Digitalt nytrykk av original fra 1974 (print on demand)
Forlagets egne omtale:
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. 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.
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.
