Seasons with Birds

David Allinson is the president of the Rocky Point Bird Observatory in Victoria, B.C.

Seasons with Birds is a charming series of interconnected essays about
the birding year in British Columbia, primarily on Vancouver Island.
Whittington has added to and modified many of the newspaper articles he
wrote over the years for the Victoria Times Colonist. The essays combine
warmth, humour, and conservation empathy.

The book is laid out in four sections covering each season, with
subsections on each month. There are numerous anecdotes and species
accounts; one particularly enjoyable anecdote finds the author watching
transfixed as a pair of glaucous-winged gulls consume seemingly
indigestible sea stars. Whittington does an excellent job of
enlightening the reader with the historical and human side of birding by
bringing to life some background on the continent’s early
ornithologists, many of whose names are now permanently attached to both
common and scientific bird names.

Local artist Loucas Raptis’s simple, elegant, and accurate drawings
invest each essay with colour and character. A handy appendix provides
an overview of binocular basics, and the reference section hints at the
wealth of titles in a burgeoning market of bird and natural history
publications available today.

The decision to use large indents and relatively short paragraphs is a
bit distracting in that it makes the essays seem as if they were written
as bullets or in point form. My quibble about formatting aside, Seasons
with Birds is sure to be a popular resource in birding and naturalist
circles.