BIRDS

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21198, 23 June 1934, Page 15

BIRDS

| <0 HAUNTS AND HABITS All About Birds. By W. S. Berridge. George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 282 pp. (7s 6d net.) Name this Bird. By Eric Fitch Daglish. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 215 pp. (7s 6d net.) Mr Berridge makes it quite plain that birds have, feathers. Among "our feathered friends" are "feathered pugilists" and "feathered voyagers." Here is also an "avian songster." Add to these phrases a handful of loosely jointed sentences and a few confused pronouns, and the worst has been said about his style, which is generally clear, vigorous, and warm with enthusiasm and affection for his birds. He knows, them all. He has followed hundreds to their homes, he has peered into the aviaries at countless zoological gardens, and about the inaccessible and the extinct he has collected all relevant and interesting records. He knows the habits of the kiwi and has been surprised by the weight and size of its egg; he rejoices to describe the mound fourteen feet high amassed by the assiduous brush turkey to serve as a natural incubator for the eggs which the parents are disinclined to hatch by ordinary means. His readers will join him in gratitude for the increasingly humane treatment of birds in civilised countries. The Austrian Air Transport Company conveyed over the alps 57,000 swallows whose wings had been benumbed by unseasonably cold weather. Light-houses are now provided with perches, screens, and shelters which considerably reduce i mortality among gulls and migratory birds. Mr Berridge is particularly fond of the kingfisher, the only bird that can run backwards, and he is old-fashioned enough to wish to believe that the cuckoo does not lay its egg directly in the victim's nest, but transports it in its beak or throat. The chapters dealing with birds of prey and vultures are interesting historically as well as ornithologically. By the rules of falconry, hawks were divided into fifteen grades, and each grade was assigned to its proper social class. Thus the holy-water clerk could carry only a musket, the poor man a tercel, and the earl a peregrine.

This exhaustive and entertaining book covers migration habits, courtship display, and song, as well as every physical distinction. There is a chapter on domestic birds full of kindly observation and appropriate anecdote. Who would believe that Lord Orford's flock of geese outstripped the Earl of Queensberry's turkeys in a cross-country walking race? The geese won by keeping up a steady, waddling pace, while the turkeys could not be dissuaded from roosting in trees at night, so that valuable time was lost each morning in dislodging them from their perches. There is t pleasant waggery in Mr Berridge's stories which is part of the gracious tolerance that comes to inveterate birdfanciers, whether they study the globose curassow or the whaup. There is much in this book of special interest to New Zealanders, and the author's 111 photographs are works of art and skill. Mr Daglish's book is concise, clear, and complete. No better field-book for the English observer could be imagined; but it must remain of merely scientific interest to the New Zealander. The book contains more than 200 coloured pictures of birds; there is a key where the arrangement of characteristics enables the reader to discover easily the identity of the bird he has seen; and, finally, and most considerably, there is a section with a full description of hundreds of birds, including details of nest, food, haunt, call, and personal eccentricity. This section may be profitably studied by anyone interested in birds as a model of clear and vivid methods of description. A certain virtuosity appears in the accounts of the cries of birds. The puffin utters "a deep ar-rr," the coot "a clear, ringing kru or krong," the razorbill "a deep, grunting sound": other birds, like the water rail, elude representation and are assigned "a wild scream, difficult to imitate."

The appearance of these books is timely, as they may recall attention to the fact that town birds in New Zealand are this month approaching the season when they need most help from those whom they cheer and entertain.

THE HELPING HAND Hamish. Bv ,T. J. Bell. The Moray Press. 304 pp.

Hamish is porter at Sloeburn, on the West Highland Railway. Only his excessive duties—four trains a day pass through Sloeburn —prevent him from living a life of endless, kind service. "The helping hand" is Hamish's catchphrase. And only quite extraordinary adroitness and obstinacy could resist the strategies with which Hamish directs the hand to close on some advantage or reward. He is an amusing, likeable fellow, one of Mr Bell's thoroughly human creations.

revelations below ground there was that day when, light-heartedly beginning to transplant a camellia, I discovered the need to shift more earth than would have been needed to make a regulation first-line trench. Who would have imagined that those sleek plants, modest a&d seemly as chaperoned maidens, could conceal such tenacity and greed of nourishment?

Trimness is not Enough These were the finds of the season, impossible in a trim and expertlyordered garden, possible only in ours where the wineberries and the strawberry trees mix leaves, and hydrangeas peek out from dark spots, and the shy flower of some unidentified plant is certain to be watching us. Even these finds, though, are not so exciting as the watching of some new flower in its efforts to achieve what we expect of it, the never-ending miracle of the rising forest of lupins with its deep and delicate blue, the profligate larkspurs, the quiet determination of the dog-toothed violet, the surprising second flowering of plants which seem to determine to take advantage of a spell of good weather much as we ourselves have done. For gardens have character of their own. This crazy season one could almost see the roses, cheated into late flowering by the long, dry spring, holding consultation and determining to proldhg the second budding into the very domain of winter himself, so that the Irish Elegance is still unfolding its petals before me as I write, and even the American Pillar roses which twine outside the window have raised a bright standard . in sympathy with the general revolt against the retreat of the sun. There is character in gardens. And at this time, rather than in the long evenings of summer when, wet-handed from the hose, we prowl round the borders after the call has come for us to go inside and eat, we should I set about discovering it for ourselves, j