“The Joy of Birdwatching” — a book review

Most readers, the peripapatic ones, may know the Lonely Planet house as a publisher of travel guides segregated by country, city, or other geographic area, as many travel guides are.  A variation on this practice and, perhaps, a natural outgrowth of it, is The Joy of Birdwatching (by multiple authors, with a Foreword by Tenijah Hamilton, previously interviewed here).  The focus of this book is not on a geographic area as such, but on birds – specifically, on outstanding birdwatching opportunities in sixty different locales around the world.

The design of the book is attractive and easy to use.  Each of the book’s “chapters” (for want of a better word) consists of four pages (two pages facing each other, times two).  The first page, continued over on to the third, gives an in-depth discussion of the featured site, such as Boulders, southwest of Cape Town, home to a large colony of “waddling, hopping and scurrying Aftican penguins”:

As one might expect, the bird photography is excellent.  The analogous page for the marshes at Minsmere, in southeastern England shows the  birds there (wrens, starlings, avocets, and bitterns, like this one, inflating to, seemingly, twice its normal size in preparation for its boom call “right at the edge of audible sound”):

Birding, the author of the Minsmere chapter says, “is 25% scientific investigation, 25% natural curiosity, 25% thrill-of-the-chase, and 25% meditation” – with the latter, meditation, the prominent feature in that calm and quiet place of few humans but many (seasonal) birds, where “whispering grasses create orchestral overtures as breezes blow in from the North Sea.”

On the second page of each chapter is a Q&A section, with the A’s provided by a local birding guide or expert.  For a chapter on Andean condors in southern Peru, the owner of Colca Trek Lodge, Vlado Soto, advises that condors appear, and are active, in the Cañón del Colca all day (not, as some guides say, only in the morning); and that “the trails aren’t well-marked, and GPS won’t help you.”  And the Northern Territory (Australia) poet, birdwatcher, and teacher Kaye Aldenhoven, gives the counterintuitive (or at least surprising) information that great bowerbirds, like these two young ones, practicing their “alfresco architecture,”

are “unfazed by [human] company” at least when they’re hungry, and gorging on schoolkids’ lunchtime leftovers.

(In short, for those planning birding expeditions, the Q&A inserts are a useful adjunct to the 10,000 Birds own “New(ish) Blog Post Series” on Bird Guides of the World.”)

The book is divided into five sections:  Africa & the Middle East, Americas and Antarctica, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, with individual entries ranging from the relatively prosaic (such as “iconic American birds in Boston’s [Mt. Auburn] cemetery”) to the relatively exotic (Mauritius and the Mauritius kestrel which, in the 1970’s and after DDT, had a wild population of four but is now soaring “back from the brink of oblivion”).

(N.B.:  the adjectives “prosaic” and “exotic” are here used from the point of view of an Appalachian-American; your idea of exotic may differ!  No judgments!  Some people even consider Appalachia exotic — in fact, most do. . .  )

The third and fourth pages of each chapter (as in the African penguins sample, below)

 give (in the “Find Your Joy” insert) instructions on how to get to the site, and best times for viewing; and, “Other Places to Peek at Penguins” (or, in other chapters, “Other Tambopata Clay Licks” (in a chapter on Peru), or “Other Top Spots for Migratory Birds” (such as at Falsterbo, Sweden, where 500 million migratory birds stop every autumn, and where the candy-colored beach huts look charming):

Whether you’re planning a birding trip or just fantasizing about one, The Joy of Birdwatching will be an ideal companion.  It will pique your curiosity and interest about places you may never have considered — or known about — and give you a head start on planning, with good practical advice and guidance.

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The Joy of Birdwatching.  By various authors, Foreward by  Tenijah Hamilton. Lonely Planet Global Limited, September 2024, 272 pp., US $27.99, UK £22.99, ISBN 978-1-83758-265-5.