to dip into and read a couple of things at a time. Basically though it’s just extremely well written. The love of birds and birding Aasheesh has comes through and the turn of phrases in many places is excellent.

There are some areas where the discussion gets a bit ‘bird nerdy’, for example detail on notebooks, but it’s generally engaging. It’s also interesting to read about a birder and birding in India, as a counterpoint to Britain even though the fundamental issues are often similar. Most foreign birding books I’ve read are about ‘Big Year’ attempts and this is very different.

It’s an interesting point whether a book like this would be written about UK birdwatching these days. I suppose the nearest I have come across is the work of Stephen Moss, Lev Parikian and yes Mark Cocker himself. I would praise this book by saying it’s in the same class as their works.

You can currently get the Kindle version of the book on Amazon for £3.61, so if you like birding literature you haven’t really got much to lose at that price.

Sample chapter frontispiece