Customer Reviews
He's a bit mental really - but in a good way - By: Big Mick, 27 Aug 2006 
A wonderful read with a whole load of information. It takes on the feel of a group therapy session - "My name is Bill & I am addicted to small feathered animals". If you share this strange fixation & want to find a name for your obsession this is the book for you.
I enjoyed the wonderful chapter on what a bird officianado calls themselves. From hard core "twitcher" to "not an ornithologist". There are many more titles for you to conjure with. "Bird fancier" isn't good. Apparantly.
A good giggle.
Is it an albatross I see on the horizon, or a plastic bucket - By: Sally-Anne, 05 Oct 2003 Very funny & most of it true, probably. Heaps of information about people who are involvedin bird orientated pass times. The two main categories are "birders" & "twitchers" though Bill does refer briefly to "ornithologists" & "dudes". "Bird watcher ... is not the correct term." The correct one, "birder", refers to folks who go out looking for birds & involves "ruggedness" & athleticism". So what's a person who watches birds from the comfort of their living room arm chair then? That's me. Persona non gratain the vocabulary of birders & twitchers.
This book serves as both a guide & a warning - a bit like a hand book on drugs (I imagine). Don't do it! But if you must do it, you'll need the following clothing, equipment, mentality & so on. If there was ever any danger of my drifting towards a life of birding, then degenerating into a mad twitcher, this book has saved me. Who would want to be "gripped off" by some smug neuroticin a grubby anorak? What bird lovers would mercilessly chase rare (in this country at least) birds that have been blown off course & accidentally landedin Britain, when all the poor little beggars want, is to catch their breath & get their bearings? No, I'll stick with watching my garden birds & recording what I see on the garden bird survey form. Thanks Bill.
A brilliant expose of the seedy underbelly of birding. - By: , 23 Oct 2000 There are few books that we can truly say affect us throughout our life. My personal list include Lolita, Heart of Darkness, Quo Vadis .... & Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book. To say that it rocked my life's foundations would be an understatement. It unashamedly ripped me away from being a young impressionable young man perfectly content at watching a flock of "waders" wheel dramatically against a winter skyline, to now cursing the low sun because I can't get any feather detail on the end one that looks a "bit small for a Dunlin". This book is about birds & birders, but if you want to look for philosophical debate it will also tell you a lot about why certain people spot trains, collect Toby Mugs, or never miss a match neither home nor away for 23 years. But it's really about birds.
If you're a bird-watcher you must read this book. If you're a birder, you already have. And if you're neither it'll turn you off bird-watching for ever, which as Bill says is no bad thing because there's too many of us already.
