Simon Barnes: How to Be a (Bad) Birdwatcher

I’ve put off reading this book longer than anyone I know, annoyed, I suppose, by the would-be cuteness of the title and the relentless efforts of the marketers when first it came out. But yesterday, lingering at the public library, I noticed the small volume on the new-books shelf, and figured, why not?

Why not, indeed. I still dislike the title: it feels too much like a dig at those of us who would rather be styled good birders than bad birdwatchers. But just a few pages in, I understood what Barnes was talking about, and by the time I finished this gracefully written little book, I found myself wishing, with him, that more good birders could be ‘bad birdwatchers’, too.

Originally issued for a British audience, (Bad) Birdwatcher has been revised slightly for the North American market. For the most part, the adjustments are small and effective, but there are a few pages where the literary seams show; readers not fluent in the birding cultures of both the Old World and the New will likely be thrown off, for example, when Barnes’s text passes without transition from a discussion of American treetops to a description of the song of Mistle Thrush, and there is the occasional sentence that reads all too clearly like a sop thrown to the US reader (in general, any line containing the word “chickadee” is suspect!).

But none of that mars what is really a jewel of a book, part birding memoir, part how-to guide, part low-key meditation on what it all means.

Most of the book is written in the first person, and the narration reveals an authorial persona both charming and discreet. The anecdotes recounted here never strain for a thrill, the stories never strive for a punch line. Narrow escapes from lions and locomotives fade into the background as the author focuses instead on tamer episodes, episodes not unlike those punctuating any birder’s career in the field: with the difference, of course, that Barnes is a fine writer with an almost perfect control of tone and timing, and stories that would fall flat in the telling for most of us become on these pages occasions for relish and reflection.

Most of the stories, of course, are about birds, but Barnes introduces an extensive supporting cast of “bad” birdwatching mentors and companions, each of whom he treats with affection and respect: shirtless Tim, Bob the hyrax chaser, Starr the conjurer of Central Park warblers. Most of these figures pass in and out of the narrative just as they passed in and out of the author’s birding life. One of them, though, Barnes’s father, is constantly present, even when he goes unmentioned, and it is his recurrence that gives Barnes’s story its structure and its significance.

The elder Barnes was, as the book’s dedication identifies him, “the first bad birdwatcher [the author] ever met,” and these pages trace not just the son’s progress as a birder but his changing relationship with a father who is by turns generous, uncomprehending, sensitive, and distant. Starting out as a birding team, father and son are pushed temporarily apart by teenage rebellion, professional pressures, and all the trivial accidents and incidents of family life; the illness and death of Simon Barnes’s mother, his father’s wife, was occasion for their reconciliation, and by the end of the book, we see them spending time in the field together again, enjoying the birds, the birding, and each other. This family saga is the more touching for the elegant subtlety with which Barnes retells it: no pathos, no drama, no blame and little guilt, just an occasional sober aside that lets the careful reader reconstruct a story that is both familiar and deeply felt.

The story of Barnes, his father, and, eventually, his own son Joe, is the strong skeleton of the book, the framework around which the author assembles the hints and tips promised in the book’s title. This is not, however, a typical how-to book: it does not provide the tremendous wealth of practical detail found, for example, in Pete Dunne’s On Bird Watching, or the preternatural sophistication of David Sibley’s Birding Basics. Instead, each chapter offers a simple, basic commandment: to look, to listen, to learn the importance of time and place; Barnes cuts through the techno-geek knot of the binocular debate with the Solomonic pronouncement that anything that brings the birds closer is likely to be just fine! Simplistic? Yes, probably; but again and again as I read, I found myself thinking that this is just the sort of broad-swath advice that new birders and potential birders can actually do something with, and I am considering adding this to the list of basic books I recommend to neophytes.

Where Barnes truly distinguishes himself, though, is in his thoughtful musings on what all this birding means. Too often in books of this sort, such pondering becomes ponderous, meditation becomes moralizing, and I end up flipping quickly through the last pages of each chapter, where “messages” and “conclusions” tend to lurk. Here, in contrast, the author’s thoughts grow naturally out of his observations, and there is none of the strain so evident, for example, in Dunford’s Life Birds, where deep thoughts are drawn with great effort from every clunkily narrated sighting.

If you haven’t read this book, do. And if you have, well, I envy you for having got around to it before I did.