Birding from the Hip

I imagine that Anthony McGeehan needs no introduction for European birders, having written columns for Birdwatch and Dutch Birding for years. But I must admit that I hadn’t had the pleasure of reading anything of his until receiving this anthology from the Sound Approach. For those unfortunate souls like me, you can think of McGeehan as the European Pete Dunne. Or Dunne as the American McGeehan, depending on your point of view.

Birding from the Hip is an anthology of 50 essays, mostly reprinted from his regular magazine columns. Based on my earlier comparison, anyone who knows how I feel about Pete Dunne may assume that I enjoyed this book. And they’d be right. McGeehan’s columns are insightful, interesting, and extremely amusing.

Most recount birding trips and adventures around Ireland and further afield. But a few others stand out. “The buck starts here”, an essay about learning from your identification mistakes, is one of my favorites, and should be required reading for anyone becoming serious about birding. A scathing indictment of the collection of vagrants (shooting for scientific purposes) was well timed, being re-published right around the time of the announcement that a Crowned Slaty-flycatcher, a first for North America, had been collected in Louisiana (scathing indictment on that incident).

Besides the similar subject matter, the writing style is very much like Dunne’s. In one of the essays, the author describes hearing a Hermit Thrush singing in a thunderstorm. He was hoping to get a handle on the song so that he could recognize it in the future, but instead got something so much more meaningful:

The Hermit Thrush thought it was singing to attract a mate, but it made a permanent work of art in my head: the decaying damp of mossy logs, the dignity of living trees, an expectation of lightning about to strike. I refuse to succumb to euphemisms to describe what we heard. It was such a song that, when the bird stopped singing, you felt like whispering Amen.

Surprisingly, not all of the essays were written by Anthony; several of them were contributed by his wife. These are just as entertaining, and provide a point of view rarely seen in birding literature – that of the non-birding spouse. Her descriptions of her husband’s behavior are at once hilarious and sobering. I’m sure most birders have also been guilty of Anthony’s foibles at one time or another, so many of Mrs. McGeehan’s comments, though firmly tongue in cheek, may hit close to home. Update: Apparently, the entries attributed to his wife were actually still written by Anthony. Definitely fooled me on my first read-through.

This anthology is liberally illustrated with some wonderful photographs, most taken by the author himself. Some of the birds shown in the photos, however, aren’t identified in a caption. Sometimes it’s to make a point, which I can understand, but most of the time not. This could prove to be frustrating to readers who aren’t familiar with European birds. But on the whole, the photographs add considerably to the book.

The two previous books published by The Sound Approach both had a unique horizontal orientation and accompanying CDs, and Birding from the Hip continues this trend. The landscape orientation, where the book is wider than it is tall, works well for the subject matter of the other two books. But for this one it is just unwieldy and unneeded. However, I must admit that some of the photos here take full advantage of the layout. I almost reconsidered my judgment when I saw the picture of the Northern Hawk Owl on page 88 for the first time (see below; the imperfections in the picture here are all a result of my photographing the page, the picture in the book is amazing and reproduced immaculately).

Mr. and Mrs. McGeehan narrate a selection of their essays on the two included CDs. These 16 tracks are extremely well produced, with accompanying music and sounds. During the one about listening to the Hermit Thrush, you hear it all on the CD just as you would imagine it sounded like during the actual encounter: the rain, thunder, and that heavenly song. I had some difficulty understanding the speaker at times, due to my inexperience with real Irish accents (as opposed to those you hear on TV). So if this may be an issue for you, I would recommend reading the essays before listening to them. For me, the CDs were a nice inclusion, but not necessary.

Recommendation

This is not the sort of book that I would have expected to come from The Sound Approach, having relatively little to do with bird vocalizations, but I’m glad that it has. It was a true pleasure to read, even for someone who didn’t recognize the import of seeing a Ortolan Bunting in Ireland or understand any of the football (soccer) references. Birding from the Hip is easily recommended to anyone who enjoys well-written and humorous stories about birding.

You can order this book from Amazon.co.uk or directly from the publisher.