Of A Feather

Avian Collective Nouns and Terms of Assembly, Group Names and Associated Terms

Avian Collective Nouns & Terms of Assembly, Group Names & Associated Terms. Written, compiled, designed and illustrated by COLIN SEE-PAYNTON, with a Foreword by DAVID ATTENBOROUGH

COLIN SEE-PAYNTON has spent more than four years in extensively researching and writing the text, and creating the sixty-one new wood engravings for this illustrated lexicon of avian collective nouns: an unprecedented achievement. In a critical essay David Alston, Arts Director of the Arts Council Wales, writes: 'not since Thomas Bewick, who both wrote and engraved in the late eighteenth century, have both literary and pictorial aspects been found conjoined in the one talent as here in this work'. That the observation and study of the natural world has been a lifelong interest is evident both from the engravings and the enthusiasm revealed in the text. From 'Abandonment of Cuckoos' to 'Zephyr of Long-Tailed Titmice' it enriches our knowledge of avian nomenclature far beyond the well-known 'Gaggle of Geese' - though that, too, is included.

DRAWING FROM SOURCES as far back as the fifteenth-century Book of St Albans, Colin See-Paynton has researched the origin of the nouns, and gives some detailed insight into the species under discussion.

IN A COMPREHENSIVE INTRODUCTION, he revisits his upbringing in rural Bedfordshire, when as a child he made a list of the collective nouns in daily use. Now, some half a century later, that list has been extended and illustrated to become Gwasg Gregynog's magnum opus for 2008.

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