Nature Group Member Bruce Kendrick has published a book recently showing how bird watching turned his life around.
As a ten-year-old, the author contracted TB and was sent to an isolated sanatorium, deep in the Cheshire countryside. There he was bedridden for six months. On fine days, nurses would push the young patients, in their beds, out onto a large veranda and it was there that his love of birdwatching developed.
On leaving hospital, he shared his passion with three schoolmates and over the next five years this small band of birders explored wildlife locations on and nearby the Wirral. Their travels and love of nature was epitomised when, aged 16, they spent part of their summer on Bardsey, a remote island off North Wales as part of a small, professional team of naturalists. As a young birdwatcher, the author is fascinated when he observes nature first-hand and begins to grasp the basics of the science of evolution.
This is a ‘rites of passage’ story of one lad’s journey through those early formative teenage years during 1957 to 1962 when birdwatching sat easily in his life alongside football, girls, radical politics and rock bands. It’s the sixties on Merseyside. Each chapter traces the boy’s expanding world of nature and then, in later life, he reflects on those times. A passion for nature has stayed with him throughout his life and as an adult, he explores the way views are formed and become a base reference framework to work out how to deal with life's ups and downs. On revisiting all his old haunts each visit triggers further questions, reflections and musings. How does nature manage, over all those years, to continue to inspire and stimulate him? What does it mean to be part of nature? How does nature manage to heal?
It’s also an inspiring call to arms for anyone who values the world outside their door.
The book can be bought direct from the publisher www.whittlespublishing.com or through Waterstones, WH Smiths and all leading independent bookshops and of course …..Amazon. It’s full colour and contains 40 of Bruce’s images. Retail price is £18.99