Saturday Review: Book of the week: High as a kite: Tim Dee spots a glorious encyclopedia of native British birds: Birds Britannica by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey 518pp, Chatto & Windus, pounds 35

• Published in: The Guardian (London)
• Main Author: Dee, Tim
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Guardian News & Media Limited 20.08.2005
• Subjects: Cocker, Mark; Dee, Tim; Mabey, Richard
• ISSN: 0261-3077

Birds Britannica is a companion volume to [Richard Mabey]'s Flora Britannica , published in 1996. Mabey is named as co-author but, as the introduction explains, his severe depression (described in his own book Nature Cure ) prevented him from playing a major role in its compilation for several years, and the book's voice is [Mark Cocker]'s. In him British bird life has found its perfect encyclopedist, able to draw together etymology, folklore and ornithology, his own life- long bird-watching and several hundred contributions from the public. The book's ordering of material says something about how we understand bird life today. Though its energies are directed towards inclusivity - mixing folklore and science - it still relies on naming species as its organising principle. Coleridge's albatross gets a mention because there have been some "real" records of the bird in British waters, including the romantic failure "Albert", who returned for many years to a gannet colony in Shetland looking for a mate. There are no phoenixes here, and it is fascinating to watch Cocker quietly interrogating poets, challenging their identifications or correcting their mistakes. Ted Hughes's "Hawk in the Rain", for instance, was actually a kestrel, which is a falcon. This is a fertile field, as we continue to see birds as poetic stimulants - my own rough survey, as chair of this year's Forward Poetry Prizes, has shown three times as many new poems on blackbirds as on the Iraq war and 9/11. There are reasons to be cheerful, too: there are more marsh harriers and avocets in Britain than ever before, collared doves have arrived with dazzling success, cranes have returned after centuries away, and many other birds are doing well. Not that we should be complacent, as mysteries remain even among our most familiar birds. Ninety million house martins drain out of Eurasia every autumn, but exactly where the birds go in Africa is unclear. Of all the 290,000 that have been ringed in Britain and Ireland, only one has ever been recovered south of the Sahara. Nor do we yet know how the innocent shag got caught up in an orgy of innuendo, although it seems jazz should be blamed, not the bird.