Book description
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.
