Book review: An Eye for Birds by Bruce Kendrick

BRUCE Kendrick may not be the most adventurous of birders, but he is perhaps one of the most appreciative.

In An Eye for Birds, he delights in sharing with the reader his love of nature in all its precise detail - for instance, a moorhen jerking across the surface of a pond or the canary colours of a yellow wagtail matching the gilded buttercups of a meadow.

The rapture all seems to stem from his lonely six-month spell  as a 10-year-old TB patient in a sanatorium where he used to watch an array of woodland birds through the window of a veranda.

"It was like sitting alone in the private box of a small theatre," he writes. "One where the set is a pastoral scene from an old master."

On his bedside table were two gifts from his father - Alexander Dumas' The Three Musketeers, which remained unread,  and a  copy of The Observer Book of Birds which became increasingly well-thumbed.

As he grew older (and now restored to health), he and three Wallasey birder-schoolfriends - Mac, Bob and Roy - spent whatever free time was available to record the species they watched in some of the birding hotspots of Lancashire and Cheshire until adulthood took them on different routes routes through life.

Occasionally during their ornithological sorties, they ventured further afield - for instance to the observatories at Hillbre, in the Dee Estuary, or on Bardsey, off the Llyn Peninsula - but there is no indication in this book that they ever ventured too far from home.

Interspersed with Kendrick's loving descriptions of his experiences with wildlife are  recollections of his support for Everton FC (his first home match was in 1960 when he was 13) and of weekend nights spent in a nightclub in New Brighton at a time when The Beatles were in their prime and he had an eye for girls.

On a more serious note, the author also supplies authoritative commentary on  contemporary issues - for instance, the devastating impact on birds and other wildlife of  pesticides and the unhappy fate of many raptor species on  Britain's grouse-shooting estates.

This  unusual but highly readable and lavishly-illustrated  book is published in paperback at £18.99 by Whittles Publishing (www.whittlespublishing.com)