West Midland Bird Club

Merlin Unwin Books: £18:95
ISBN: 978 1 873674 94 9  

Denys James Watkins-Pitchford, who wrote under the pseudonym BB, though living in Northamptonshire, taught art at Rugby School, Warwickshire, from 1930–1947. His last book, A Fisherman's Folly was published in 1987. He was made MBE in 1989 and died a year later.

Originals of his books now fetch silly money, but thankfully they are being reissued at somewhat more reasonable prices. This one, first published in the middle of wartime, in October 1941, must have been a breath of fresh air amidst conscription, rationing and "the Hun", as he called them (in an eye-witness account of the bombing of Coventry and the destruction if its cathedral, p.178–), dropping bombs. Like many of his contemporaries, Watkins-Pitchford drew little distinction between being a bird-watching naturalist and a butterfly-collecting, wild-fowling hunter, and this collection of essays discuses both types of activity, though there's plenty enough of the former, with a local flavour, to interest West Midland Bird Club members.

For instance, he writes (p57) of Tree Pipits being fairly common in Warwickshire. Despite the terrors of wartime, or perhaps in order to temporarily escape them, he found time to take some of his pupils on a visit Wappenbury Woods (now a Warwickshire Wildlife Trust reserve), and study and write about (p. 67–) the butterflies there — Commas, Meadow Browns, Ringlets, even White Admirals, listed casually, with the others. Oh how times change! He also writes about neighbouring Northamptonshire, and his travels further afield.

This hardback book has 304 pages, with 48 wood engravings by the author, but credited as Denys Watkins-Pitchford, not BB.

A lovely, if sometimes melancholy, time-capsule of essays will be enjoyed by any local naturalist, by their bedside or elsewhere.