I recently came across some seabird prints that I thought I recognised. A little sleuthing showed that they were illustrations from The Gannet by J Bryan Nelson, published by T&AD Poyser in 1978 (1st ed).
Unlike his previous publications The Gannet was written for the general ornithologist and bird watcher. Nelson “tried to make this monograph on the gannet as complete as anybody but the specialist could want” and as the leading expert on the Sulidae (Gannets and Boobies) he was well placed to so. As an ethologist, studying animal behaviour, he felt “it is as important to ask why gannets do not feed their free-flying young as it is to describe the plumage of a two-year-old” and hoped that the reader would “find their understanding and enjoyment of the lovely ‘white bird of the herring’ greatly enhanced.”
John was a great friend and illustrated many of his books over the years, travelling together to places as diverse as Azraq and Aldabra Atoll. Bryan Nelson’s autobiography On the Rocks charts his adventurous life and a more recent retelling of his time in the Galapagos has been published by Brant Galapagos Crusoes – A year alone with the birds
The Gannet ends with a poem by Simon Baynes from ‘God’s Dominion’ which I can’t resist repeating here. As Nelson says, the poem “charts the immensity of the course man has traversed since those days in which he was circumscribed, credulous of barnacles turning into geese and ignorant of his destructive potential.”
Gannets
before the fall, before
the sixth day, plunged
from brow to base
a hundred feet
of the Bass cliffside
with the weight and
speed of a plummet
the slant sea riving.
Gannets no doubt
when man is redeemed
or redundant will
nest on the wreckage
of the world he leaves;
spread their wings
to the measure of man
and continue in calm
their immaculate diving.
From ‘God’s Dominion’ by Simon Baynes
