Digitalt nytrykk av original fra 1975 (print on demand)
Forlagets egen omtale:
“From
mid-January to mid-April 1935 I was off on my dilapidated bicycle, but how
different Speyside was from Breckland. In late February many crossbills were
still in flocks; I had to walk and cycle for many miles before finding my first
nest in the last week of March, when I located a small breeding group in a
plantation of old pines close to a keeper’s cottage. Thenceforward, until
1942, I followed the crossbills and slowly began to understand a little about
them. At first everything was gloriously new. I watched my crossbills mating and
discovered how subtly a winter flock changed to a mating party and from a mating
party to mated groups. I studied patterns of territory and dispersion and
watched how hens built their nests. I sat under trees and I climbed to nests. I
watched hens brooding and saw cocks feeding them. One hen pitched on my fingers
and allowed me to catch her. I still vividly recall the sharp resiny scent of
her body. I saw pairs rear their young and followed them and their broods
through the forest. Soon my notebooks were full, but this was only the
beginning.”
That extract from the book’s first chapter describes how the author began his
study of the Scottish pine-feeding crossbills, having noticed earlier that the
calls of crossbills in Rothiemurchus Forest were different from those of the
spruce-feeding common crossbills he had known in the English Breckland.
From this study and a quest for the true identity of the Speyside crossbills has
emerged that all too rare book, a work of scholarship and research that is
wholly readable, in which the author’s delight in his study subject becomes
the reader’s, too.
