Langford Press, 2011; hbk, 352pp, colour and black-and-white illustrations throughout; ISBN 978-1-904078-37-1; Subbuteo code M20951, £50.00
This is the latest in the rapidly growing Langford Press ‘Wildlife in Art’ series, and it continues the tradition of sumptuous, large-format wildlife art books. Its theme is bird migration – and its capacity to inspire and delight – but at its core is a constant and rather darker message: that the migrant birds we so treasure face increasing, largely human, threats on their annual journeys. The book is thus not only a celebration of migrant birds in words and pictures, but a heartfelt plea for their conservation.
The book contains a series of essays by over 30 contributors, each reflecting on their own experience with migrant birds and, in most cases, focusing on a particular conservation challenge. The contributors come from around the world, so there are pieces on, for example, the songbird migrants of North America, Honey-buzzards Pernis apivorus and harriers Circus in Sweden, Spoon-billed Sandpipers Eurynorhynchus pygmeus in east Asia and visible migration in Norfolk. The text is, however, dominated by contributions from the Mediterranean – Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia and, above all, Malta. The accounts of the pressures faced by migrants there confirm our worst fears, but there are also well-written and intelligent analyses of the political, cultural and legal issues involved in this illegal bird hunting, as well as inspirational accounts of ‘on the ground’ conservation work, often in difficult and highly stressful circumstances. The accounts are all very different, but together they succeed in tempering the gloom with hope for the future.
The heart of the book is, however, its artwork. Here we have a mouthwatering selection of work from a host of well-known contemporary bird and wildlife artists. The variety of styles is dizzying, from the vivid immediacy of Bruce Pearson’s field sketches to Greg Poole’s highly stylised images and the more traditional renderings of Donald Watson. Not everyone will like all the images but everyone will surely find something here to inspire them. My personal favourites are Barry van Dusen’s exquisite portrayals of North American songbirds, particularly his Palm Warblers in Bayberry and Female American Redstart in Poison Ivy.
This book, then, is a delight to the eye as well as the mind. Its few shortcomings, however, are not the responsibility of either the authors or the artists. In a nutshell, the book suffers from a lack of firm editorial control. As acknowledged in the ‘Editors Notes’, the authors were given free rein to write what they liked, with the editors offering only ‘light touch suggestions’, but the inevitable result is a wide variety of styles and subject matter which does not always add up to a coherent whole. There is, particularly in the Maltese contributions, a degree of repetition and, earlier in the book, even an essay on sharks! A more interventionist editorial approach with a stronger initial brief could have produced a much tighter and more homogeneous set of essays. Similarly, a disappointingly high number of errors have slipped past the proofreaders. Typos and inconsistent capitalisations are not difficult to find and there are too many instances of caption errors. Mike Henry’s delightful sketches of harriers suffer particularly badly in this respect, with images of Marsh C. aeruginosus, Hen C. cyaneus and Pallid Harriers C. macrourus all being captioned ‘Montagu’s Harrier’. A further wonderful set of sketches of a Pallid Harrier over Swedish farmland, though correctly captioned, appears twice, firstly, and entirely appropriately, in a chapter on Swedish harriers, yet, somewhat bizarrely, it appears again in the chapter on Malta.
Nevertheless, apart from these editorial and proofreading shortcomings, this book is a magnificent achievement. Its images transport the reader to a world full of migrating birds, while its words pull no punches in highlighting conservation priorities and in pointing the way to a more enlightened future. This book is, as its title claims, truly a celebration of bird migration. It is also a call to conserve what are perhaps the most inspirational birds of all. Although not cheap, it fully deserves a place on the large bottom ‘art book’ shelf of your bookcase, and with the editors apparently working on a second volume, ‘There and Back Again’, we can be sure of another visual feast to come.
Andy Stoddart
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