Sunday book review – The Merlin by Frank Rennie – Mark Avery
While breakfasting on 14 January, I glanced out the window and saw a Merlin flash past over my Northamptonshire garden at fence-top height. The sighting might have been an eighth of a second or perhaps less but our smallest falcon was unmistakable and put a smile on my face for the rest of the day. Three similar ultra-brief views here over the last 15 years have had the same impact on me, so, yes, we could regard Merlins as magical.
But I need a book like this to fill in the gaps of the typical Merlin’s year when not nipping across some back gardens in Northants. This book tells me about the evolution of the species and its ecology in the UK but also across its wide world range.
The book’s chapters take us through all the areas one would expect in terms of phylogeny, feeding, breeding, movements, migration, predators, parasites, interactions with humans and habitat management and conservation in 160 pages leaving the last 80 pages of the book to reference material and an index. The references fill 23 pages and will remain as a very valuable source for those who are interested in Merlins for many years.
I always think of Merlins as ground-nesting and in much of their world range that is true, but they nest in trees too, usually in old corvid nests. I remember when, back in the 1980s, it became clear that in some parts of the UK, those studying Merlins had overlooked the switch of some pairs to nesting at the edge of moorland in conifer plantations. I read with interest that the urban Merlins of the Canadian prairies nest in trees too and that they seem to benefit from the densities of non-native House Sparrows. This raises the question of why Merlins don’t nest in Inverness or Newcastle.
The author is a Merlin enthusiast though not someone who has studied Merlins in great detail so there aren’t papers on Merlins by the author in the references and this appears to be a good literature review of the work of others. I’d have liked to have had a bit more of the author’s love of this species in the book.
The Merlins I see so rarely but so memorably in Northants may have come from Iceland or Scandinavia, or they might be British- or Irish-bred birds: we don’t really know. No matter, the mystery doesn’t detract from the magic.
The cover? Smashing! I’d give it 9/10.
The Merlin: the ecology of a magical raptor by Frank Rennie is published by Pelagic.
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