By Antonio Sandoval Rey
Tundra Ediciones, 2016; pbk, 318pp; ISBN 978-84-16702-16-9
Ј28.50 – buy it from the BB Bookshop
What Good Are Birds? is a captivating series of bird-related tales. Spanning everything from gods to life lists via conservation, politics and spies, the author weaves a continuous prose that leads you seamlessly from topic to topic, all set to the backdrop of his birding experience in northern Spain. Many of the tales are triggered by observations or experiences, which gives the book a charming sense of first-hand narrative and glues everything together. The book opens with the author seawatching from Estaca de Bares, Galicia, and leads on to musings on where these birds are going, migration, ringing, and advances in tracking technologies. The topics keep on rolling from there on in.
Some of the stories you may have heard before but many were new to me; and there’s plenty more to this narrative than just tales from the archives. The author talks passionately of his birding experiences in Spain, particularly his beloved Galician coast, with Spanish birding topics ranging from the origin of the word ‘bimbo’ (the Spanish equivalent of lifer) to a harrowing eye-witness account of the Prestige oil spill and other conservation efforts along Spain’s north coast. The text is passionate, poetic, and descriptive. Occasionally it gets a little treacly (too sweet and hard to wade through) but generally it is a pleasure to read.
The title was originally written in Spanish but there are very few issues introduced by the translation – the etymology of English names, for example, shows that this has been more than just a direct translation. The count of 500 million birds migrating through Falsterbo, Sweden, may be one small slip – mil = thousand in Spanish and indeed the correct total is 500,000 – and there is the odd paragraph seems to have been skipped over altogether by the proofreader (the variety of hyphenation use in gull names, even within the same paragraph, for example) but, by and large, the content could pass for having been written by a native English speaker.
Birders will certainly enjoy reading this book, especially those who are interested to see how the relatively young Spanish birding scene has developed over the past few decades. However, with its breadth of topics and careful explanations, this title would also make the perfect gift for a non-birder – perhaps a partner or family member who themselves are asking, as you head out of the house on a windy Saturday for another day of seawatching, ‘What good are birds?’
Stephen Menzie