THE extract below is from the e-book No More The Song of The Nightingale.
GROWING up in Scotland at the start of the twentieth century, close pals Arthur Landsborough Thomson, Arthur Davidson and Lewis Ramsay were ardent birdwatchers.
All three lived in Aberdeen, and Thomson and Davidson both attended the Grammar School, while Ramsay met up with them on holiday when he returned from Merchiston School in Edinburgh.
As boys they explored, on foot or cycle, the wildlife-rich countryside of the Ythan Estuary and Royal Deeside.
Thomson went on to become an undergraduate at the University of Aberdeen where he established Britain’s first co-ordinated bird-ringing scheme.
Davidson and Ramsay were only too keen to become involved, and, on May 8, 1909, the first birds to be ringed by the trio were six young lapwings at the Sands of Forvie in Aberdeenshire, plus a starling at Inverurie by an older associate, Thomas Tait.
Herring gulls became of particular interest, and the teenagers would use their acetylene cycle-lamps to dazzle and trap them.
One bird ringed on October 3, 1910, was caught, on May 20 the following year, by a farmer working in a turnip field on the Orkney island of Burray. The incident was deemed sufficiently newsworthy to be reported in the Aberdeen Free Press in its edition of May 26, 1911.
When war broke out on July 28, 1914, Davidson and Ramsey were 24 while Thomson was only 23.
According to Alan Knox who, much later, wrote an article about the trio for the journal British Birds, they had had six other friends who studied wildlife in and around Aberdeen.
Of the nine who signed up to fight for King and Country in 1914, only Thomson was to survive the war.
There must have been hundreds more similar instances all over Europe - on both sides of the conflict - of friends who grew up together and who had watched and recorded birds and their behaviour.Tragically, many never returned from the battlefield.
In some cemeteries, Germans and Allied soldiers rest close together, united again in death as they might have been in life had it not been for the dislocation caused by the war.
Among those that fell are doubtless hundreds of scientists, spare-time naturalists and literary or artistic figures who had been forced on to opposing sides, thence to have had their plans and careers - and all too often their lives - destroyed by the conflict.
How cruel the irony that those who fought and fell were in an environment which, in peacetime, would have provided the very habitats for them to pursue their enjoyment of birdwatching.
Remembered here are 21 of these gallant soldiers. All apart from one were officers. Some were members of the peerage, and one had served in a front-bench role in government.
It is a reflection of what was then a far more hierarchical and class-divided society that, unfairly, the lives off those lower on the social ladder have, with few exceptions, gone unrecorded.
Several of those listed must have been men of significant financial means because, before the war, they had participated in wide-ranging voyages of exploration and discovery.
The list includes the writer, Edward Thomas, who was commemorated by his friend and fellow-poet, William “W.H.” Davies, in this extract from Killed In Action (Edward Thomas):
“Happy the man whose home is still
In Nature's green and peaceful ways;
To wake and hear the birds so loud,
That scream for joy to see the sun
Is shouldering past a sullen cloud.
But thou, my friend, art lying dead:
War, with its hell-born childishness,
Has claimed thy life, with many more:
The man that loved this England well,
And never left it once before.”
The sad toll of fallen birdwatchers also includes:
Sydney Edward Brock
George Wyman Bury
Hugh Vaughn Charlton
John MacFarlan Charlton
Eric B. Dunlop
John ‘Jack’ Dighton Grafton-Wignall
Leonard Gray
Herbert Hastings Harington
Auberon Thomas Herbert
Boyd Horsbrugh
Wyndham Knatchbull-Hugessen
Gerald Legge
Alfred Stanley Marsh
Francis Algernon Monckton
Henry Edward Otto Murray-Dixon
George Stout
Philip Edward Thomas
C.H.T Whitehead
Richard Bowen Woosnam
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