The East Atlantic Flyway of Coastal Birds 50 Years of Exciting Moments in Nature Conservation and Research

This is not an easy book to categorise as it lies somewhere between memoir and conservation history with the backdrop being birds and the East Atlantic Flyway. There are contributions from 21 people with the editor Peter Prokosh being also the lead author of some of the 18 essays that take up 212 pages of this 232-page book. If I had to summarise the book in a word, it would be 'inspiring'. The essays vary in style between popular science and reminiscences. But they also provide useful clues to early career scientists and conservationists on how different paths can be followed to achieve an international impact. At one level, it is inspiring how in many cases a surprisingly small handful of individuals engaged in international collaborations have achieved so much. They have brought in vast swathes of land in multiple countries into protected areas of various designations. At another level it also provides an insight into the various levers that can be used, ranging from national and international committees to various pieces of national and international regulations, to achieve amazing outcomes.

The book is in a large format (height 28.5 cm × width 22 cm), a little shorter than A4. This helps with the extensive usage of photographs, maps, charts and tables. But it is mainly images which dominate the non-text elements. Although the essays have science in them, they are written in a conversational style and lend themselves to being the kind of light read one might like to engage in whilst sitting on public transport on the commute to work. With this in mind, I would have preferred a smaller shape of book.

Taken as a whole, the book draws together the importance of the coastal areas across different countries and continents for the conservation of migratory birds, especially waders and waterfowl. Tens of millions of square kilometres need to be protected. This book provides an insight into pioneering scientific studies which helped to understand the flyways and key breeding and wintering sites which needed to be prioritized for protection. No one essay is better than the other. But I will illustrate the variety of the essays with a few examples. Peter Prokosch writes an essay on how the Great Artic Reserve was born. A collaboration between Western European scientists and Russian scientists of a sort which he himself concludes is hard to imagine in 2024. It's a story which lends itself to being made into a docudrama and the essay is lavishly illustrated with historical photographs including the team inside a MI-8 helicopter. Amazingly, from idea to realization, it had taken only four years.

Another essay is on the Parc National du Banc d'Arguin in Mauritania. A text box includes an interview with William Dick who as part of a university research team drove overland from England to the wader study site in Mauritania. With no email and internet at that time, organizing the expedition was a logistical nightmare and not helped by the absence of roads to the sites they studied. It's an exciting expedition adventure story whilst echoing the theme in many essays of the pioneering fieldwork carried out by scientists before the days of electronic satellite tags revealed the path of migrants. I especially enjoyed some of these essays as I have my own share of adventures including being out at sea looking for cetaceans and pelagic seabirds off the coast of Kalpitiya in Sri Lanka where if anything had gone wrong there would have been no way for anyone to find me and my boatman. I suspect many birders who travel around the world in search of lifers can in their own way relate to the adventures of scientists.

The essay on what has been learnt since 1973 about Red Knots and Bar-tailed Godwits outlines modern studies and illustrates the migratory routes of the six subspecies of red Knots but also shows how the subspecies formed from two main lineages diverging 34,000 years ago. The story is complicated by subspecies having periods of contact (admixture). Even with modern DNA sequencing techniques and geolocators, there is still much to be learnt about the world's biodiversity. This book is not just for birders and wader and waterfowl enthusiasts. I am sure the essays will inspire scientists and conservationists in many other taxonomic groups to find their own adventures.