In a month, in the last weekend of January, the annual National Garden Bird Count will take place. Anyone with a garden or a balcony can participate: count for half an hour and then pass on the reports on the website mytuinvogeltelling.nl of Bird Protection.
To be well prepared, a garden bird guide is not an unnecessary luxury, and the beautifully illustrated Birds in our garden outcome. Artist Erik van Ommen made watercolors of 27 well-known and 10 lesser-known garden guests, and birdwatcher and nature journalist Paul Böhre wrote clear texts.
Garden bird guides are available in abundance, but thanks to its beautiful appearance, this is also a nice book to browse if you do not have binoculars or birdwatching ambitions. Moreover, the texts are written in an accessible way – something that other bird guides often lack – and at the same time sufficiently informative. For example, you can estimate how old the bird is by the white spots on the beak of a wood pigeon (the ‘nose caps’): the bigger, the older. A bright white color means the bird is healthy.
Birds in our garden originated as a collection of monthly garden bird columns in nature magazine roots. Van Ommen introduces each bird on the basis of his personal experiences with that species – he tells how the ‘generous donor’ of a tawny owl box comes to help with its installation, and he writes about long-tailed tits as ‘fast-flying balls of fluff’ – but for whom? If you want to learn more about garden birds, those rippling texts add little. As a result, you soon have the urge to browse for the birds themselves – especially for the special ‘vagrants’ in the back, with beautiful names such as wryneck, king of leaves and firecrest.
The book ends with general bird facts. For example, ‘don’t tidy up too much’ is number 1 in the tip list for the ideal bird garden. And: every bird has a fixed singing time. The common redstart starts in the spring before five in the morning, while the starling doesn’t start until half past six.
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