| Peter Jarvis | Pelagic Publishing | 2020 | Hardback | eBook available | 549 Pages | ISBN: 9781784271947 |
The Publisher’s View: Throughout a lifetime of biological and seabird research, Michael Brooke has been blessed with the opportunity to visit a huge array of islands dotted across all the oceans of the world. His is an island list fit to make the armchair traveller green with envy – and potentially seasick. Truly no island has been too far: from St Kilda to Spitsbergen, from Hawaii to the furthest reaches of the Southern Ocean, with all manner of destinations in between.
In this deeply knowledgeable and at times humorous book, the author shares the experience of stupendous scenery, amazing wildlife and cutting-edge scientific investigation, all blended with idiosyncratic adventures. We discover a great deal about the peculiar ecology and unique species of islands, looking at everything from plants, mammals, reptiles and birds to human aspects, with a splash of history and anecdote.
The engaging journey will appeal to anyone who wants to learn about islands that they will probably never visit in person. The reader will share the day-to-day grind and exhilaration of undertaking fieldwork in remote situations, reflecting on the curiosity of a mindset that enables equal pleasure to be extracted from, say, Sicilian architecture and the inexpressibly brown landscape of Cape Verde.
The Author: After completing an Oxford doctoral thesis on the burrow-nesting seabirds of the Welsh island of Skokholm, Michael Brooke has been linked to the University of Cambridge as a teacher, curator and researcher. He has scoured islands across the world, both near and immensely far, to discover more about the lives of seabirds, enduring discomfort and rejoicing in quirky adventures. As well as scientific papers, he has written widely for magazines and national newspapers and authored several books.
Fatbirder View: My oldest mate collects islands… that is to say he wants to visit as many as possible and, like the author, is prepared to put up with some discomfort in order to do so. He is a birder too and braves the storms if it gets him even a subbie (a unique sub-species). I’m sure, if he could, he’d gladly follow in the footsteps of the author, although he loves birds he can claim no expert study.
Michael Brooke makes his privations as enjoyable to read about as his research, and the latter often has as many frustrations. Which is worse I wonder, sharing an island with young men with no domestic skills so that, as he writes: “The first steaks were so dry that the very act of chewing them counted as the day’s exercise”, or finding that your research results were invalidated by faulty equipment and having to redo weeks of work? The phlegmatic author deals with life exigencies almost as if they were part of the joy of island life.
This account not only catalogues the islands visited and privations survived, by the author’s progress from dogsbody student to luxury cruise lecturer. As much as we might envy those all found cruises to the Galapagos, us birders will envy all those bird sightings, more.
There a great deal to enjoy, it’s my biographical book of the year so far.
Fatbirder