Lost Among the Birds
Neil Hayward
Birdlife's Spoon-billed Sandpiper campaign
The ‘big year’ account is now a well established genre, particularly in North America, so this new entry to the market by Neil Hayward will find a suitably primed and receptive audience. The book recounts his initially unintentional entry into the year-listing scene in 2013, beginning with a New Year Nutting’s Flycatcher in Arizona and then slowly but surely escalating into an all-out assault on Sandy Komito’s North American year-listing record of 748 species.
Between the year’s first bird (a Canada Goose in his home state of Massachussetts) and the last (a Great Skua off North Carolina) we are treated to a grand tour of the continent’s most famous birding locations - Nome, St. Paul, Gambell and Barrow in Alaska, the Sonora Desert and ‘sky islands’ of Arizona, Texas’s ‘Big Bend’ and Gulf Coast, offshore California, the dusty plains of Colorado and many more. Along the way we encounter some great birds, not just North America’s own special species but also a long list of star vagrants from other continents - a Red-flanked Bluetail in Vancouver, an Amazon Kingfisher in Texas and, rarest of all, a Rufous-necked Wood-Rail in New Mexico.
As each new bird starts to matter more and more, Alaska features ever more prominently in the latter stages of the book. As well as the state’s sought-after breeding birds - Bristle-thighed Curlew, McKay’s Bunting and the rest - Hayward makes repeat visits to the Bering Sea islands, encountering such Asian vagrant delights as Grey-streaked Flycatcher, Olive-backed Pipit and Baikal Teal. Though most of the book is inevitably an out and out ‘twitch’, the Alaska bird-finding accounts were to me the most exciting, conveying much of the excitement of vagrant-hunting in remote locations. Such birding is hard and usually unrewarded but I truly shared Hayward’s excitement in finding North America’s first Common Redstart on St. Paul.
Published: Bloomsbury, June 2016
Hardback: 401 pages
ISBN: 9781632865793
RRP: £18.99
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This book is an easy and engaging read, full of the typical ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ of birding and twitching - the easy, relaxed ticks, the unexpected bonus encounters and the satisfaction of personal discoveries but also the heartbreak of near-misses, poor views and long but ultimately unsuccessful vigils. What makes these North American ‘big year’ accounts so compelling, however, is the sheer scale of the enterprise. This is, make no mistake, an epic undertaking on a literally continental scale. British year-listing and the odd trip to Shetland might seem extreme but it is nothing compared to what is involved here - a truly gruelling regime of flights, rental cars, motels and truly jaw-dropping distances, from Massachussetts to Florida, Arizona, Newfoundland and Alaska (and many places in between) not just once but repeatedly. And don’t even try to calculate what all of this might cost, emotionally as well as financially. Though year-listing is not for everyone, it is hard not to admire the dedication and commitment of its leading exponents.
There is, however, another dimension to the book. As well as an account of an extraordinary year with birds, this is also a year of personal change for the author as he navigates the often more difficult human world too - the departure from a lucrative but unfulfilling job, a relationship breakdown, an episode of depression and the tentative and precarious beginnings of a new relationship. The less bird-obsessed reader will find this strand as compelling as the listing exploits for Hayward lays his soul bare, trying to discover what makes him truly happy and, in that knowledge, wondering how to shape the rest of his life. These internal battles will be familiar to many readers but their eventual resolution - the slow recovery from depression, the consolidation (against some odds!) of his new relationship and the completion of a wonderful year of birds - is a powerfully positive story. And did Hayward break the North American ‘big year’ record? Well you’ll have to read the book to find out!
Andy Stoddart
19 July 2016
Commission for Conservation
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