A raft of new titles

A lot going on at Planet Poyser at the moment. For a start, we've three new titles out. All three are on sale now, in all good bookshops.

We've also got two titles currently undergoing the book production process. The Snowy Owl by Richard Sale was submitted last week, while Extinct Birds by Julian Hume – a genuinely canonical work – is currently being laid out. The Poyser list is in rude health!

CRAZY GIVEAWAY BONANZA

Would anyone like a book?

I've got copies of the following titles looking for a good home. Some are pristine, some arent, some are Helm or Poyser, some are US editions of our books, all are collectable either way.

Wrens, dippers and thrashers
The Hen Harrier
Lapland a natural history
Seabirds a natural history
Crows and Jays
Parrots
Penguins (Poyser version)
Pipits and Wagtails
Starlings and mynas
Shrikes and bush-shrikes
Shorebirds
Tits, nuthatches and treecreepers (US and UK versions)
Sylvia warblers

If you'd like one drop me a line (jim dot martin at bloomsbury.com) with your address. Will need to be before 6pm Wednesday (Aug 3rd) this week though!

JIM

This week, a guest post from author and photographer Clive Finlayson, on an incredible encounter around a carcass in the Pyrenees …


It’s cold, actually it’s freezing – hard to believe that I am in the Iberian Peninsula and not somewhere in the Arctic. The temperature has plummeted to -11^oC here at 1,600 metres in the Pyrenees. It’s January. Having to keep motionless in the dark really doesn’t help much, nor do the layers of thermal underwear, tights, pairs of socks … the sky outside is intense blue. That should, at least, ensure good conditions for photography. But will our target birds arrive today?

It’s now 10am and my wife and I have been in the hide for four hours. The sun is up but the temperature stays below freezing. Some silhouettes flit past. They are large. We focus the cameras on the deer carcass laid out barely 15 metres away, and we wait … out of nowhere a Griffon Vulture appears, as though by magic, but he’s been soaring cautiously above the bait – we just couldn’t see him with our limited view. A blink of the eye and there are now twenty vultures on the ground. They look around nervously, unsure. We avoid the temptation of clicking away. This would be the wrong moment. If they get spooked now, that will be it for today. Ten minutes later and a hundred or so Griffons approach the carcass. The first one goes for the intestines and starts to open up a gash. Others come in quickly. They start to scream and chatter at each other. The frenzy has started. Now we can start to shoot!

Griffons do their thing.

Twenty minutes and hundreds of photos later the deer is a skeleton but our work has only just begun. Hanging around the edge of the frenzy, eight Black Vultures now come forward. They may be larger but they cannot compete with so many Griffons. But there is plenty for them to eat now; tough tendons, sinews and hide all get torn to shreds by their powerful beaks. Even now we haven’t got what we came for and we know we may not get it at all. Previous visits have ended in disappointment – they didn’t come down or they kept some distance. Today is different. We can see their distinctive shadows on the ground – large with a wedge-shaped tail …

Black Vultures - the Face of Death.

Then, as unexpectedly as the first Griffon, our first Lammergeier is down – a first-year bird. This one stays on the edge of the commotion. It looks around nervously but then starts to walk towards the hide. A second bird puts it up as it lands. These birds seem to have the habit of landing close to each other in threatening fashion, often displacing each other. And the young ones seem more aggressive than the adults. Then the “wow” moment as the first adult lands. Its hard to believe how spectacular this bird is when it is just a few metres away.

The Lammergeier.

Anvils? Who needs anvils. The Lammergeiers find their ideal bones, manipulate them with dexterity and swallow them whole! That’s just one lesson from watching birds close in. It’s only when the optimal bones are exhausted that the larger ones are carried away, held in one foot or with the beak.
The scene I have described would have been a familiar one to our prehistoric ancestors. In fact, most of the Palearctic species around today predate the last two million years of glaciation and many are much older. Lammergeiers shared their Palaearctic range with the Neanderthals – the fit is almost too exact – and they must have come into close competition for bone marrow. No doubt the Neanderthals watched the vultures, who led them to sources of food.

An Egyptian Vulture joins the fun.

I’m now back at home in Gibraltar, going through the palaeontological collections that I have been excavating here for twenty years. I bring out a set of bones from a Neanderthal occupation level. In my hand is a metatarsus of a Lammergeier and the box also contains Griffon, Egyptian and another large vulture (probably Black). The bones are 40,000 years old. I reflect on the history of the avifauna of the Palearctic. How did climate shape the fates of the birds? Can we combine the fossils with the living birds to give us a better understanding of the history and biogeography of Palaearctic birds? In Avian Survivors I hope to answer these questions and more …

Clive is the author of Avian Survivors: The History and Biogeography of Palearctic Birds – on sale in August!

A Passion for Puffins

This week, a guest blog from Poyser authors Mike Harris and Sarah Wanless, from the Puffin colony on the Isle of May, Scotland ...
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It is early morning and we are peering out of a weathered wooden hide at some 400m² of grassy slope – part of the largest Puffin colony in the North Sea, on the Isle of May National Nature Reserve in the entrance to the Firth of Forth, southeast Scotland. Some of the Puffins disturbed by our arrival at the hide are starting to land, while others that dived down into their burrows peer out before confidently
re-emerging. They should be used to us, since this is the 40^th year that we have been watching them.

