Why a good nature book is forever

SURELY everyone who has a child in the house should have a book on the natural history of Ireland if they can afford it.

A good new year’s resolution would be to buy one.

A bird book is an obvious choice and there are many guides on the market. Birds are the most visible wildlife, the most numerous, most colourful and most diverse. Irish species range from semi-domesticated robins and blue tits to very undomesticated ravens, from common-or-garden blackbirds to migrants that arrive from the Arctic ice or the Siberian steppe and are wild as the mist and the snow.

Nature watching costs nothing but gets one out into the open air, and what one sees is never the same two days running. It can brighten up life with amazing sights, taking us into a parallel world where there is always something new to behold no matter how long one has been looking.

It can be inspiring too. The whales I saw spouting off the Seven Heads last week was a personal case in point and so also was the visit of a tiny goldcrest-wren to our bird table. Now that nature is everywhere under threat, it’s surely important that we all — especially the young — know enough to be able to keep a protective eye on our own small patch of the planet.

Some children are lucky enough to have someone in the house who is mad about wildlife and can transmit their enthusiasm. It was my father who showed me my first charm of goldfinches and explained that they were feeding on groundsel. He always put out bread for the birds, and he brought home and nursed injured barn owls which he found on the road, hit by cars. Although he worked in a bank, such interest was not unusual in his time. He, and most of his generation, were born on farms.

Whether born on the land or in the city, it is not unusual for one child in the family to show an interest in bugs, fish, animals or birds. Such interest is a good thing; it’s cheap to indulge and exercises the powers of observation. But access to an identification guide makes a world of difference. It may be a guide to birds, animals, fish, insects, wild plants, trees or the stars, or be a compendium of all that one may be encounter in nature. It will allow the child to educate himself/herself and it will stimulate the instinct to collect, to cherish and compare. It is the ‘sightings’ that modern nature-watchers collect and treasure. The reference book allows them to tick off, literally or mentally, the specimen that has been seen and painstakingly identified and there is great satisfaction in that. Victorian travellers collected everything from shrunken heads to specimens of plants for Kew. A Victorian axiom on species identification said: “Shoot it and you can identify it, don’t and it will forever be a mystery.” But instead of stuffed specimens decaying with the years, the modern day collector’s book keeps a benign record of events in nature for himself or for posterity. Bird “twitchers” take the business very seriously and travel miles to tick off a new bird. Their battered field guides are filled with ticks and notes, material for their “life list”.

Recently, I rediscovered a seminal work in my childhood, a small book which helped introduce me to the interest in wildlife I’ve never ceased to enjoy. My name is written in a scrawly hand on the flyleaf and the date is 1952.

A Beast Book for the Pocket, it is called, a small, fat, hardback reference book treating every species of wild and domestic animal in Britain and Ireland, with a chapter on the life history of each, and small maps showing their distribution. The illustrations, in full colour, are drawn by hand; colour photos in such books were then unknown. Included are breeds of cattle, sheep, goats, dogs and cats. As a boy, I pored over it for hours; it was beautiful, the drawings, the maps and it was a treasure house of information.

Coincidentally, when I reviewed Éamon de Buitleár’s autobiography some years ago, I found that he mentioned it as a watershed volume in his young life too. I still consult it. A good nature book is forever and will be treasured for years to come.