Safari Sketchbook

For me there are two very distinctive things about Africa. One is a characteristic smell that hits you when you step out of the plane, and the other is a kind of light that I have never experienced anywhere else in the world. It is a dappled light that gives everything a soft and warm feeling. This book can’t provide you with the smell, but it does convey that light, and if you’ve travelled in Africa I am sure it will transport your mind back to your last visit to the Dark Continent.

Martin Woodcock has a particular passion for Africa. This book is a journey through his sketchbooks from birding trips over the last 50 years. It was in 1961 that Martin first visited Africa, and in the opening chapter he recounts his experiences – travelling through three countries in a VW Beetle.

In 1978 he was commissioned to illustrate The Birds of Africa. Planned originally as four volumes, this series of handbooks took 26 years to complete, so from 1983 to 2003 Martin undertook about a dozen trips to Africa, sketching as he travelled. While the finished plates were published for all to see, the original field sketches remained hidden in Martin’s studio. Now, for the first time, we can see those sketches and learn of his travels and experiences.

The result is a beautiful and evocative collection of studies. Starting with that first trip in 1961, we move on to Lake Baringo and the Kakamega Forest, then to Lake Naivasha and Nairobi, all in Kenya. There are lots of sketches of small birds – chats, cisticolas and warblers – but the face-on view of a captive Crowned Eagle is stunning. From here we stay in Kenya and visit Naro Moru in the shadow of Mount Kenya, and then northwards to Shaba. Bee-eaters, sunbirds and weavers compete for attention, but for me the double-page spread of Hartlaub’s Turaco is the best image in the whole book.

The travels continue, and next we go to the rarely visited north-west corner of Tanzania. Joining a group of ringers in the woodlands around Minziro, Martin gets the chance to obtain close-up views of highly confusing passerines of the deep forest.

From here we are taken to the tea gardens at Mufindi in southern Tanzania. Another selection of birds is depicted – although Martin includes for good measure the Udzungwa Forest-Partridge that he painted some years later from a skin obtained by a group of Danish birders. Finally, we head to Ethiopia with all of the specialities that are on offer, and it is here that we get the only mammals in the book – Ethiopian Wolf and Mountain Nyala.

A mixture of bird names have been used, and pedants whose lives revolve around such things will find this a bit irritating. For example Udzungwa Forest-Partridge is used in the text, but becomes Udzungwa Partridge in the illustration, and old and new names in the text and illustrations differ (Fan-tailed Grassbird versus Fan-tailed Warbler, for example). However, if you buy this book for taxonomic interest, then you are definitely living on a different planet to me!

Safari Sketchbook is a mixture of one man’s art combined with notes of his experiences while travelling across Africa. If you’ve been to Africa I think you’ll love it. If you haven’t, then buy this book and get hooked!

Tech spec

• Safari Sketchbook – a Bird Painter’s African Odyssey by Martin Woodcock (The Esker Press, Norfolk, 2010).

• 176 pages, numerous colour and black-and-white illustrations.

• ISBN 9780956401601. Hbk, £45.

Available from Birdwatch Bookshop

First published in Birdwatch 224:45 (February 2011).