Seventy Years of Birdwatching

H.G Alexander

• Publisher: T & AD Poyser
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781408136645
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781408136980
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Biological Sciences

This is a book about birdwatching, birdwatchers and, above all, birds. It is, in some measure, also a history of the development of modern ornithology in Britain - although the author's birdwatching extended over parts of three continents, Europe, India and North America.

Seventy Years of Birdwatching is not truly an autobiography, there is too little about the author in it, though the personality of this exceptional, shy and gentle man comes through. H. G. Alexander began birdwatching in earnest in 1898 and has never stopped. He has met or corresponded with most of the leading ornithologists of this century; his first article in British Birds appeared in 1909, and it may surprise many to discover how much of practical ornithology that is deliberated today was debated and practised so many years ago.

During more than seventy years the author has witnessed important changes in resident and migrant bird populations in Britain. Dungeness, for example, was almost as uninhabited as the moon when he first knew it and Kentish Plovers bred there by the score, but Carrion Crows were a rarity. Over the years he saw the gradual decline of the Red-backed Shrike, Corncrake and Wryneckbut he was instrumental in bringing one bird to Britain, the hitherto 'undiscovered' Willow Tit which he, with others, helped to identify.

Fifty years ago H. G. Alexander had already covered scores of six-inch Ordnance Survey maps with his mapping records and these, together with his notebooks and correspondence with contemporaries, supply an absorbing glimpse of a birdwatching era that was fascinatingly like and yet unlike our own. Perhaps this is why today's birdwatcher has only to turn the pages to be enthralled.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• CHAPTER 01 - Beginnings
• CHAPTER 02 - Some British Ornithologists: 1907–1940
• CHAPTER 03 - The First of January
• CHAPTER 04 - The Kentish Weald: Population and Territory
• CHAPTER 05 - Firecrests, Willow Tits, Water Pipits
• CHAPTER 06 - Migration
• CHAPTER 07 - Dungeness and Romney Marsh
• CHAPTER 08 - West Midland Reservoirs
• CHAPTER 09 - Peveril Point, Dorset
• CHAPTER 10 - Winter Birds in the Mid-Atlantic States of North America
• CHAPTER 11 - Some Indian Birds
• CHAPTER 12 - Do Birds Migrate Over the Himalayas?
• CHAPTER 13 - Rare Birds
• CHAPTER 14 - Some Problems and Notions