How to watch a bird

I must say when I first heard that Steve Braunias had written a book on birdwatching I thought someone was having me on.

The fact that Braunias, the sometimes funny, occasionally cynical and often sharp-tongued columnist with the Sunday Star Times, can write is not in question. He did after all win the Best First Book of Non-Fiction at the 2002 Montana NZ Book Awards and he has previously been a feature writer at Metro and deputy editor at the Listener.

But birdwatching? How the hell did that come about?

Well you might say it was something of an epiphany. One night in late January he was visiting Emily in her city apartment and when he stepped out on to her balcony for a cigarette a black-backed gull flew right past only a few feet away.

With that he became hugely interested in feathered birds of all kinds, those in the city, those on the coast and those in the country. He became a birdwatcher. 2006 became his year of birds.

Here he is talking of that year:

I took down names. I saw birds I never knew existed. I became fascinated with
birds that no longer existed, and with the literature of birds, with the social
history of watching birds in New Zealand.
I learned things. I shared pleasures. I saw another New Zealand, a particular geography where its borders and centres were defined by birds – a feathered New Zealand.
And I saw another kind of New Zealander, their lives transformed, consumed, by birds.
I loved seeing what they had seen, that year, and years before. I loved
discovering a simple truth: to watch a bird is to see the world in a completely
different way.

His book is charming and compelling and captivating.

Each of the 17 chapters is fronted by a black & white bird photograph mostly taken in the 1940’s which is a rather nice touch.

And it couldn’t be published in a more appropriate list than in Awa Press’ Ginger Series. It seems right at home there with Kevin Ireland’s How to Catch a Fish, Justin Paton’s How to Look at a Painting, How to Read a Book by Kelly Ann Morey, How to Catch Cricket Match by Harry Ricketts and all the others in this wonderful series of “captivating reads for curious people”.

The Listener described Awa Press as “a specialist non-fiction publisher that has rapidly established itself as one of the most interesting small presses in the country”.
I heartily endorse those sentiments and I offer the author and the publisher my congratulations on this new title.

Heart warming, entertaining and enchanting, it was a real surprise to me.

How to Watch a Bird Steve Braunias Awa Press NZ RRP $25