Enchantment by Birds: A History of Australian Birdwatching in 22 Species, by Russell McGregor
Scribe Publications, 2025
320 pages, paperback
ABA Sales–Buteo Books 15563
With an eye to my first visit to the great southern continent, I picked up the prize-winning historian Russell McGregor’s new book, and learned that what is true of us as peoples is just as true of us as birders: Like siblings conceived years apart, Australia and the U.S. are both very different and surprisingly similar.
Enchantment by Birds is organized on a principle that has become familiar over the past few decades in “micro-histories” of all sorts of phenomena. Cast in consistently graceful, informal prose, McGregor’s preamble and each of his 21 chapters is introduced under the sign of a different Australian bird. “All birds,” writes McGregor, trail “long plumes of historical association, residues of the myriad ways in which the lives of birds and people have intertwined and intersected.” A story of human encounters with each species opens into the discussion of a different aspect of the history of birding in Australia. Some of those aspects are closely defined, others much more general in scope. The 19th-century experiences of A.J. Campbell in a colony of Great Crested Terns—the first species of Australian bird to be photographed in the wild—leads naturally to a brief, precise exploration of photography’s role in birding, while the chapter devoted to the Rock Warbler has as its subject the broad idea of “the sensory experience of place,” on the part of both birds and their watchers.
In the preamble (“Capricorn Yellow Chat”), McGregor warns his reader against looking for chronological constancy or thematic continuity; the book’s chapters will “chas[e] new species and themes whenever they come into view,” just like birders in the field. The book is far from haphazard, though, and while it is possible to read several chapters on their own, without reference to what comes before or anticipation of what is to follow, most fall neatly into clusters; the short tern chapter, for example, is most profitably read against the one before, dedicated to the Tooth-billed Bowerbird and the practice of collecting, though either could stand alone for the reader in a hurry.
Nearly all the themes McGregor takes up have been current in American birding, too. Some of the parallels are eye-opening: I did not know, for example, that the “plume wars” had been waged contemporaneously and with equal passion in the U.S. and in Australia, and eventually with similarly gratifying results. As well, the development of the field guide as a literary genre and a field tool was remarkably similar in the two countries, proceeding from a broad approach taking both technical systematics and sentimental nature appreciation to a more exclusive focus on identification.
Differences, of course, can be at least as informative as similarities. Most surprising is McGregor’s exploration of attitudes about the feeding of wild birds. My sense after nearly half a century of interaction with North American birders is that bird-feeding is widely accepted, with only the occasional mild objection to its potential negative effect on birds and their ecosystems. Attitudes in Australia appear to have gone in precisely the opposite direction, and the argument has been conducted with what sounds like real vehemence; how it has all come out for the moment at least was obvious in our Australian excursion, when we noted again and again a surprising absence of feeding stations at sites that in the U.S. or Latin America would be piled high with bananas, birds, and birders.
Debates, sometimes bitter ones, about names have also taken place on both continents, and McGregor devotes large parts of two chapters to the matter. While it seemed for a while in the U.S. that the Donatists would prevail, the campaign to change the English names of some birds has slowed nearly to a stall here. The argument has gone on longer in Australia and on average with less stridency; more than 120 years ago, there were calls there for “more children’s and poets’ names, and less of the deadly formal [English names] for some of the world’s most glorious birds,” as part of a campaign to ease access to birds and bird study for those of a less scholarly bent. Among the prime examples were (and are) “Jacky Winter” for the charming little petroicid robin and “Willie Wagtail” for a bold and abundant terrestrial fantail, two names not in the least calculated, as I can attest, to help visiting birders remember their field marks. In contrast, a number of more transparent folk names coined by European settlers have been formally replaced by Latinisms and Hellenisms like “gerygone” and “cisticola,” creating what is sometimes a confusing hodgepodge for those of us who grew up with neither set of names. A special case, there as here, is that of birds bearing English names that include the names of historical personages, some closely connected with the living bird, others not: The Prince Regent (later George IV) had precious little to do with the gorgeous, endangered honeyeater. The Australians live with an uneasy set of commemorative and non-commemorative names; thus, Richard Bourke keeps “his” parrot, but neither Leadbeater nor the genocidal Major Mitchell can lay claim any longer to the cockatoo.
Having read this book before my departure for Sydney, I found, made my experience of the birds of Australia that much deeper and my encounter with Australian birders that much richer. Its real value, though, a value that can be realized for any reader, is the realization that we aren’t that very different after all, people or birders.
Rick Wright leads Birds and Art tours in Europe and the Americas for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours. A widely published writer and sought-after lecturer, he is the author most recently of the Peterson Reference Guide to Sparrows of North America and the former Book and Media Review Editor for Birding magazine. Rick lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey, with his wife, Alison Beringer.
