Tales from Concrete Jungles: Urban Birding Around the World

When you think about going birdwatching, you imagine visiting magnificent open countryside, rolling hills, lush woodland or waterlogged marshes. You don’t think of towns and cities. In fact, the urban environment is surprisingly rich in birds: parks, gardens, scrubland, lakes and reservoirs all harbour many species of birds. Some town gardens even have bigger lists of birds than country gardens. David Lindo has brought urban birding back into the public consciousness, promoting its virtues at every opportunity and writing about it in the birding press. He urges people to look up when walking around in cities, or to stop and close your eyes in a busy street just to listen to the birds that may be singing. Since 2006, a long-running series of articles has appeared in Birdwatching magazine, showcasing David visiting a wide variety of cities in Britain and Europe and the birds he has encountered on these short city breaks. These articles are collected here for the first time; most of them are expanded with new material, but a few never before published are also featured. They cover visits to many cities throughout the world and these cities are surprisingly different, with striking variations even between cities in Britain. Each urban centre has its own personality and this is reflected in the people that David meets and the birds that he sees. This book is not a compendium of birding sites within many of the world’s cities. It is a series of adventures featuring birds and inspiring stories. Along the way, David meets some amazing conservationists whose commitment to urban wildlife conservation, no matter how small their projects are, is unwavering. Their work and successes are celebrated within the pages of this book. Above all, it is hoped that this book will inspire you to look at cities with different eyes and realise that is is probably more important to spread the conservation message here than anywhere else in the world. But it will also inspire you open your eyes wherever you are, and to appreciate the diversity of wildlife to be found in our urban environments.