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| A glorious bird indeed - one of the plates in the book depicts great bustards at their nesting site |
A RARE copy of a book written by a British expert on great bustards is set to go under the hammer on September 11.
After retiring, Colonel Willoughby Verner (1852-1922) spent much of his time in southern Spain where warm weather eased the pain of wounds he had sustained in the 1899-1901 Boer War.
His interests included archaeology, photography (in its primitive form) and rock-climbing, but he was also a passionate ornithologist who chronicled the most colourful of his birding experiences in My Life Among The Wild Birds in Spain which was published in 1909.
In a chapter dedicated to the great bustard, he describes - entertainingly as well as authoritatively - the feeding and nesting habits of the species which he was often able to watch through a telescope from the roof of his villa.
He dismisses suggestions that Spanish birds sometimes 'migrated' over the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, maintaining that, though prone to wander, great bustards are not true migrants in the same way as, say, cranes.
Like many of his generation, Verner treated the species as a gamebird and organised shooting parties for friends who visited him from England.
But this did not prevent him retaining an affection for the species, reflected in his annoyance when a horse he was riding while on a nest-hunting excursion trod on a pair's eggs.
Another time, he was delighted to see an apparently abandoned bustard egg hatch after being placed under a domestic hen, but, alas, the chick did not survive for many days.
The book (Lot 129) is being sold by specialist Wiltshire-based auction house Dominic Winter (www.dominicwinter.co.uk) which estimates it will fetch between £300 and £500.
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| The colonel with mountaineering rope and camera |
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| According to the auction house, the book could fetch as much as £500 |
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