The Frayed Atlantic Edge by David Gange

This was recommended to me by a friend during the course of a conversation about traditional boats while we were engaged in searching for lichens on Dale Head on one of those August days when even the mountain tops become too warm.

It is a carefully crafted account of a journey or more accurately a series of journeys stitched together to explore the west coast of Britain.  The author is an historian and the journey was by necessity fragmentary so as to allow for his lecturing commitments.  It is a journey undertaken largely by kayak.

The early chapters give a flavour of the techniques involved in kayaking through the exposed and hazardous waters around Shetland where the journey begins.  The narrative includes historical context, wildlife encounters and accounts of interactions with local inhabitants.  He quickly realises that the advice given by local people includes descriptions of the uniquely dangerous sea condition that he will encounter.

As the book progresses, we are told less of the kayaking and more of the local landscape and its historical and cultural connections.  I was staying on North Uist while reading the chapter on The Western Isles: I had just returned from a walk on the Udal Peninsula where I'd turned back from trying to cross to Vallay to take a close look at a ruined building as the channel seems too hazardous an undertaking.  That same evening I read that the son of the archaeologist who'd lived there had been drowned while crossing to the island.  Sometimes it turns out that a decision had been a good one !

David is clearly a traveller who values the wild places.  As he continues south, he comments that the 'coast' becomes the 'seaside' and friendly meetings become rare events and are replaced by contentious confrontations.  He seems to lose the joy of the journey as he continues southward beyond Bardsey.

This is a thoroughly good read and one that I found highly informative and enjoyable.

 

Orison for a Curlew by Horatio Clare

 

This is a beautiful read.  It comes from a writer who is very undervalued.  He has a degree of bravery to give his book a title that includes a word like orison.  A word that I imagine many will not have come across let alone know its meaning.  He is not playing to the gallery.

It is the tale of travels that are ostensibly a search for the Slender-billed Curlew that is now, more than ten years on, generally considered to be extinct.  Even at the time of his travels and writing the book there was, in reality, a vanishingly small chance of success in finding the bird.  His travels do have a purpose beyond finding that elusive species, and that is to meet conservationists and wildlife enthusiasts who have had a similar quest - to search for and discover more about this enigmatic bird.

In meeting these people within the known range of the bird from the Mediterranean to Omsk (which lies just to the north of Kazakhstan) he gets a flavour of its former habitat.  The commitment of his contacts in these areas is an inspiring testament to their dedication in the context of what is surely a lost cause.  

The last known photograph of this curlew was taken at Merja Zerga in Morocco in 1995.  Many birders travelled to that during the 1990s, one of whom I was in conversation with just a few weeks ago.  Instances of breeding of the species are known from only one area, that is Tara, Omsk where birds bred from 1905 until 1925.

The slide towards extinction was obscured by a series of what are now known to be erroneous reports of the bird.  Identification of this curlew is not entirely straightforward and visiting birders to its winter haunt in Morocco may have been seduced by wishful thinking as they watched distant curlews in the shimmering heat of the lagoon.

As if this sad tale of extinction is not strange enough there is a further strange episode to follow.  My late friend Tim Cleeves found what he believed to be a Slender-billed Curlew in Druridge Bay, Northumberland in May 1998.  The bird was watched by many observers and it was photographed.  The bird was accepted by the British Birds Records Committee and admitted to the British List by the British Ornithologists Union Records Committee.  The record was then reviewed in 2013 and found to be 'Not proven'.  It is no longer on the British List.  The size of the file relating to this is the largest ever considered by these bodies.  It is unfortunate that the quality of the photographs are far inferior to those we generally see today in this age of digital images taken on sophisticated equipment.

The process of submitting the description of the Druridge Bay bird along with the subsequent review to find the record Not proven was a harrowing one for Tim.  Years later he told me that he wished that he had never found the bird.