Seabirds

A weekend of seabirds. The annual meeting of the Bird of Prey society, a lot of lectures in a small theatre in the north of the country. I usually attend the lectures, but this time I was out there for the "Save the Albatross" campaign. Not strictly speaking birds of prey maybe, but I guess you could call them the ocean's birds of prey. And they deserve to get more attention. We managed to raise some money for the campaign again, and raise awareness of the plight of the seabirds in the Southern Oceans.

These birding days are special days. You get to meet the same people at the various fairs, some you know by name, others you know better. This time one of the guests of my last Antarctic trip turned up, but I did expect him too. Then there is a couple I meet at all sorts of birding events, and sometimes in the field. I remember them once turning up an early Sunday morning out of the woods carrying a high ladder because they had been inspecting nesting boxes.

At this fair I found a nice copy of Edward Wilson's "Birds of the Antarctic", a 1987 reprint, but in very good condition. I got to see a little more Wilson over the weekend at the house of a seabird enthousiast I stayed with. He collects bones, skulls and skeletons of seabirds, and he has quite a collection. He does a lot of research into the subject and he knows a lot about it. It is strange though, to see the skulls of some of the birds I saw flying in the South earlier this year on display in a glass case in someone's house. I had to disappoint him though. He hasn't got the skull of a gentoo penguin and I remember holding one in my had at Aitcho to show our guests. I had to leave it behind, of course, even though it was very beautiful. No souvenirs from Antarctica.

This collector also has a nice collection of books and he has a copy of the original Terra Nova bird report with Wilson's drawings. Most of these are in the 1967 book, but not all, and it was lovely to see them in this report. Now I know I'll have to get hold of that somehow.

I don't know what it is about Wilson's drawings that makes them so special. When I first found "Birds of the Antarctic" at the Arctic weekend a couple of years ago I took one look at the book and just fell in love with Wilson's art. The drawings are so lifelike and delicate, and I liked the fact that many of the ones in the book are not finished, they are just sketches. On reading more about the man I came to appreciate the art even more. I now have a lot of material published about him, and I still find him fascinating.