Baker wasn’t just bird watching

E.M. Nicholson‘s book The Art of Bird Watching recommends keeping a card system to document bird sightings:

Along with the field notes (which, according to Nicholson, had to be made in the field within the first few minutes of the sighting), Nicholson also advised his readers to make another, more detailed and permanent record. This, he said, should be something like a card system, and most certainly, ‘not a record in diary form which’, he remarked, ‘soon becomes unmanageable.’

Baker ignored this. He took up the diary form. Which makes sense considering Baker’s literary tendencies:

Yet a record in diary form was exactly what Baker chose to write when he started his ‘systematic watching’. At the end of each outing he would come home and write up the day’s field notes into the exercise books he kept in the spare bedroom which he had converted into his study. Here he kept other kinds of birding notes that also went beyond Nicholson’s remit of a useful permanent record. Sometimes these included flowers or feathers that he had brought home, often for Doreen but also for himself as tokens of the day’s expedition and inspiration for his writing.

and

He kept cardboard folders, too, for his other natural history research, on the covers of which he wrote lists of suggested contents. One read: ‘Speculations / Introductions / Valley / Topography / Geology / History / Species Occurring / Peregrine in Essex / Essex Generally / Arrival & Choice of Territory … ‘ ‘ Unmanageable’ might have been Nicholson’s description – and perhaps this was just part of Baker’s unmanageable nature – but in any case Baker seemed to manage it quite well.

I have the suspicion Baker enjoyed this ‘unmanageable’ process. All the detail and time it demanded likely helped him absorb the information even deeper.

Discover your own process. What’s unmanageable to some, could be your ideal.

Saunders, Hetty. My House of Sky: The life and work of J.A. Baker. Lower Dairy, Toller Fratrum, Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2017.