This new county avifauna is a lovely book considering that Bedfordshire, like my adopted home county of Northamptonshire, is land-locked and, in many ways, is an unspectacular county for birds. But there are birds everywhere and their numbers change for a wide variety of reasons so every county avifauna is full of information destined to be slightly out of date as soon as it is published and that only gets worse over time.
This book updates the information on Bedfordshire’s birds since the last county avifauna in 1991. There have been plenty of ornithological events and changes in those three decades and this book does an excellent job of documenting and explaining them.
It is a large book with 506 pages at greater than A4 size and is well over an inch thick. Most of the pages give species-by-species accounts of birds in taxonomic order with maps and graphs which document changes in numbers. There are large and attractive photographs of all species, almost all of which are good and some of which are superb. The opening chapters on habitat, climate change and birdwatching itself hold the keys to many of the changes revealed in the following species accounts. Some of the trends and their apparent causes are brought together in a later chapter on patterns of change.
Some will be more interested in the records of rare birds and others more drawn to the changes in numbers of breeding or wintering species. As someone who commuted from Northamptonshire to the RSPB headquarters in Sandy during much of the period covered in this book I can recall both the dead (and tail-less) Yellow-billed Cuckoo found (by the gardener as she collected holly for Christmas decorations) at The Lodge on 6 December 1990 and that after working late to get some report or council paper finished I would sometimes see and hear roding Woodcock as I reached my car. The Woodcock have gone from The Lodge and many other (all it seems!) Bedfordshire sites as breeding birds, following the decline of Tree Sparrows at Sandy and county-wide and followed by Spotted Flycatchers similarly.
If you live in this county and are interested in birds then I would have thought this book is a ‘must have’ which will give you hours of interest.
If you live in neighbouring Northamptonshire then your last county avifauna was not in 1990 but that of Lord Lilford in 1895! It’s a tad out of date.
There is an event to promote this excellent book at the Beds, Cambs and Northants Wildlife Trust’s site at Rushden Lakes on Sunday 30 November – click here.
The cover? It’s fine and Steve Blain’s landscape of the Pegsdon Hills might even tempt you to book your next holiday in Bedfordshire! I’d give the cover 8/10.
The Birds of Bedfordshire by Tony Ploszajski is published by the Bedfordshire Natural History Society.
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