View from the hide (Liz Mackley).

The colony is a busy place today, even though by early May most pairs will probably be incubating their single egg, deep within their burrow. However, some birds are still squabbling over the ownership of burrows. Usually this involves little more than threats but there is the occasional scrap, with the protagonists tumbling down the slope, beaks locked, wings flailing. Other birds are tugging away at clumps of dead grass and taking bundles down burrows to line the nest chambers. Periodically, a rabbit hops through the area looking slightly intimidated by all the Puffin activity. During the winter it probably lived in a Puffin burrow but has been evicted  now that the owner has returned, its soft nose being no match for a Puffin’s beak!

Puffin and rabbit (Eleanor Watt).

As well as simply enjoying watching the goings-on in the Puffin colony, our visit to the hide on this and many other mornings has a more scientific purpose. We are trying to read all the colour-ring combinations of the birds that are present, and this is best done early in the season before the vegetation has grown. At the end of the 2010 season, 158 colour-ringed Puffins were known to be alive, and so far this season we have recorded 75% of these at least once. There is still plenty of time to tick off more birds but already it is clear that that survival rate over the 2010–11 winter has been good, since the resighting rate is approaching the normal 80–85%. Actual survival is always a little higher than the resighting rate, since we never see all the birds alive.

The Puffin that we would love to see, but sadly probably won’t, is ‘yellow-blue left, yellow-BTO ring right’, a male ringed as a breeding adult in 1974, when he would have been at least five years old. He last bred in burrow number 100 in 2005 and was present in the colony in 2006 and 2008, when he would have been at least 39 years old. Currently the longevity record for the Puffin is held by a bird that died in the Lofoten Islands in Norway when aged 41 years.

Colour-ringed Puffin on the Isle of May (Liz Mackley).

On the Isle of May the Puffin is among the earliest of the seabirds to breed, with the first egg often laid in the first few days of April. The incubation period lasts 40–42 days, so we are now looking forward to one of the highlights of summer at a seabird colony, seeing the first Puffin carrying fish ashore.

Puffin carrying sandeels (Akinori Takahashi).

Mike and Sarah are the authors of our forthcoming Poyser monograph The Puffin – coming soon!

Cape Clear Coming

With two blogs in a week I am breaking new ground, but what the heck: more news.

Natural History of Cape Clear - I have finally got this back and am about to send it to the printers. So it should be available in a month or so. This is of course one of the rarest (and by some margin the most expensive, second-hand) of all the Poysers. Cape Clear is the last to be revived as a POD, and its publication will mean the entire list is now back on sale).

I've given away quite a lot of the original Poyser covers now, so if you need one for your collection I'd urge you to contact me pretty much right away ...

Lost a dust jacket?

An unfortunate part of the POD production process is that original copies of the books had to be destroyed in order to produce digital scans. As you can imagine, this broke my heart.

But the upshot of this is that I now have a lot of original first edition dust jackets hanging around the office. As any book collector knows, jackets get ripped, or discoloured, or faded, so I thought I'd offer these up for any readers or collectors of the series who have lost a dust jacket and would like a replacement. Here, in no particular order, are the jackets I have to hand:

The Status of Seabirds
Ducks of Britain and Europe
Rare birds in Britain and Ireland
The Peregrine Falcon
In Search of Sparrows
Gulls an ID guide
Wild Geese
Birds in Ireland
Cuckoos, cowbirds and other cheats
Birds New to Britain and Ireland (1976 version)
In search of Arctic Birds
Birds by Night
The Pinyon Jay
The Dippers
The Bee-eaters
Red Data Birds in Britain
Birds of the Strait of Gibraltar
The Magpies

Great Auk Islands

Estuary Birds
The Skuas
Rare Birds Day by Day
The Ancient Murrelet
Birdwatcher's Year
The Sparrowhawk
The Ruff
Birds and Forestry
Birds and Berries
The Pied Flycatcher
Population Ecology of Raptors
The Sparrows
Herons of Europe
Birds in Scotland
Atlas of Wintering Birds
Atlas of Breeding Birds
Dictionary of Birds
Man and Wildfowl

The Gannet
The Barn Owl
Owls of Europe
Lapland (Yale edition)


Plus a couple of Helm ID guides:

Swallows and Martins
Seabirds (revised edition)
Shorebirds (1989 edition I think)


If you would like any of these please drop me an email (which has recently changed: its now jim.martin at bloomsbury.com).

An introduction to bird observatories

This week, a guest blog by Peter Howlett and Mike Archer, two of the editors of our most recent title, Bird Observatories of Britain and Ireland.


Since the first observatory was set up in 1933, on the island of Skokholm, bird observatories have played a central role in monitoring bird migration in Britain and Ireland, and have contributed much to our understanding of this phenomenon. The daily recording of migrants at observatories has revealed patterns and trends that can be put to real use in conservation.

Full-board accommodation is offered at the observatory at Twingness on North Ronaldsay (Kevin Woodbridge).

The character of each observatory varies enormously, from the wild heather-topped terrain and huge sea cliffs of Fair Isle, the wind-swept marshy fields and dunes of Holme, and the calm tranquillity of Bardsey or the Calf of Man, to the beach-hut studded fields surrounding the observatory at Portland. Each has its own character, which will come to the fore during a stay; first appearances can be very deceptive and should, in some cases, be ignored! They are exciting spots where anything could happen – the next dramatic fall of migrants, or a major rarity lurking in the next bush.

The nature of each observatory also has an impact on the daily birding routine. Take Fair Isle, for instance. The island is unique amongst the observatories in that  weather and landscape have reduced the importance of mist-nets for trapping migrants to almost the incidental. The bulk of trapping is done using fixed Heligoland traps. So instead of the frequent net rounds of the other observatories there are periodic drives of the traps. The remote location of Fair Isle also means that major arrivals tend to occur later in the day, so really early starts aren’t necessary – probably just as well with dawn at around 3.30–4.00am in May. At Dungeness the public nature of the trapping area means mist-nets can’t be left in place and need to be put up and taken down each day. The net round also involves a not-inconsiderable walk over shingle, a stark contrast to the five-minute walk around the permanently-sited nets in the gardens at Portland, Bardsey and the Calf of Man.

The new observatory building on Fair Isle, completed in 2010 (Deryk Shaw).

In spring and autumn, like-minded people are brought together in the unique ‘obs’ atmosphere, all hoping to witness one of the spectacular avian events for which the observatories are famed. What better time for an up-to-date and comprehensive second edition of the Poyser monograph on the bird observatories of the British Isles? This new book, with personal accounts by wardens, staff and volunteers, provides a detailed account of the history and work carried out at each of the 18 observatories.

We hope you may be enticed to visit one.



Bird Observatories of Britain and Ireland is available through our website. Click the cover below to find out more.

Follow that falcon

This week, a guest blog by Richard Sale, Arctic explorer, photographer and author of T & AD Poyser monograph The Gyrfalcon.


The accumulated whitewash identified the Gyrfalcon nest site. The little cave high in the cliff was an ideal spot, the whitewash suggesting that generations of Gyrs had used the well-hidden, well-guarded spot. This year’s female was barely visible as she sat incubating her clutch. Gyrs are among the earliest to breed of all Arctic species and this female had started before the sea ice at the base of the cliff had even begun to melt. 

Access to the cave was difficult, a sloping ramp of rock offered a chance, but there was still an overhanging section below the cave. I climb rock faces as a hobby, but the week before, out on Hudson Bay, I had slipped in the boat from which I was photographing Beluga Whales, caught my hand on the gunwale, and fractured the thumb of my left hand, which was now the size of a football and hurt like hell. With my thumb splinted against my index finger with insulating tape – no medical facilities out in this remote place – I had continued to head north. But for a one-armed solo climber the cliff face was just too intimidating. A high-angle scramble up frozen mud and scree, using the tripod as a makeshift ice-axe, allowed me to approach the spot where the male Gyr had an observation post. From this point he watched for any sign of predators on the prowl, in defence of his mate and her precious eggs. He saw me, and let out that awesome but beautiful kaa-kaa-kaa that raises the hairs on the back of my neck. He was magnificent, almost pure white, ghost-like as he flew silently through the cold air. 

Over the next few days, perched in a cramped and fairly miserable hide, I got to know him well. He hunted regularly for his mate, feeding her so that she would not have to leave the eggs, which would have quickly chilled in the sub-zero temperatures. Then he would sit on his observation post, resting and peering out over the sea ice. Once he let out a sharp call, and exiting the hide I saw him dive and hit a Snow Goose which had strayed too close, killing it instantly but knocking the unfortunate bird into a stretch of open sea, from which he could not retrieve it. At other times he plucked his lunchtime grouse just a few feet away. Days passed and my hand hurt a little less. That made the long, long snow-scooter ride back to civilisation much less painful than the outward journey had been. It wasn’t the pain that stopped me now, but the need to look back for one more glimpse of Gyr. 

Richard Sale is the author of The Gyrfalcon (2005), recently reprinted and currently on sale. Click the cover below to get a copy!

Filling the gaps

Published back in 1997, Derek Ratcliffe's The Raven is a seminal work, telling us everything there is to know about Corvus corax and providing a rich evocation of one man's love for the wild uplands of Britain and their birds.

This book had the misfortune of going out of stock just as the POD process was about to go underway, so it has been unavailable for some time. The good news, though, is that I've just sent it off to the printers. So The Raven will be back, soaring black and resplendent  high above the crags of publishing, and available in print-on-demand format in around a month or so. 

This leaves just a couple of Poysers left to complete the set, one of which (rather unfortunately) is the hardest to of all to get in its original guise, The Natural History of Cape Clear. Apologies if you're waiting to snap this one up, but it should be available by the end of February.

Ravens having fun (Rebecca Nason)