I wonder how you got into birding? In my case it was through my Dad. Maybe that is how it was for many of us, especially those of my generation. I was born in 1950; my Dad in 1923. His diary is in front of me now, a chunky little hardback about seven inches by five, with a deep olive-green cover and a worn, faded burgundy spine. His handwriting in a cream paper panel stuck on the front announces that it is a Diary of Bird Life in & around Grimsby. Inside is written in heavy pencil: ‘Diary commenced on October 11th 1939’. He was sixteen. Six weeks earlier Britain had declared war on Germany.
In 1934, when he was eleven, Dad’s paternal grandparents moved from Grimsby to live in Covenham, a village a dozen miles to the south in the Lincolnshire countryside. He had already developed an interest in birdwatching though I don’t know what the catalyst for this was and now it’s too late to ask him. He soon began to spend his weekends and school holidays at his grandparents’ house, a base from which he could explore the fields and lanes in pursuit of birds and, during the breeding season, birds’ eggs. He got to know many of the people in Covenham and in particular the village lads.
When he was sixteen, he began to keep a diary of his exploits. By that time, he had been a regular visitor to Covenham for five years. He filled more than half of the diary’s pages. It’s fascinating and it goes on, intermittently, for over three years until the final entry, which is dated Feb 26th 1943: ‘This is the first entry in my diary for nine months owing to the fact that I am now one of the members of the RAF and have sadly neglected my observations during this period.’
Then, nothing more until, after a gap of one page, in my laboriously formed script, comes this: ‘Diary of bird life in and around Grimsby’ with my name and address, ‘32 Westkirke Avenue, Scarthoe, Grimsby, Lincs.’ and ‘Diary commenced 5th March 1959.’
I was a fortnight short of my ninth birthday when I wrote that. I can almost see my furrowed brow, and possibly my tongue slipping out between my lips as I strained to carefully form the letters. On the next page, under the heading 1959, underlined twice, I wrote ‘Eggs I hope to get this year’. The list of birds whose eggs I hoped to collect went: ‘Starling, Robin, Chaffinch, Blackbird, Song Thrush, Skylark, Partridge, Pheasant, Waterhen (with a tick and the date April 5th 1959), Whitethroat, Carrion Crow, Rook, Mistle Thrush, Greenfinch, Green Plover’.
There are entries for just nine dates in total and after six weeks, on April 18th my diary ends. It only covered four pages. I don’t know quite what to make of it. Did I feel, somewhere within me, aged nine, that taking birds’ eggs was wrong and recording it was compounding the offence? I assume that the notes I made referred to outings with my Dad, but I don’t even know that for sure. The 1950s were a more innocent time when as kids we ‘played out’ and roamed the fields and surrounding countryside in a way that children now don’t or can’t, more’s the sadness.
So, I didn’t keep up my diary of egg collecting or the egg collecting itself, I’m happy to say. As for my Dad, I think the moment that shocked me most came a couple of years later when we were on a rare family holiday in 1961. We were not well-off but the main reason we didn’t have a family holiday most summers was that it was virtually impossible for my Mum to persuade my Dad away from his every-weekend cricket commitments. He was a very good wicketkeeper who in his time ‘kept’ to the likes of Richie Benaud, Keith Miller and Roy Gilchrist. But I digress.
Somehow in 1961 Mum swung it and we had a week on a houseboat on the River Waveney in Norfolk. One day during that week stood out starkly for me. We drove up to the north Norfolk coast to go on a guided trip. I was eleven at the time and I have a sharp memory to this day of how, at the age of 38, Dad stole a tern’s egg while we were with the warden whose job involved protecting the nests. It seemed a betrayal. I’m more forgiving now. Time heals, and my changing view has also partly resulted from having read some of our finest current nature writers on the matter of egg-collecting.
Helen Macdonald has fascinating things to say in Vesper Flights, published in 2020. It’s an accomplished collection of essays, in the first of which, Nests, she says: ‘Naturalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries routinely collected birds’ eggs, and most children who grew up in semi-rural or rural surroundings in the 1940s and ‘50s have done it too.’ Talking of those who spent their childhood bird’s-nesting, she says they: ‘…can’t help but assess the ability of last year’s laid hedge to hold a chaffinch or robin’s nest.’ And this: ‘Egg collecting requires skill, bravery in the field, hard-won knowledge of the natural world. It can become an obsession for minds gripped with still beauty’
‘Egg collecting requires skill, bravery in the field, hard-won knowledge of the natural world.’ That would have been Dad exactly, as he carefully took an egg, only ever one, from a nest that might have involved a risky tree-climb, coming down with the egg in his mouth, or careful observation of a bird’s repeated behaviour that might reveal a hidden location. The ‘still beauty’ of those eggs he settled on a bed of sawdust in a shoebox under his bed. I wonder if it fleeted across his thoughts that the beauty of those eggs was irrevocably changed in the act of removing them from the natural world, blowing them and then hiding them away as an increasingly suspect personal secret?
Dad has been gone fifteen years now. I long ago forgave him. I owe him a great debt for awakening my interest in the natural world, a portal to an appreciation of the complexities of ecosystems which has enriched my understanding, my travels and quite simply, my life. He sowed the seed of my interest in birds and although it has waxed and waned, particularly during my late teenage years and twenties when an interest in girls, alcohol and generally getting to grips with the big wide world out there took prominence, it has stayed with me throughout my life.
And just to throw a curve ball at you towards the end of this piece, what about this from Lev Parikian, from his excellent book Why Do Birds Disappear? He meets a birder on the Isle of Wight who owns up, sheepishly, to having been an egger as a lad. Lev’s response is this: ‘Egg collecting. Normal in Victorian times, illegal since 1954. Egg collectors are now universally reviled, and the knee-jerk reaction is to disapprove of such cruel and unnecessary activity, until you discover that David Attenborough used to do it. Not only that, but he would also be in favour of a change in the law to allow responsible egging as a way of sparking young people’s interest in nature. If it’s good enough for Attenborough, it’s good enough for me.’
I’m not sure that I agree with him but it’s food for thought. So, here I am, these many years on, 76 now. This afternoon, on the last day of March 2026, I’ve had an hour or so at Rambla Morales in my adopted home of Almería province. Best birds were Garganey, a stunning pair of Black-necked Grebes in breeding finery, White-headed Ducks, Greater Flamingos (almost always here but still astonishing), a totally unexpected Rose-ringed Parakeet and at least two Nightingales singing. And then to the Salinas de Cabo de Gata: Grey Plover, Spoonbill, Redshank, Slender-billed Gull, Greenshank, more Flamingos (of course), Avocet, and more. Not bad at all. If you’re up there somewhere, thanks, Dad.
Kevin Borman – ABS member