A really hip book on birdwatching

THIS week, I will diverge from reports of local events in nature, the marvellous humpback whale displays in Wexford, and the shoals of sprats in the seas off west Cork, to tell readers about a book I’ve greatly enjoyed called Birding from the Hip: A Sound Approach Anthology.

It’s a bizarre title for a bird book, but, then, it’s a medley of text and sound and as much about the attitude and activities of birder-author, Anthony McGeehan, and his obsessive birder friends, as it is about the birds themselves. His gang of bird-questers and sound recordists don’t do “birding as a hobby”; this is hard-nosed, dedicated “birding from the hip” like ‘shooting from the hip’, not only on the shores of Belfast Lough during the Troubles, where they were regularly challenged at gunpoint by the British army, but also in freezing fog on Spanish lakes, recording the dawn chorus of cranes.

The book is a joy; it is beautifully produced and includes two CDs on the inside cover, with McGeehan and wife reading extracts from the text. The man is a self-effacing, funny, knowledgeable and very honest writer, and, if anything, his wife, who gets a couple of chapters, is even funnier. She regards the behaviour of her husband as he might observe the behaviour of some weird feathered species; he is a ‘quare hawk’, for sure. In one of her pieces, entitled Gulls ‘n’ Roses, she recall how, in the west of Ireland, to where they had travelled from Belfast to view “the chief object of his desire,” a rare Iceland Gull, he submerged himself under the bedclothes in their hotel room to better view photos he had taken on his digital camera, leaving her in a resounding silence which she didn’t dare interrupt. She thought “maybe I’ll go out for a drive in the car. At least the woman’s voice on the Sat Nav will talk to me.”