BOOKS ABOUT BIRDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 409, 24 April 1947, Page 31

BOOKS ABOUT BIRDS

BI = hae Nae By Mollie Miller AtkinH. and A. W. Reed, Wellington. PODGY. THE PENGUIN. By L. E. Richdale. Printed for the author by the Otago Daily Times, RS. ATKINSON began by writing about birds for children, and has now made some studies for grown-ups. Mr. Richdale began with grown-ups and (continued on next page)

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} (continued from previous page) is now reaching down to the children. There is also this further difference that Mrs. Atkinson did most of the birdwatching at home, and a good deal of it from her bed, while Mr. Richdale did his on sea-headlands or windswept islands where birds were the only inhabitants. But the comparison must not be pushed too far. Mrs. Atkinson is a bird-lover who happens to be an artist as well. She writes about the things shé sees and feels and has no interest in academic questions. Where her observation is close enough-as, for example, her notes on the beaks of sparrows and the claws of more-porks-it is science. But science is not her field, She watches birds, not to make discoveries about them, but to satisfy a feeling for them. Fortunately she has enough skill with hér pen to° express her feelings in good English and enough talent with pencil and brush to light up her baie with pleasing illustrations. Mr. Richdale’s epproassy is a little different. First he is a zoologist with academic methods and standards, and in the second place he is a man with a message. He is writing a series of books for children hecause he ‘wants — New Zealand to know in future, if it has not known or cared-to know in the past, that trusting. our native birds to chance is to risk losing them altogether. It. is propaganda, but propaganda warmed by emotion, and informed by eleven years of patient observation and study, involving something like 1,000 visits to rookéries and colonies, and 140.000 miles of car-travel.