Bill Oddie - Bill Oddies little black bird book

The Little Black Bird Book was first published in 1980. Sometime in the mid-1980s it went out of print. It was republished in 1995 and is now being made available again...

However, I am faced with a dilemma. Do I update the text or not?

Does it need updating? If so, how do I do it? One things for sure: Im going to have to read the book again. So thats what I started doing. My first idea was that I would add little footnotes, to explain any names or references that are not quite so topical now as they were back in 1980. Thats what they do with Shakespeare, isnt it? I remember from school, there were more footnotes than speeches in my edition of Hamlet. I also remember that they used to drive me nuts, because no sooner had you got into a rollicking soliloquy, than you came up against some peculiar old-fashioned word, which you then had to look up in the footnote, which was so long and pedantic that, by the time youd read it and understood it, youd completely lost the thread of the play, and had to go back to the beginning. Come to think of it, mind you, quite a few of the footnotes in Shakespeare were about birds: herns and martlets, and that kind of stuff. And surely if its good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for me. In any case, Shakespearean footnotes have to cover nearly 500 years worth of anachronisms. The Little Black Bird Book is a mere infant by comparison, so there shouldnt be too much work involved. So thats what Ill do, I decided. I shall update the text by adding little footnotes. It should be a doddle.

Oh yeah? First page. First line: This is one of the very few books about birds that does not begin with a Foreword by Robert Dougal.

Who!?

Well, no disrespect to the lasting fame of the man, but you have to be of a certain age to remember Mr Dougal. For those of you of more tender years, Robert Dougal was not the dog in the Magic Roundabout. Oh, you dont remember that either? OK then, Robert Dougal was, in fact, a venerable television newsreader (a sort of benevolent Jeremy Paxman, or paler Trevor McDonald) who was also a bird-watcher and, indeed, one time president of the RSPB.

So thats one footnote already.

Any more needed on the jokey Foreword page? Yep.

Billy Fury. He was a rock and roll singer, who was also, reputedly, a bird-watcher.

And Eric Morecambe (another celebrity birder) who is of course very sadly now no more.

Perhaps I ought to replace them with a few relatively recent equivalents. I suppose I could shove in Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine, although Ive always suspected that both of them pretend to be bird-watchers only because the Tory party PR department told them it would soften their images. (I recall Margaret Thatcher more than once being photographed with a pair of binoculars. It didnt work for her either.)

And, what else needs updating on that page? Oh yes, the guilty publishers are now Portico Books. And...

Hang on, hang on! Already there are twice as many footnotes as the original text! Perhaps this isnt the best way to do it.

Forget the footnotes. Maybe I needed to update by actually rewriting some parts. Considering this approach, I moved on to the next major chunk: Bill Oddies qualifications (this is just a list of the places Ive been birding over the years as if that proved I knew something about the subject!).

OK. Up to 1980, fine. No need to rewrite history. But what about the years since then? Do I really have to rattle on about having been to New Guinea and Morocco and lots of other places? Surely not. Just take the opportunity to plug my other book: Follow That Bird! (published by Robson Books), which covers that sort of thing. Except that it is now out of print.

So far so good. This method seemed much more promising and much less effort.

But then I got to the last line of the qualifications chapter: He has seen 325 species in Britain, which isnt very impressive, considering that he is already thirty-eight years old.

Right. So update that one. Er well... My British list is still only just over 350, and I am now sixty-something! (Ouch! Even less impressive and a lot older.)

On second thoughts, I hate this updating thing. Id rather live in the past.

So it was that I came to a decision: I am not going to do any updating. I am not going to add little explanatory footnotes. Neither am I going to rewrite the text. (They dont rewrite Shakespeare do they?) So, what follows is the Little Black Bird Book, exactly as it first appeared in its original form in 1980.

Now Im going to re-read it again. Excuse me for an hour or so.

Later that same day...

Mmm, very interesting. I rather enjoyed it (well, I would say that wouldnt I?) but is it out of date or not? I have to ask myself: how much has the birding world changed since 1980? Well, in some ways it has got smaller: in the sense that theres just about nowhere on earth that birders dont get to these days. At a price, of course. And, inevitably, the price has gone up. The 200 worth of frantic weekend twitching that I suggest would probably cost nearer 2000 now. Moreover, some of the best 1980s sites have disappeared. On the other hand, new birdy hotspots are being discovered every year and, in that sense, the birding world has got bigger. One thing is absolutely certain: the number of birdwatchers in the field has rocketed incredibly, especially twitchers. (As it happens, the media are in the habit of using the word twitcher far too glibly. For a more precise definition try .) Also, bird information technology has advanced and proliferated amazingly. There are more magazines, field guides, tapes, videos, CDs, DVDs and not to mention a plethora of websites. Consequently, rare bird news is broadcast much more quickly and more widely. Nancys Caf and the grapevine have been replaced by Birdline, iPhones and even more websites. The result is that more rarities are being found, and being seen and thereby confirmed by more people. You can even remove any element of doubt by taking still or moving pictures of the rarity. Grief, you dont even need a camera. Phones that take photos, whatever next! I suppose this is a good thing, but I cant help being a little sad that the opportunities for self deception are being decreased by all this progress and efficiency. Its so much more fun getting things wrong! And even more fun investigating other peoples mistakes. Which brings me to what the Little Black Bird Book was and still is mainly about.

You may read it as an account of where birding was at in the early 1980s, at the dawn of mass twitching as we know it today. But that is merely history. And, like all history, it is instantly out of date. But what of the psychology of bird-watching? Has that changed? I remember, soon after BOLBBB was first published, a mate of mine told me rather tetchily: I could have written that. To which I responded, somewhat smugly: Yes, but you didnt!

I knew what he meant though. All I did was to put down on paper what most bird-watchers knew in their heart of hearts was true. Having just re-read the book, Im bound to say that I think it still is.

So here it is then. The original Little Black Bird Book. Think of it as the re-issued CD version of an old pop classic. Only its much cheaper than a CD, despite having a brand new hard cover.

May it provoke nostalgia in older readers; humility in uppity youngsters; and illumination or ammunition for those who wish to understand or embarrass their bird-obsessed partners. Who knows? You may decide to join us!