The Accidental Birdwatcher

Description

The book is divided into twelve chapters and includes photographs of some of the birds that Michael writes about, and is a wonderful ‘biograhical-travelogue’ across Canada, with stops in Ontario, Quebec, Vancouver, and Churchill, Manitoba before the reader is taken overseas with entries in India, Trinidad, France, Tunisia, Australia, Kenya, and Bremerhaven, Germany to name a few.

About the author

Born in England and educated at Rugby and Oxford, Michael Spencer’s interest in bird watching arose as an excuse to avoid playing cricket, “So, for the wrong reason, the avoidance of cricket, I went on a bird walk around a reservoir in the middle of England.” Little did Michael know at the time, but on June 8, 1935 at the Stanford Reservoir, Michael and his den-mate Sharon Watson would become inadvertent contributors to the science of ornithology; an inland record of a Northern Gannet.

Along with bird watching, Michael knew early on that even though he was studying Law at Oxford, he would eventually find himself a career in the film industry, “I had been the owner of a 9.5-millimetre movie camera and been much influenced by documentary films, which could be seen in London Cinemas in those days.” But it was on a trip to visit relatives in Vancouver in the fall of 1939, Michael would discover that, “My world was to take a distinctly different turn.