Book review: Birdland by Jon Gower

Julie Brominicks

Jon Gower could write about the inside of an empty box and make it a place of wonder. Apply that talent to a splendid subject and you get something very special indeed.

From the kittiwakes and whistling Geordie builders of Newcastle to the farmers and great bustards of Salisbury Plain, Birdland is about birds and the bird-people and places of Britain. It is part memoir, part nonfiction, part plea and entirely enthralling.

Here’s language to break your heart. ‘The sorcelling song of the curlew unsettles the land, unsquilching the tent pegs of the moor’s canvas, flapping it loose.’ See? Thankfully, it’s not all like that. I mean you’d collapse wouldn’t you, all that forgetting to breathe? Such gorgeous lyricism is necessarily interspersed with humour, information and anecdote.

Although each chapter can stand in isolation (perfect podcast material), so smooth are the segues it took me a while to notice. Each is loosely organised around one or two species in a certain location. So we have corncrakes on Coll and Tiree, turtle doves in Canterbury, Brent geese at Leigh-on-Sea, Manx shearwaters on Ynys Enlli, and so on.

The avian information is interwoven with music, art and literary references, encounters with other bird-folk, and Gower’s own birding exploits, all delivered in dancing prose, resulting in a delicious mix of mystery explained and magic enhanced.

Mesmerising

Take woodcocks for example. These mesmerising birds come to my valley each winter and I’ll typically get just a glimpse as they jink between trees, leaving only a lasting, burning impression of a long-beaked silhouette. So the account of one frosty night when our intrepid author accompanied Arfon Williams on a woodcock-ringing mission across a perilous fence had my heart racing.

‘The cold flenses my face: this is winter, open sheep country, 8 o’clock at night.’ Perhaps I’d read but forgotten that woodcocks overwinter in Cymru when their Siberian breeding grounds freeze. That by dark, they ascend from wooded valleys to feed on open ground. I’m sure I never knew that the undersides of their feathers are the purest white, but now these facts are fixed in my memory because Birdland is no field guide, but adventure and sensation.

The woodcock expedition includes stalking and torchlight and nets, and after the ringing, when Welsh culture, farming and species-loss are discussed, tea. Two mugs.

Representation 

Cymru is well represented but birds know no borders, and Britain, as I can testify having just walked the Camino de Santiago wearing binoculars (‘So British!’), is known for its birders, whose secret lives Gower reveals with relish. Goose-Whisperer David Low works in the Co-op. Phil Espin, who has ticked off 631 species, once nipped out of a tax conference to see a Baillon’s crake.

British life and landscape is so affectionately observed, with references to Gary Numan, brunch bars, and birch bark that is ‘the same colour as that orange hair dye favoured by punks and adventurous members of the blue rinse brigade’ that the reader is at times reminded of television shows like ‘The Detectorists.’

Not to be upstaged, Jon Gower often turns his trademark humour on himself, with great poignancy as he finds himself ageing. A tone of wise mellow fruitfulness (not dissimilar to that in Mike Parker’s On The Red Hill) thus ripples through the narrative. But then; ‘A day to feel young!’ he declares. His knees may be knackered but the legendary Gower gusto is undiminished.

Nevertheless, this book in its maturity, observation, wonder, and reflective gratefulness is special. For its pause and for its purpose.

Guidance

‘Be attentive’ we are advised on the first page. Prompted by Tom Bullough’s Sarn Helen, in which Bullough is concluding, suggests we look to the early Celtic saints for guidance as our planet breaks down, Birdland is Jon Gower’s response to the environmental crises. He outlines problems and explains the contributions birders make to conservation but showcases the joy that nature in general, and birds in particular, bring them.

I have so far only read a handful of Jon Gower’s thirty-something nonfiction and fiction books in Cymraeg and English, but enough to know the co-existence of light and dark is a recurring theme. When someone who has examined the dark urges you to appreciate and care for our gifts in the light, they know what they’re talking about.

Jon Gower’s childhood was ‘far from easy’ with a cider-swilling father prone to ‘bouts of anger’. Such experiences can leave profound scars, but our author’s escape was bird-watching and a summer on Ynys Enlli where he was ‘given the gift of horizons after tense, domestic, familial confinement.’ Nature saved him, is the implication in just one or two sentences.

Emotive personal journeys might be on trend, but when it comes to the important things our author (like those ascetic Celtic saints) subscribes very effectively to ‘less is more.’ Also to ‘show don’t tell.’ Perhaps this is as much due to his famed kindness as it is to his writerly prowess. Does he chastise or even comment on the eye-watering air-miles clocked up by a prolific twitcher? No. Instead he quietly follows with a birder who has given up flying.

Contribution

Jon Gower’s contribution to an expanding array of books aimed at addressing environmental breakdown might be summed up thus; be attentive to nature and cheerful in resistance.

‘Much as I am an optimist, there are times when the deadening of life on the planet wounds me, suppurating the soul like a poison arrow’ he writes. A grief-saturated heart-tearing sentence indeed, but one of so few you can count them on one hand. They are the anchor that stops this shining balloon floating away while keeping it off the ground, a balloon that is fat with light and life. Hard notes in language that sings.

Birdland boasts boats that ‘loll and yaw’, days that ‘unwind slowly like pizza dough’, and egrets ‘each one a little dab of titanium white lifted off the artist’s palette.’ A book, in other words, that is exquisitely balanced.

Birdland by Jon Gower is published by HarperNorth and is available from all good bookshops.