The Birds of Britain!

The sublime joy of distracting yourself with an old bird book

Our book today is a tiny gem from 1942, part of the great old “Britain in Pictures” series: The Birds of Britain by James Fisher, who though only in his early 30s at the time was already both the editor of the Penguin volume of The Natural History of Selbourne and a genuinely wonderful book called Birds as Animals. The “Britain in Pictures” series was a uniform delight: slim hardcover volumes full of illustrations, dedicated to entirely accessible subjects like “British Sea Fishermen,” or “British Classes,” or “British Hills and Mountains.” But given the long history of the birding mania in the British Isles, there’s maybe no more iconic an entry in the series than this one, which kicks off with a typically nerdy factual throat-clearing from our very nerdy author about all the places where you might be likely to find his avian subjects: