published by Struik Nature

As anybody who has tried it can tell you, birdwatching is something that can start as an innocent pleasure, then become a habit and finally morph in to something akin to an obsession.

Rupert Watson, who describes himself as “a lawyer, mediator, naturalist and writer”, is a person so afflicted. In the course of a 40-year career, the Kenya-based author has travelled the length and breadth of Africa seeking out its numerous and varied birdlife.

His latest book, Peacocks and Picathartes: Reflections on Africa’s Birdlife, is very much a distillation of these experiences. Drawing extensively on literature, history, science, avian miscellany and his observations, it is intended as a celebration of the diversity of African birds, especially those peculiar to the continent.

Chapter Two of the book, for example, is devoted to birds that occur only in Africa, Chapter Three to those that occur MAINLY in Africa and Chapter Four contains a list of his personal favourites.

Watson writes in a chatty, conversational style and most of the book’s pages are enlivened with little vignettes. In the course of its pages, he shows how certain birds – the Hamerkop and the Ground Hornbill are obvious examples – have acquired a special, even mythic status in local folklore and belief systems. Elsewhere he explains how some of the scientific names for birds have changed in the light of the most recent hypotheses about generic relationships. More controversially, common names have suffered a similar fate for the sake of international consistency, a factor which has led to some consumer resistance and resentment.

Other birds find themselves being shunted from one grouping to another, a factor that only serves to highlight the difficulty in resolving classification conundrums even with the advent of DNA analysis. The four African hyliotas, for example, now compromise their own family after being claimed by both the Old World warblers in Sylviidae and the batises and wattle-eyes in Platysteiridae.

There are many more insights and happy phrasings. We all thrill to an unusual sighting and you can feel Watson’s palpable excitement when he describes how he tracked down a rare White-necked Picathartes in the Bonkro region of Ghana. Even common birds can arouse his interest. There is an amusing description of the almost feral Egyptian Goose, a bird that has developed a singular attraction to swanky golfing estates where its habit of moulting and defecating on fairways has made it extremely unpopular with golfers.

The result of all of these reflections is a classic birder’s bedside book full of insight, anecdotes, information and an imaginative sympathy with the natural world. Hopefully, it will give non-birders some idea of what they are missing..

published by UKZN Press

The spectacular rise of bird-watching over the last fifty to a hundred years has led to a growing interest in not only avian territorial behavior but in other aspects of ornithology, including the question of how birds come by their names. While most of South Africa’s best-known bird books and field guides provide some explanation as to their vernacular names what has been needed is a book examining the subject in depth.

As the author of Zulu Names (2002) and Zulu Plant Names (2015), Adrian Koopman, who is also an emeritus professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has the intellectual armoury to fill this gap, at least insofar as far as the Zulu names go. In a book that combines scholarship with readability, his knowledge and learning is apparent on every page of this book and he deserves full credit for the remarkable amount of information he has amassed.

Utilising up-to-the-minute research (including information gleaned from a series of local workshops conducted between 2013 and 2017), his hugely detailed survey explores the link between birds, names and people. While intended primarily as a reference work the book is more than just that; it also includes all sorts of interesting critical, cultural, personal and historical observations

What rapidly emerges is just how complex a subject it is. In an early chapter, the author looks at the underlying meaning of African birds and shows how these are linked to identity and function. Thus there can be lexical meanings, connotative meanings, associative and symbolic meanings. These, in turn, can be broken down into other categories such as names based on appearance, song, habits, habitat, behaviour, motion, season and weather, superstition etc.

What also constantly astonishes is the radiant aliveness and poetic sensibility behind so many of the Zulu bird names. Koopman revels in explaining fascinating things that some readers may know little about. For example, the name impofana for the Eurasian Golden Oriole while meaning ‘slightly dun-coloured’, is also one of the nicknames of the Kaiser Chiefs Football Club, whose uniform is a striking half-yellow/half-black, just like the plumage of this bird. As apt as it is lyrical is the coined name umambathilanga for the Yellow Bishop which translates out as “the one that wears the sun as a blanket”.

The book is littered with other similarly colourful examples.

In addition to explaining how the birds got their wide range of Zulu names, Koopman also examines the extremely important role birds play in Zulu praise songs, proverbs, riddles, beliefs and traditional lore. Certain birds are seen as omens, portents of things to come (the arrival of the Red-chested Cuckoo, for example, heralds the start of the ploughing season), others are regarded as charms, such as love charms and protective charms. Linked to this are the taboos against killing, eating or even imitating certain birds.

Leaving nothing to chance, the author concludes his investigation by underlining the critical role such knowledge can play in encouraging both conservation and avitourism.

Prodigiously researched and sparklingly expressed, this is likely to remain the most comprehensive and authoritative book on the subject for some time. Koopman’s cabinet of curiosities is not only handsomely produced, with a neat bibliography and index, but is further enhanced by numerous colour photographs and his own fine watercolour bird paintings.