COLLECTED BIRD AND BUTTERFLY POEMS

PREFACE This book contains a collection of more than 240 poems written about some of our European birds and butterflies and also their habitats. Some of these species are now under serious threat of extinction in the next few years. Many birds like Wryneck, Golden Oriole and Red-backed Shrike no longer regularly breed in Britain while in Europe butterflies like the Apollo have seen their breeding range greatly reduced. So the poems and some of the photos included are an attempt to capture something of the essential beauty of these species as a gift of creation. The first of these poems, ‘Sooty Shearwater’ and ‘(Red-necked) Phalarope’ dates back to September 1991 thus making this a collection spanning more than thirty years of ornithological and lepidopterous observation, writing and photography. I have avoided using other people’s bird and butterfly photographs although the four corner images on the front cover have been gratefully borrowed to represent key habitats of bushes, trees, heath and reedbeds and water locations. Some of the poems like ‘The Marsh’ and ‘On the Heath’ are poetic descriptions of habitats but they are connected to the species that associate with them while ‘The Tribute to an Ornithologist’ is quite unapologetically a tribute to a great ornithologist, photographer and human being who sadly died in 1998 after a brief illness. A few of these poems were previously published in ‘Out of the Wild’ which was first published in 2010 then much extended and revised, and published in 2021 with significantly more wildlife poems. Several readers of this book, though not necessarily keen readers of poetry, nevertheless enjoyed reading the descriptive passages of the wildlife in their typical habitats. I hope that readers of this work will similarly enjoy these writings.