Fancy that - shape of kingfisher's beak influenced how Japanese designed their bullet trains

                                 

HOW about this for a description of magpies on a lawn: "They strut proprietorially around my lawn like a couple of fascists at a rally"?

It is an example of the colourful writing of Charlie Corbett in his absorbing book, 12 Birds To Save Your Life.

Subtitled Nature's Lessons in Happiness, this is a frank and very moving account of  the part  that birds - and his keen, perceptive  observation of them -  have played in helping him to come to terms with life after the grief and trauma that followed the loss of his  mother to cancer.

The author was outraged and dismayed when those same magpies took out a nest of mistle thrushes which, much to his family's delight, had made their home in the branches of a sycamore in his back garden.

But ultimately he forgives the black-and-white "scoundrels", deciding his scorn for such a "beautiful, charismatic and tenacious" bird is not fair. "After all, a magpie doesn't know it's a magpie,"he writes. "It just does its magpie thing."

                                         

Strutting 'like a fascist at a rally'

Corbett, who is a language expert and journalist based in Wiltshire, goes on to explore the special significance in his recent life of 11 other species - the skylark, kingfisher, curlew, bullfinch, house sparrow, house martin, robin, wren, song thrush, chiffchaff and barn owl. 

Along the way there are some interesting nuggets - for instance, that the aerodynamic excellence of the kingfisher's beak may have influenced how the Japanese fashioned the noses of their bullet trains.

Staying on the aeronautic theme, he describes how he once saw a peregrine being mobbed by two grey wagtails - a fascinating spectacle which he likens to "two biplanes being attacked by a Tornado jet".

And the allusion to the Tornado is not far off because its designers apparently used the shape of the peregrine's nostrils - which protect the bird's lungs at high speeds - as a means to increase the safety and efficiency of their engines.

Corbett is a great fan of the writings of the clergymen-ornithologists of yesteryear and also of  former Foreign Secretary Edward Grey whose exquisite The Charm of Birds is a evidently book to which he constantly refers - and understandably so.

By comparison, to him, the authors of modern guidebooks describe birds in a way that "feels a little less familiar, a little more worthy and a little too scientific".

He continues: "They write about birds as something to look at, to study and make a note of  rather than as of an innate part of our daily life, of the human story; there doesn’t seem to be any real affection - all cold fact and no heart."

(Note the use of the semi-colon - forsaken by most contemporary writers but, where appropriate, reintroduced by Corbett to pace the rhythm of his sentences.)

Is the author worried by the loss of birds and our seeming, downwards spiral into what risks becoming a "post-Nature" planet?

Of course he is. 

"We humans and the wildlife that surrounds us have become strangers in the great cocktail party of Life on Earth,"he frets. "It is much easier and more enticing to watch David Attenborough explore the jungles of Madagascar on the BBC on a comfy sofa  than to  go outside and form an attachment to the local squadron of plain brown and white sparrows chittering away on the road. 

"But the sparrows are Nature's ballast, and once they’re gone we won’t get them back."

To end on a cheerful note,  hats off to Corbett for his readiness to poke fun at himself - notably with an acknowledgement of his failed efforts to capture acceptable images of bullfinches which he describes as "cheerful, stocky little bird", but somehow "unreachable" in their thick hedgerows.

" I have I tried in vain to photograph bullfinches,"he says ruefully. "Which is why I am the proud possessor of about 50 photographs showing grey-pink-red blurs in the far distance."

And let's face it, he must be having a laugh (perhaps at the reader's expense) when he likens the sight of a flying kingfisher to "a dazzling samba dancer skipping through a dimly-lit London pub."  

Come off it, Charlie! Kingfisher as samba dancer?That's surely stretching things just a little bit.

12 Birds To Save Your Life is a book to read, then to re-read.

Published in paperback by Penguin at £9.99, it is available wherever books are sold.