Knowledge of Britain’s best birding sites was almost a state secret before the publication of ‘Gooders’, which encouraged a whole generation to fully explore the country’s wild places and seek out its birds.
66 : Where to Watch Birds by John Gooders
1967
Knowledge of Britain’s best birding sites was almost a state secret before the publication of ‘Gooders’, which encouraged a whole generation to fully explore the country’s wild places and seek out its birds.
Many birders will remember that after they first took up their binoculars and became familiar with the birds of their local area, or perhaps after a Young Ornithologists’ Club trip to an accessible RSPB reserve, branching out further afield was reliant on the recommendations of the more experienced or on word of mouth from other birders.
This was to change in 1967 when John Gooders, a teacher originally from south London, produced the then revolutionary Where to Watch Birds, a comprehensive new-format directory of Britain’s best birdwatching sites. The Rosetta Stone of birding travel guides, it would be the trigger for countless journeys to often little-known but ornithologically productive locations around the country. Many thousand of copies of the various editions of this horizon-broadening volume were sold, and by 1970 the follow-up Where to Watch Birds in Britain and Europe was also proving popular as package tours and the first wildlife-oriented holidays boosted birders’ tastes for the exotic.
Gooders’s books held their own for the greater part of two decades, although later editions of the European volume somewhat surreally included destinations such as Israel and The Gambia on the spurious basis that they were often visited by British birders. This was an unwitting admission that the reachable world was becoming ever larger, and that the demand for more globe-trotting information had outgrown the material supplied by the two original Where to Watch Birds volumes.
Beyond the boundaries of Europe, it often wasn’t widely known where the best places to see birds were, and the difficulties of access, season, language and other complications needed elucidating. Birders’ personal trip reports, photocopied and passed on, provided more practical bird-finding advice in this respect; before long, this basic but effective format was adopted by the enterprising Dave Gosney for his first Gostours guides. Initially little more than pamphlets, they were typed, illustrated with self-drawn maps and cheaply reproduced to good effect, recounting personal experiences at each site covered and often pinpointing exactly where, when and how key target species could be seen in a range of destinations.
Others developed the site guide genre still further, and none more so than Christopher Helm. From the late Eighties, the publisher rolled out guide after guide covering English regions, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and ultimately almost every continent. With updated editions of the domestic titles often appearing at regular intervals, many of the guides remain essential companions on independent birding ventures. Other publishers including Prion, the American Birding Association and, latterly, Crossbill Guides, as well as a wide range of independents, continue to specialise in detailing birdwatching areas not well covered elsewhere.
Like all facets of the hobby, however, these books are undergoing a serious challenge from the free, easily accessible, partisan and up-to-the-minute information available online on forums, websites and newsgroups, much of which is now becoming available in the field to the owners of smartphones, tablets and laptops. But the advent of ebooks and by extension a new digital lease of life for the original guides may yet ensure a future for the professionally written and published legacy of the original ‘Gooders’.