At Christmas and on birthdays my wife and I give each other books. This last year we thought we would treat ourselves to just one big and expensive one. It was what affects to be the seventh edition of that eternal companion to anyone who is at all fascinated by the exuberant bird life of this country: Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa. The first hairline crack of foreboding comes when you notice that with this new ‘7th Edition”, the all-important possessive apostrophe after the Roberts is no longer there. Just as well. This new version of the book so radically departs from what Austin Roberts intended when his first book came out some 66 years ago, it can be argued that, by performance, the current compilers and publishers have abrogated what patronymic rights they ever had to the name. The use of the Roberts name now seems unnervingly disingenuous. For a start, like the apostrophe, all the long-established Roberts’ numbers have been discarded, referred to only in passing. The sequence of birds has been changed completely. Call me reactionary, but over the years, like all amateur birders, I knew more or less where to go to find the sunbirds, larks or eagles. Now it’s via an index.
In future editions they should go for broke and not try to hang sales on the long-acquired and treasured Roberts’ reputation. Call the thing something banal but explicit like The Greater Tome of Southern African Avifauna or the Frustrated Taxonomist’s Bible. But please, no more of this passing off. For all its more than generous addition to published knowledge, this is only in a few ways a blood descendant of Roberts’s. And at R700 a copy it is effectively out of reach of Joe Birder.
The first thing you notice about this new bird book are its dimensions. It is formidable (24cm by 32cm and 7cm thick) running to 1 296 pages. A word of warning: if you’ve got a dodgy back, don’t try to pick the thing up. Use a supermarket trolley to get it to the car.
Of the book being a veritable lake of information there is no doubt. Unless you can afford a couple of sturdy bearers, it’s certainly no longer a field guide. More’s the pity. There’s always something satisfying and secure about having your Roberts’ with you when you’re bashing around the sticks, the more battered, scratched-in and dog-eared the more proof of how valuable it has always been. The late Tony Pooley once said that a Roberts’ was not truly a Roberts’ until it had fallen into the Pongola a few times. This new one you’re terrified of hurting.
The hairline crack widens when first you see the dust cover. The downward slope of degenerative aesthetic taste runs: Kitsch; Super Kitsch; Mega Kitsch; Heroic Kitsch; Wildlife Art. In the latter category falls work all the way from copper elephants to the grossly sentimental metier so popular in bank boardrooms: seven metre-wide canvases of charging rhinos, pensive lionesses, looming giraffe. But you would think that with something as important as a major new bird book they could have avoided commissioning a cover that looks as though it came straight from the Joshua Doore Gallery. It is a hideously lurid reproduction of a painting of a photograph of a fish eagle in flight. There is really only one term to describe it — wildlife art at its most excruciating.
Unfortunately the wildlife art theme has been carried forward into some of the paintings in the book itself. Here you find raptors and others perched in cute little wilderness settings, as if in a nursery book. In the middle of the book there is page depicting 15 different petrels, in flight over a patch of twilit ocean. This is half a step away from flying ducks on a wall.
The bird illustrations, by a brand new set of painters, are also going to take some getting used to. After the delicate work of Ken Newman and others, they seem far too big. Some of them are just plain badly painted and very few have the ‘jizz” that Newman captured so well. And using the silhouette method of identifying a bird on a page of them is tiresome. The bird paintings should have their names printed next to them. The little black and white illustrations next to the text for each bird are, however, delightful.
Then, in arctic fury, comes the revenge of the taxonomists. Dozens and dozens of bird names that reek of language and allegory have been rubbished in meek submission to academic formality. Loeries are now Turacos, Robins are Robin-chats, our old friend the Fiscal Shrike is now the Common Shrike, plovers have become lapwings, francolins are spurfowl. The Rock Pigeon is now a Speckled Pigeon, the Jackass Penguin has gone all politically correct as the African Penguin.
The sheer wealth of information in this ‘Roberts” is valuable, even if you have to take a sabbatical to have the time to absorb but a 10th of it. The trouble is that all the data, notification and citation tend to put you at quite a long remove from the birds themselves. Perhaps that’s why they made the thing so cumbersome. Absorb the knowledge but thrill not at its flights.